Apprasial Flashcards
Emotions knowledge and appraisal
5 theories
The mainstream definition of emotion refers to a feeling state involving thoughts, physiological changes, and an outward expression or behavior.
Causal process that gets emotions going.
What is it that suddenly triggers a feeling of gratitude, vs pride or joy? How do we get emotions going in the first place?
Basic idea: the mind is interpreting events in some sort of way that gives rise to certain emotions. The mind also interprets internal states
Appraisal processes:
o Primary unconscious automatic processes in the amygdala
o Secondary appraisal: more complex processes that differentiate emotions.
• Without the help from the right hemisphere, you would be able to read the word “pig” for instance, but you wouldn’t be able to imagine what it is.
• There are five theories which attempt to understand why we experience emotion.
James-Lange Theory: An event causes physiological arousal first and then we interpret this arousal. Only after our interpretation of the arousal can we experience emotion.
Schachter-Singer Theory: An event causes physiological arousal first. You must then identify a reason for this arousal and then you are able to experience and label the emotion.
Cannon-Bard Theory: Physiological arousal and emotions occur at the same time, thoughts or outward behavior are not considered
Lazarus Theory: A thought must come before any emotion or physiological arousal. In other words, you must first think about your situation before you can experience an emotion.
Facial Feedback Theory: Emotion is the experience of changes in our facial muscles. In other words, when we smile, we then experience pleasure, or happiness. When we frown, we then experience sadness.– Mirror neurons and empathy
Studies on appraisal
The split brain experiments: Sperry, Gazzaniga et al in the 1960s - patients who had surgery to cut the corpus callosum
• Left hemisphere - Analytical and verbal tasks.
• Right hemisphere - space perception tasks and music, gives emotional context to language
Split brain
If an image is projected to the right visual field - that is, to the left hemisphere, which is where information from the right field is processed - the patients could describe what they saw.
But when the same image was displayed to the left visual field, the patients drew a blank: they said they did not see anything - If asked to point to an object similar to the one being projected, they could do so with ease.
• The right brain saw the image and could mobilise a nonverbal response. It simply could not talk about what it saw. The same kind of finding proved true for touch, smell and sound
Primary appraisal
A fast unconscious automatic evaluation: reads of the goodness or badness of the stimulus.
Le Doux
• Awareness and subliminal pictures of either happy face or angry face, before seeing a symbol. Pps who were aware of the faces didn’t affect the rating, but the subliminal angry face resulted in a more negative rating. Something is happening
When are we consciously aware of emotionally charged stimuli they are less likely to affect our judgements of other stimuli
o Remember Schachter and Singer’s experiment? –
Their two-factor theory of emotion states that the physiological arousal in different emotion is entirely the same and we label our arousal according to the cognitions we have available. Those who were informed about possible vitamin (adrenaline) side effects experienced the least postitve or negative emotion becuase they could attribute their feelings
Ohman and Soares (1994)
o Measured skin conduction in snake and spider phobic after presenting subliminal images of snakes
snake- and spider-fearful Ss showed elevated SCRs to snake and spider pictures as compared with neutral pictures. Triggers amygdala
Chartrand, van Baaren, and Bargh (2006) confirmed that automatic appraisal processes can influence the emotional state. Positive (e.g., music; friends), negative (e.g., war; cancer), or neutral (e.g., building; plant) words were presented repeatedly but so briefly they could not be identified at the conscious level. Participants receiving the negative words reported a more negative mood state than those receiving the positive words
Data shows that we respond more to bad things.
Negative stimuli such as startling, frightening sounds or disgusting smells trigger more rapid, stronger physiological responses
Secondary appraisal
Amygdala that tells you if things are good or bad.
Although fundamental, much more is needed to account for the complexity of emotional experience
Fronal cortex - Takes time, you wouldn’t survive if you reply on this
• What resources do we have to cope?
• Who’s to blame?
• What are we supposed to do?
• We engage in an assessment of the consequences of our actions
• Then we engage in more complex a secondary appraisal to get to more specific emotions.
