Cognition and Emotion 1 Flashcards
What is emotion?
-Brief and temporary
-Intense experience
What is affect?
-Experience of feeling or emotion
What is affective judgement?
-Decision of what a person likes or dislikes
What did Watson and Clark (1994) state that emotion was?
“…we can define as distinct, integrated psychophysiological response systems…An emotion contains three differentiable response systems: (1) a prototypic form of behavioural expression (typically facial), (2) a pattern of consistent autonomic changes , and (3) a distinct subjective feeling state.”
-Behaviour e.g. facial expressions
-Physiological/bodily response e.g. heart rate and changes in autonomic nervous system
-Feeling e.g. feeling frightened/fear
What components did Lang (1971) come up with for emotions?
-Behavioural
-Physiological
-Cognitive/verbal
How do we classify emotions and emotional experiences?
-We have lots of emotional states e.g. happiness, sadness, interest, boredom
-2 main approaches;
-Basic emotion approach
-Dimensional approach
Briefly describe the basic emotions approach
-We rely on limited number of discrete basic emotions
-What everyone says is ‘basic’ emotions could be different
-The ‘Big five’ basic emotions are cultural independent and universal (Ekman, 1971)
-Anger
-Disgust
-Fear
-Happiness
-Sadness
Describe Ekman’s (1971,1972) facial recognition studies
-Ppts asked to recognise an emotion within someone’s face and told to give a label o the emotion
-Looked across label within different cultures
-Results found that all 3 groups recognised happiness the most yet people from isolated non-literate groups struggled to recognise the other emotions, yet responses were still above chance
What characteristics determine whether an emotion is a basic one (Ekman, 1999) ?
-Distinct universal signal
-Distinct physiological response
-Present in other primates
-Quick onset
-Brief and short duration
-Associated with subjective experiences such as memories, images etc.
Briefly describe the dimensional approach
-Classify emotional experiences on fixed dimensions
-Lang (1988) showed people a load of images and then had people rate them based on Self assessment Manikin (SAM) 9 point scale
-Visual rating scale
-Created an affect-grid which had 2 dimensions; valence (positive/negative) and arousal (low/high)
-These pictures came from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS)
What are problems with this approach?
-Some emotions combine attributes that dimensional models are incompatible with e.g. nostalgia as it could combine positive and negative valence
-how to know what is a good amount of dimensions to use
What are the 3 historical theories of emotion?
-James-Lange theory
-Cannon-Bard theory
-Schacter and Singer - 2 factor theory
Briefly describe the James-Lange theory
-Somatic theory
-Stimulus -> Sensory perception -> Leads to bodily changes/autonomic arousal -> Experience particular emotion
-Subjective experience of emotion is slave of physiology of emotion
-Feedback from the bodily change leads us to experience the particular emotion
-In this mode, behaviour will occur before any cognitive process
-The reason that emotions feel different is due to them having different physiological responses e.g. love and fear
Briefly describe the Cannon-Bard theory
-Stimulus -> Sensory perception -> General autonomic response and Particular emotion experience (occur simultaneously)
What is the cognitive theory conducted by Schachter and Singer (2 factor theory) ?
-Arousal-interpretation theory
-Assumes that there are 2 factors needed that are essential to experience emotion:
-High physiological arousal
-Need to interpret the arousal
-Stimulus -> Sensory perception -> General autonomic arousal -> Cognitive appraisal (interpretation of the state you are in) -> Particular emotional experience
