1
Q
What do emotions do?
A
- A functional perspective suggests emotions are signals to motivation (needs are fed by emotions)
- Eg. survival and fear; need to belong and guilt
- Well-suited to help us manage the “push” of biological processes and “pull” of socio-cultural forces (eg. delayed gratification)
2
Q
What are the processes behind emotions?
A
- Bodily arousal: change that alters state you were in before emotion began to arise
- Conscious experience: labelling of the emotion
- Expressive behaviour: changes in facial features, body language
Feelings > sense of purpose (motivates or demotivates)
3
Q
What are emotions as motivation?
A
- General agreement that emotions function as one type of motivator, but views about their importance vary
- Early psychology focused on psychological drives as motivators (hunger, thirst, sex)
- Followed by a view that emotions were the causal and immediate source of the motivated action (for humans)
- Eg. if you have air deprivation, the terror and fear that comes with it makes you act in a certain way
- Strong explanation for causes of behaviour (goal of psychology)
- Take away the emotion, and you take away the motivation
- If you can change your feeling about a task, you can change how motivated you are about it
4
Q
What are emotions as evaluation?
A
- Read out of the person’s ever changing motivational states
- Positive emotions signal the satisfaction of our motivation states
- Negative emotions signal the frustration of our motivational states
- Emotions are not necessarily motives in the same way that needs are; instead they reflect the satisfied vs frustrated status of other motives
5
Q
What is the James-Lange theory?
A
- Body before thoughts
- Our emotions directly follow the responses of our physiological reactions to a stimuli
- Different emotions have different bodily arousal signatures
- Eg. sight of oncoming car (perception of stimulus) = pounding heart (arousal) = fear (emotion)
- Debunked because increased heart rate can’t be distinguished for fear and for joy
6
Q
What is the Cannon-Bard theory?
A
- Simultaneous body response and cognitive experience
- Our emotions occur simultaneously with our physiological reactions to a stimuli
- Eg. sight of oncoming car (perception of stimulus) = pounding heart (arousal) + fear (emotion)
- Problem is doesn’t explain where emotions are coming from (just say it’s a result of stimuli)
7
Q
What is the Schachter-Singer theory?
A
- Emotion = body + a label
- Emotions are the result of the physiological response and the cognitive appraisal of this response
- Eg. sight of oncoming car (perception of stimulus) = pounding heart (arousal) + cognitive label (I’m afraid) = fear (emotion)
- Cognitive appraisal and looking at situation tells your brain that the feeling you feel are fear (thought first, then feelings)
8
Q
What is the most modern theory involving automatic affective experiences?
A
Schachter-Singer: role of appraisal in labelling conscious experienced emotions
Lazarus: even in emotional responses that operate without conscious thought, “top-down” cognitive functions such as appraisal of stimuli can be involved
- Not fully automatic, still need prefrontal cortex
- Speed, not requiring full cognition but happens quickly because of rehearsal
Robert Zajonc/LeDoux: emotions without cognitive appraisal (you don’t need to have cognition or prefrontal cortex to feel something)
- Some emotional reactions (fears, likes, and dislikes) develop in a “low road” (bottom-up) through the brain
- Skip conscious thought, automatic response
- How we sense things alter how we feel things
9
Q
Are we controlled by our emotions?
A
- Often emotions provide us useful information that help us adapt to changing life circumstances
- But sometimes, the emotions we feel are not ideal for us to adapt to the situation or conflict with social roles = we need to control our emotions
- Eg. lashing out at police officer when getting a ticket
- Mastering the regulation of your emotion requires effort but like other skills it can be practiced and improved (fundamental skill in life; being a parent and holding a job)
- Eg. smiling in the hospital and touching them
10
Q
How do we regulate our emotions?
A
Awareness monitoring, appraisal, and coping strategies
11
Q
What is awareness monitoring?
A
- Recognize the emotions you are experience (label them, this will allow you to monitor them) and understand them
- Well captured the concept of emotional intelligence (appreciate their own emotional state and others)
- Eg. keeping a journal
12
Q
What is appraisal?
A
- Choosing how to view a situation
- The start of an emotion is a life event, how you view that event affects how you will feel about it (different motivational outcomes)
- Eg. is it overwhelming and will I give up? OR is this a challenge, and will I tackle it?