Language
Positive words are used far more often than negative words and they tend to be ‘unmarked’ - that is, the positive is the default (e.g. ‘happy’) whereas the negative is achieved by adding a negating prefix (i.e. ‘unhappy’).
If you do not have the word, can you experience the emotion?
Rozin et al, 2010
There are states represented by a single word in other languages that are not represented by single English terms:
In Czech one finds litost which means the sudden realisation of life’s tragic circumstances - no word, no emotion
In German: Schadenfreude: pleasure in seeing the failure or suffering of another person - Have the feeling but not the word
If you don’t have the word, you may not have the emotion
Lomas, 2016
There are over 200 foreign words for emotional states and concepts that we don’t have in English.
Cultural variation of emotion words
Cultures vary in the number of words that represent emotions:
♣ English: 2000, Chewong of Malasia: 8
In the Gifjingai language of aborigines of Australia fear and shame are captured by the same word: gurakadj.
Distinction between shame and embarrassment is not made by Japanese.
Hypercognising of emotion: represent it with numerous words and concepts.
In Tahiti: 46 words for anger
In US guilt and love are hypercognised.
In Chinese there are greater distinctions between self conscious emotions.
What does language do to emotional experiences?
o The language of emotion gives insight and clarity on the nature of our emotions.
James Pennebaker:
Subjects write about trauma in their lives (divorce, death of parents, holocaust, 9/11 victims),
♣ In one condition they are asked to write about the deepest emotions with respect of that trauma
♣ The other condition they are asked to write about the facts of it.
People that represented their feelings (Condition 1) do better: less counselling, helps physically, enhance immune response, a very beneficial effect of catharsis.
It works because
♣ 1- it gives clarity
♣ 2-writing about an emotion reduces the costs of suppressing your emotions, suppressing emotions is costly
Putting a label on an emotion stops the amygdala, the cortex has to act and give a name to the emotion. One you stop/decrease amygdala activity you feel cathartic
Emotions and two languages
We think more rationally in a foreign language
Keysar et al , 2012
We’re typically affected emotionally twice as much by losses as we are affectedpositivelyby gains of equivalent size.
Would you bet if by tossing a coin you have the chance to win $1.50 or lose $1?
People will tend to shy away from the bet even though the cold logic of probability theory suggests they’ll win out in the long run - more emotional in own language, you react to the negative more
Players were far more willing to gamble when they played the game in their second language
This also applies to other situations
Marian, 2008
When speaking about immigration, bilinguals (Russian and English) used more emotion words overall in their second language (English).
Development of emotions
Emotions are our first language
Each emotion comes as an innate package with its own neural program (Tomkins 1962).
Lewis 1990
2 months: adults can identify expressions of happiness, different from reflex smiling
3 months: they smile in response to the same kind of events that make older children and adults happy: attention, invitations to play
Smiling occurs when infants (2, 4, 6 and 8 months old) master skills:
String attached to baby’s arm.
Condition one music played randomly,
Condition two played when string pulled.
Higher levels of interest and smiling in condition 2.
♣ One function of infant’s smiles: Make adults interested and happy. When infants showed interest when playing with parents the parents’ expressions of interest also increased
Observational studies (Izzard) on when emotion starts to occur in child development. Young babies possess the capacity to show different emotions - they emerge systematically as the child is meeting different demands and opportunities in the environment. Compassion: 12-15 months young children will take correcting action to help other people in distress. If they see a person that is sad they will do something to alleviate it Functions of emotions in the lives of infants: Our babies are the most vulnerable, they need a lot of care and attachment is important. A baby smile makes a caregiver happy. A baby’s expression of negative emotion signals that something is not right.
Adolescence: lag in maturation of cortical regions: OFC relative to limbic regions
This lag has been suggested to underlie poor reward-related processing and decision-making
Disruptions in reward processing, such as risk-taking or reckless behaviours, including gambling and substance abuse increase during this developmental period.
