Chapter 5: Emotion Flashcards
Emotion
A brief, specific response, involving appraisals, experiences, expressions, and physiology that helps people meet goals, including social goals.
Appraisals
The interpretation an individual gives to a situation that gives rise to the experience of the emotion
What is the purpose of emotions?
Help us interpret our surrounding circumstances
Guide our actions, which can advance our goals
What is the evolutionary approach on emotions?
Emotions are portrayed as adaptive reactions to survival-related threats and opportunities that involve specific patterns of expression and physiology.
Expect emotions to be universal
What is the constructivist approach on emotions?
Culture affects how we feel about events, what we might do about our feelings, and how we express and describe our feelings to others and to ourselves
People in different cultures might be expected to express their emotions in different ways
What was Darwin stance on emotional expression?
The idea is that the expressions of human emotion we observe today derive from actions that proved useful in our evolutionary past.
What were Darwin’s hypotheses about the universality of emotional expression?
- All humans use the same 30-40 facial muscles to communicate emotions, people in all cultures will likely
communicate and perceive emotion in a similar fashion. - Humans share an evolutionary
history with other mammals, most recently primates, our emotionally expressive behaviors should resemble those of other species. - Blind individuals, lacking the rich visual input that culture provides about how to express emotion, will still show expressions similar to those of sighted people because the tendency to express emotions in specifi c ways has been encoded by evolutionary processes.
Ekman 1969 Facial Expression study
Aim: Test Darwin’s universality hypothesis
Procedure: Actors were pictured expressing anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. They then presented these photos to people in Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the US, who selected from the six emotion terms the one that best matched the feeling being communicated in each photo.
Findings: Across these fi ve cultures, accuracy rates were in the 70-90 percent range for the six emotions. If
participants had been merely guessing, they would have succeeded only 16.7 percent of the time. Seems to
provide evidence that emotions are indeed universal.
Limitation: The participants had all been
exposed to Western media and therefore might have learned how to identify the expressions through that exposure.
Ekman & Fiesen 1971 Facial Expression follow-up study
Aim: Test Darwin’s universal facial expression but with a community not affected by Western culture.
Procedure: They found the Fore community in Papua New Guinea. They were tested by being told an emotion-appropriate story for each of the six emotions. For adults, they were presented photos of three different expressions alongside a story that matched one of the expressions, and he asked participants to match the story to the appropriate expression.
Findings: Th e Fore adults achieved accuracy rates ranging from 68 to 92 percent in judging the six emotions; the children achieved accuracy rates ranging from 81 to 98 percent.
Focal emotions
An emotion that is especially common within a particular culture
Affect valuation theory
A possible answer as to why some emotions become focal in a particular culture.
Emotions that promote important cultural ideals are valued and will tend to play a more prominent role in the social lives of individuals.
Emotion regulation
The ability to alter one’s own emotional state to make themselves feel better or to fit the present context. There are three strategies: reappraisal, acceptance, and suppression.
Reappraisal
The process of reinterpreting the causes of an emotion and its meaning for the individual
an emotion regulation strategy
Acceptance
Adopting an open and welcoming attitude to one’s emotions.
An emotion regulation strategy
Suppression
An emotion regulation strategy by which people minimize the outward signs of the emotion.
What are the components of happiness?
- Life satisfaction
- Emotional well-being
What are the benefits of happiness?
- It enables better work
- Strengths friendships, romantic partnerships, and parenting bonds
- Better health
Affective forecasting
Predicting future emotions, such was whether an event will result in happiness, anger, or sadness and for how long.
Gilbert et 1998 Break Up Study
Aim: Affective forecasting, the expected impact of breaking up with a romantic partner and comparing it with its actual impact
Procedures: Students who had not
experienced a romantic breakup, called “luckies”, reported on their overall happiness, and then predicted how unhappy they would be two months aft er a breakup. The researchers compared their estimates with the happiness of people who had
recently broken up, labeled “le ftovers”.
Findings: Leftovers were almost as happy as luckies, but luckies predicted they would be much less happy two
months after a breakup than the actual leftovers were.
Immune neglect
The tendency for people to underestimate their capacity to be resilient in responding to difficult life events leads them to overestimate the extent to which life’s problems will reduce their personal well-being.
A bias, thus leading to not accurately predicting our future happiness
Focalism
A tendency to focus too much on a central aspect of an event while neglecting how other aspects of our lives will influence how happy we are.
A bias that makes it difficult for people to predict what will make them happy.
Duration neglect
The relative unimportance of the length of an emotional experience, whether pleasurable or unpleasant, in retrospective assessments of the overall experience
What are some principles you can follow to find more happiness?
- Happiness is often found in being with other people.
- Money does matter in terms of overall satisfaction with life. But when it comes to emotional well-being, having more money is helpful only up to a point.
- Practice gratitude
- Better to give than to receive
- Focus a bit more on experience and a bit less on material possessions.
- Try to cultivate experiences that can lead to awe.
