Lecture 15: Everyday life Flashcards
Define emotion
A strong feeling deriving from one’s circumstances, mood or relationship. It’s a state of arousal which involves facial and body changes, brain activation, cognitive appraisals, subjective feelings and tendencies towards actions.
What is the traditional view of emotions according to Ekman?
What is the functionalist perspective of emotions?
Internal states that are expressed behaviourally in line with display rules.
They’re used to communicate during social interactions and create changes in the environment
When do emotions emerge in children?
From birth, but the emotions have a narrow range.
At age 3, babies show a full range of human emotion
Describe Ganchrow’s study 1983
It involved giving new borns sweet or bitter liquid for their first feed. He found that the babies produced distinct facial expressions; sweet liquid made them slightly smile and bitter liquid made them purse their lips and the corners of their mouths turned down. This distinction between positive and negative becomes more distinct over the early months
What did Izard 1987 find?
He examined emotional expressions during inoculations of babies when they were 2 months until they were 7 months. The younger babies showed a generalised distress but the older babies showed a distinct angry expression involving their eyebrows, eyes and mouth.
Discuss primary emotions
They’re universal and are present within the first 6 months. They’re biologically based. Positive emotions: joy, happiness, contentment. These begin internally but are then expressed externally. Negative emotions: Sadness, disgust, anger and fear.
Discuss secondary emotions
They develop with cognitive maturity and vary among cultures. They’re also know as self conscious emotions. Early secondary emotions: Bashfulness, coyness. Late secondary emotions: Guilt, pride and shame.
Describe the model of emotional development, created by Lewis in 1989
Emotions emerge over the first 3 years. Primary emotions need the least cognitive support and so emerge first. The emotions that need more cognitive support emerge later. The primary emotions contribute to the cognitive development. You develop early secondary emotions when you become aware of yourself and later secondary emotions when you understand standards and rules.
Discuss evidence against Lewis’s theory of emotional development
Some studies have found coy smiles in early infancy. For example, Reddy 2000 found that all infants between 7 and 20 weeks showed coy smiles which is prompted by an onset of social attention. So maybe these emotions don’t require such complex cognitive abilities.
Discuss the ability to recognise emotions in others
Infants are able to distinguish and react to others’ emotions. For example, Haviland 1987 found that babies responded differently to different emotions expressed by the mother, if the mother was angry, so was the infant. This shows that they can discriminate emotions.
What is social referencing?
Forming an understanding of a situation via the interpretation of the situation in another person. For example, infants look to caregivers to gauge an emotional reaction. If an infant is approached by a stranger then they become wary and look to the mother to ascertain her reaction. The visual cliff experiment supports this.
Describe the visual cliff experiment
Mother stands on the opposite side of the visual cliff, a glass surface with a drop-off below it, with a happy or fearful reaction. Scorce 1985 found that infants were more likely to cross if the mother looked happy and vice versa. So from an early age, they can interpret others’ emotions.
Describe the universality of emotions
Primary emotions are universal; infants can read parents’ emotions, facial feedback hypothesis (facial muscles send information to the brain about the emotion being expressed) and cross-cultural recognition. Ekman found that the 6 basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, happiness, surprise and sadness) were universal in westernised, non-westernised, literate and illiterate cultures. There is also universal recognition of primary emotions in geometric patterns. Primary emotions are biological and other emotions are culturally specific.
Describe the cultural differences of emotions
There is a lot of variation in expressing and explaining emotions. The body part associated with locating feelings is different; Americans it’s the heart, japan it’s the gut and Chewong it’s the liver. There are different display rules as well of when, where and how to express them. The rules characterise what is acceptable and not acceptable. Ekman 1969 found that japanese people didn’t show disgust in front of others but they did on their own which contrasts against americans. Safdar 2009 found that japanese expressed powerful emotions a lot less in front of others, like anger and disgust. It’s because they’re a collectivist culture so they value groups over individuals compared to americans who are individualistic. They’re also much more positive about their disagreements.
Describe cultural differences in language about emotions
There is a different amount of adjectives for emotions across cultures. For example, Chewong have 8 adjectives but Taiwanese have 750. English words like unwinding have no equivalent in other languages. This is the same for other cultures, like germans have a word deriving pleasure from the misfortune of others. Some cultures don’t have words for universal emotions. The use of the term I love you varies among cultures but it doesn’t mean these emotions don’t exist. The dual influences of emotions are cultural vs universal