Whittle 2009
Studies in adolescents have shown that parental interactions shape emotion processing brain areas
Conflictual interactions tend to increase right amygdala volumes, especially in boys
There is a correlation between the frequency of positive maternal behaviour and right amygdala volume.
Positive interactions reduce right amygdala volume - Right size = site of negative emotions
Elicitors of emotions changes across life Scarr and Salapatek (1970) Exposed infants (2 mts – 2yrs) to strangers, visual cliff, jack in the box, moving toy dog, loud noises, someone wearing a mask. Few children under 7 months showed marked expressions of distress. With increasing age more fearful avoidance of visual cliff, more fear of strangers and masks.
The fear of loud and sudden movements, and unfamiliar toys showed a different pattern: fear began at 7 months, peaked at the end of 1st year and then declined.
Preschoolers are frightened by imaginary themes: monsters, ghosts, frightening dreams
Early school years: fears surrounding bodily injury and physical danger.
Negative emotions predominate from 10-13yrs , from 14 onwards more positive emotions.
Perception of emotions
Visual perception: Infants recognise emotionally significant expressions from the age of few months. Infants systematically attend to face and not other parts of the body they respond to facial expression.
Perception of voice: Parents use a different voice when talking to infants and infants pay more attention to this special voice of motherese and show more positive emotion during it.
From 5 months babies can discriminate affective messages indicating approval or prohibition, either in their parent’s language or in a language that their parents do not speak.
Between 5-9 months they react to facial expressions. Their expressive behaviour becomes synchronised with the expressive behaviour of the parents.
After 9 months they use the caretaker face most typically the mother to gather information about the environment.
Preschool children can differentiate happy, angry, sad in that order and scared, surprised and disgusted emerge later. By school age, children are good at recognising emotions in other people. No gender differences.
Hoehl et al, 2010
Children (5-6 yr old) and adults were presented happy and angry faces of adults and children
Very similar neural networks were involved in the processing of angry and happy faces in adults and children, including the amygdala and prefrontal areas.
Children - heightened amygdala activation in response to emotional faces than adults.
Children showed stronger amygdala activation in response to angry adult
Adults showed stronger amygdala activation for angry children faces.
Sarcasm and irony
Impulsivity and deferred gratification
Sarcasm and irony
In both cases the speaker says the opposite of what they mean, but whereas an ironic statement is aimed at a situation, a sarcastic remark is aimed at a person and is therefore more cutting.
Two puppets are playing on a trampoline, one falls on his face. ‘Great trampoline tricks,’ the other character says, sarcastically. Contrast this with two puppets playing on a saggy trampoline with little bounce. One of them says ‘great trampoline’, an ironic remark.
Glenwright and Pexman 2010
5-6 years old and 9-10 years old
Puppet show scenarios that ended with one of the characters making a critical remark
Literal aimed at person or situation (faulty trampoline used in gym class)
Non-literal aimed at person (sarcastic: “great trampoline trick”) or situation (ironic: “great trampoline”)
o Asked to rate how mean the comments were
o Both age groups recognised the non-literal comments as intending to mean the opposite of what was said - understand irony and sarcasm
o The older age group showed a sensitivity to the difference between irony and sarcasm.
o They rated sarcastic utterances as meaner
Shoda et al, 1990
4 year olds – Have one marshmallow now or two 20 minutes later
Delayed gratification group - Closed their eyes, sang, talked, tried to sleep.
Reassessed 12-14 yrs later
Delayed gratification group: Better social life, resourceful, confident, abler to cope with frustration. Still able to delay gratification
After finishing secondary school, they were better academically! Higher IQ scores.
Impulsive group:
Conflictive, avoid social contact, obstinate, unable to decide, jealous, envious.
Ability to control impulse is essential: Start a diet, finishing a career
116 4-year-old children were shown a wrapped present and told they could open it as soon as they completed a puzzle.
The researchers helped the children with their task and then spent 90 seconds shuffling papers before telling the kids to open their present
Kids who opened regardless of researcher (impulsive) -
Boys were “irritable” and girls were “sulky” in the future
Delayed gratification - boys were “attentive” and girls “competent”
