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Notes: Emotion and Cognition lectures
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Week 1- Why study emotions?
o Emotions have a huge impact on life
o Memory/attention/feelings
o Not a day without an emotion
o Entertainment: want to be happy/thrilled
o Important for survival and social skills
o Reactions
o Some mental disorders ar extremes of emotions states
o Well being depends on emotion
- What are emotions
o Phenomenal experience, physiological pattern. Verbal+nonverbal expression
- Emotion schema
- Expressions are distinct states of the mind, displayed early in life
- 6 basic emotional expressions: fear, anger, disgust, joy, neutral , sadness, surprise
- Emotion properties:
o Relatively distinct, but mixed-emotions possible
o Subtle differences across subjects
o Emotion recogntition across cultures
- Paul Ekman: emotions are universal across cultures
- New Guinea study (1971)
- Pick pictures fitting a story
- Pictures & stories representing happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear
- 6 basic emotions
- Validity of Ekman’s study
- Russell (1994): there is low agreement about the classification of expressions
- Lacking cross-cultural overlap
- Elkfenbein & Ambady (2002): emotions are universal to a limited degree
- Noise can occur at all stages, this is why emotions can be mixed
- Display rules shape emotions
- Friesen (1972) & Matsumoto (1990):
- Japanese adapted their expressions to HIDE negative emotions
- Emotions are flexible and they may not necessarily reflect the true feelings
- Japanese are more likely to display surprise than americans
- Culture
o Positive emotions are important for americans, and the more positive and the less
negative, the better
o In Japan, the amount of negative and positive emotions was correlated. Thus, when
a Japanese had more positive emotions, he/she also has more negative
o In Japan, some positive emotions are felt more and considered more important,
these are socially enganing emotions
o Japanese amde more statements about cntextual information and relationships that
americans
o Americans tend to ignore contextual information when making judgements
o The surrouding people’s emotions influences Japanese but not Americans’
perceptions of the central person
,- Why emotions?
o Adaptive functions, universal (Darwin)
o Principle of serviceable associated habits
o Purpose during evolution
o Principle of antithesis
o Most emotions have a counterpart
o Principle of expressive habits through the nervous system
o Distinct reaction by the brain
o Bodily responses (James)
o Response before emotional experience
- Lange’s idea:
o Lange developed similar ideas independetly of james
o Both theorist defined emotion as a feeling of physiological changes due to a stimulus
o They focused on different aspects of emotion
o James focused on the conscious experience of emotion
o Lange made james’s theory testable and applicable to real life examples
o Both agreed that if physiological sensations could be removed, there would be no
emotional experiences
o Physiological arusal causes emotion
- Testing James-Lange theory
o 1. Change in body alters your emotions
o 2. Cognitive inhibition of your body lakens emotions
o 3. Substance-induced bodily changes alter emotions and related neural activity
- Cannon's criticism
o Visceral changes too slow to be source of emotion (FALSE)
o Seperating body from CNS does not alter emotional behavior in animals (FALSE)
o Artificial induction of visceral changes typical for emotions do not produce them
(adrenalin) (FALSE)
o Relation bodily states – emotional states not 1:1 (TRUE)
- Cannon-bard criticism led scoentists to adapt james-lamge theory because:
o Not all physiological changes showed the same pattern per emotion and congtion is
sometimes necesary to know which emotion is experienced
o Adrenal injection induced APPRAISAL dependent emotions
- Quick decisions (Damasio, ledoux)
- Based on appraisal (Arnold)
- Social constructs (Averill)
- Why measure emotions?
o To diagnose mental disorders
o To infer well-being
o Advertisements: good vs. Bad impacts
- Emotional stroop task
- Physiology
- Measuring emotions
o Infants: emotions are pure and simple
o Disorders: emotions are uncontrolled or extreme
- Reactions to emotional stimuli
, o Record and study expressions
o Cross-cultural research
o Cross-species
- Schachter’s two factor theory
o Context and expectations can alter emotions/feelings
o Acknowledge that emotional experience largely depends on bodily changes
o Thus, physiological changes precede emotional experience
o Also, some cognition/appraisal precede emotional experience
o But, bodily canges are not solely responsible for emotions
o Arousal must be interpreted
o Emotion = arousal + cognitive component
- Models of emotions
o Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory
Few (8) basic emotions
Polar opposites
Vary in intensity
Remaining emotions derived/mixed
Mapped onto adaptive behaviors
o Ortony & turner (1990)
There is no objective way to investigate which emotions are basic
Neuroscience cannot fully dissociate emotion categories
Disagreement which are basic due to vagueness of language
Disagreement which are basic due to hierarchies
Disagreement whether emotions have to have a valence
- Subjective emotions
o The term basic is a subjective label
o Emotion is a slightly vague term
- Words may not represent nature (Russell)
o Dimensions rather than categories to investigate emotions
o Similarity ratings
o Ask participants to group together images of people who feel alike
- Subjective vs. Objective dimensions
o Ratings are subjective but calculating the dimensions is an objective method
o With help of the mean difference score one can find underlying
constructs/dimesions
- Feldmann barrett: emotions are learned or socially constructed and not given to us by
nature
- Emotions dimensions
o Arousal
o Valence
o Goals
o Active vs passive
o Probability of the goal
Week 2
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