- Remember hormones are slower to affect your system and their action are typically longer
- Change the appraisal now, but it might take a bit of time before change physiological states
- Eg. gratitude journal
13
Q
What are some coping strategies?
A
- Strategies that people use to deal with negative emotions
- People tend to use problem focused (direct; actual solution to problem) vs emotional focused (change how you feel about it) coping strategies
- One example is mindfulness meditation
- Rapid growth of programs/interventions (change towards positive psychology: that just like your body health benefits from regular activities, so does your mental health; you don’t need a disorder for psychology to have a postive influence on your life)
- They aim to strengthen attention/concentration skills, build self-awareness and improve how people manage their emotions
14
Q
What are the types of emotions?
A
- Low arousal, positive: relaxed
- Low arousal, negative: sad
- High arousal, positive: enthusiastic
- High arousal, negative: fear/anger
15
Q
What are the 6 basic human emotions?
A
- Expressed the same way in all cultures
- Anger, disgust, fear (closed mouth), happiness, sadness, surprise (open mouth)
- Only 1 certain positive one: humans live on negative emotions (pay attention to negative cues, strong power to motivate, consolidate memories)
16
Q
What is the catharsis myth?
A
- Anger is uncomfortable emotion often experienced when we believe we were wronged
- Catharsis myth: reduce anger by acting aggressively to release it (venting or blow off steam)
- In reality, venting is counter productive; teaches to act aggressively and often leads to feelings of guilt
- You can change your appraisal for a healthier way or use constructive coping
17
Q
What is an emotion?
A
Behaviour with 3 components:
- Subjective thought or experience with
- Accompanying patterns of neural activity and physical arousal and
- An observable behavioural expression
18
Q
What is the initial response?
A
- Amygdala: group of nuclei in medial portion of temporal lobes in each hemisphere
- Fires when we perceive stimuli that are emotionally arousing
- Sensitive to fear-relevant images and sounds
- Amygdala’s projections to other brain structures that lead to observable behaviours that we think of being emotional responses
19
Q
What is the autonomic response?
A
- Autonomic nervous system specializes in perceiving a threat and preparing body to physically response to stimulus
- Sympathetic nervous system helps recruit energy to prepare for response
- Parasympathetic nervous system helps preserve energy and calm you down if no response is necessary
20
Q
What is the emotional response?
A
- If body is going to mobilize energy during emotional response, nervous system needs to prepare
- Emotional stimuli trigger increase in activity in brain areas related to planning movements
21
Q
What is the facial feedback hypothesis and which theory does it support?
A
- James-Lange theory of emotion
- Facial feedback hypothesis: suggests that our emotional expressions can influence our subjective emotional states
- Less ability to move face correlated with dampened emotions
- Physical touch are more likely to feel better
22
Q
What is mindfulness?
A
- Mental state of consistent and flexible attention to the present moment, to both the world outside us and within
Involves accepting attitude, nonjudgemental, with curiousity - Stressors usually come as future/past experiences
- In psychology there are training activites (make yourself better at mindfulness) that are non-religious and non-esoteric
- They derive from religious meditation but are not formal
23
Q
What are some unhealthy coping mechanisms?
A
- Not all forms of emotion coping are good; relying external mechanism to regulate emotions can backfire (eg. relying on others which can lead to insecure attachment and substance abuse)
- Alcohol myopia: a state of shortsightedness in which superficially understood, immediate aspects of experience have a disproportionate influence on behaviour and emotion, a state in which we can see the tree, albeit more dimly but miss the forest altogether
- Using alcohol to regulate anxiety/stress (fear, panic), to feel better about one’s self (pride), to lower inhibition to do things you otherwise would not be able to experience (excitement)
- Alcohol creeps into your life (part of student culture), building up a habit to learn how to cope with stressors for the rest of your life
24
Q
How are emotions regulated?
A
- Frontal lobes receive information directly from amygdala and from sensory areas whose activity is influenced by amygdala
- Frontal lobes must decide if instinctive emotional response produced by earlier stages of processing is best one for situation
- If necessary to use energy, amygdala and autonomic nervous system influence frontal lobes to generate behaviour that is appropriate for situation
- If not necessary, frontal lobes send feedback that reduces the intensity of initial emotional response to avoid depleting body’s resources
VPSYC
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Decks in class (13)
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