Emotion

Question 1

What is the definition of emotion?

Answer 1

“a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a significant matter or event” - APA dictionary of psychology

Question 2

What are the three components of emotion?

Answer 2

1. Experiential component
2. Behavioural component
3. Physiological component

Question 3

What is the experiential component?

Answer 3

what the mind has conscious access to. E.g. I feel sacred

Question 4

What is the behavioural component?

Answer 4

What physical actions we perform with our body – the tendency the emotions produce

Question 5

What is the physiological component?

Answer 5

Prepares body for future actions

Question 6

What is a modified definition of emotion in terms of music?

Answer 6

“A complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements, typically (but not exclusively) elicited ad a response to a personally significant matter or event”

Question 7

What is the definition of a mood?

Answer 7

A disposition to person emotionally in a practical way that may last for hours, days, or even weeks, perhaps at a low level without the person knowing what prompted that state

Question 8

Feeling definition

Answer 8

The subjective experience of an emotion or mood

Question 9

Affect definition

Answer 9

Umbrella term that encompasses emotions, mood, and feelings

Question 10

What is perception?

Answer 10

If you perceive an affect you recognise the potential signal for that affect

Question 11

What is expression?

Answer 11

○ If you express an affect, you are creating a signal that could be perceived by someone else

Question 12

What is feeling?

Answer 12

If you ‘feel’ the affect you actually experience the affect

Question 13

What is induction?

Answer 13

If something ‘induces’ an affect it means the stimulus causes the participant to feel the affects

Question 14

What are dimensional models?

Answer 14

Express emotion as points in continuous space

This location is specified by a series of numbers, with one corresponding to each dimension

Question 15

What is the circumplex model of emotion? (Russel, 1980)

Answer 15

2 dimensions

1. Arousal - links to energy levels
2. Valence - positive valence responds to good and negative feelings - used to encourage the individual to take decisions that are good for the organism’s security

Question 16

What is the Pleasure, arousal, dominance model? (PAD) (Mehrabian & Russel, 1974)

Answer 16

1. Pleasure - like valence
2. Arousal - links to energy levels
3. Dominance - distinguishes further - e.g. Fear and anger produce same pint on the circumflex model but a re very different when considering dominance

Question 17

What is Ekman’s concept of basic emotion? (Ekman, 1999)

Answer 17

He believes we should focus on core emotions

1. Distinctive universal signals – there function to communicate emotional state with conspecifics (should occur cross-culturally)
2. Distinctive physiological signature – e.g., heart rate
3. Have an automatic appraisal mechanism – emotion must be a spontaneous reaction to a situation
4. Must have universal antecedent events – same events should elicit same emotions cross culturally

Question 18

Positives of dimensional models

Answer 18

Efficient summary of relationships between emotions

The dimensions of the models can have underlying biological significance

Question 19

Negatives of dimensional models

Answer 19

Limited in expressivity – struggle to provide a complete account of human emotion

Question 20

Positives of categorical models

Answer 20

Capture subtle differences between emotions

Question 21

Negatives of categorical models

Answer 21

By being able to create many categories you end up with a long list with no clear structure
Are emotions continuous or categorical?

Question 22

What is the Geneva Musical Emotions Scale (GEMS)? (Zenter et al., 2008)

Answer 22

Broad set of terms as to what an emotion is

Conducted through a series of self-reported questionnaires based on how people experience emotions in musical contexts

Model is hierarchical

Top level being sublimity, vitality, and unease – each level is thus broken into more specific terms

There is a positivity bias in this model – as positive emotions were more widely reported

Question 23

What are aesthetic emotions?

Answer 23

Perceptions of beauty in wider context?

Question 24

How does Menninghaus at al., (2019) organise aesthetic emotions?

Answer 24

1. Aesthetic versions of ‘ordinary’ emotions

2. Appreciation of aesthetic virtues

Question 25

3 observations about aesthetic emotions

Answer 25

1. Aesthetic emotions are deeply linked with pleasure and displeasure
2. Pleasure is largely determined by the intensity of the aesthetic emotion
3. An intense experience can be pleasant – listening to something that evokes strong feelings of sadness can correspond to a pleasant aesthetic experience

Question 26

List the 3 ways of measuring emotional responses

Answer 26

1. Self report
2. Physiological
3. Neuroimaging

Question 27

What is self report?

Answer 27

Ask the participant about emotional experiences (relies on sophisticated vocabulary
Rating scales (GEMS) - use this to make questionnaires for quantifying certain kinds of core emotional responses (Easy to get data, however, results mediated by vocabulary) - Paradigm across musical cultures

Question 28

How do we measure physiological responses?

Answer 28

a) Heart rate
b) Respiration
c) Goosebump recorder
d) Skin conductance response
e) Skin temperature
f) Facial electromyography
g) Pupillometry

Question 29

Advantages of measuring physiological responses

Answer 29

Avoids mediation through vocabulary, they are necessary to understand full response pattern

Question 30

Disadvantages of measuring physiological responses

Answer 30

Produces noisy data streams
Meaning more participants or longer testing sessions to reach sufficient reliability
Difficult to distinguish emotions in fine detail
methods can be invasive
Potentially changing the listening experience

Question 31

What is neuroimaging?

Answer 31

Gain insight into brain processing underlying a particular emotional response

Question 32

What is fMRI?

Answer 32

Functional Magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
i. FMRI assess the blood oxygen levels of different regions of the brain, through this neural activity you can hypothesise what brain areas are involved in particular cognitive processes

1. Amygdala – implicated in pleasant and unpleasant emotions, thought to be used to codify music’s affective positivity or negativity
2. Nucleus accumbens – is implicated in motivation, aversion and reward; particularly involved in pleasure
3. Hippocampus – linked to positive tender emotions

Question 33

fMRI Advantages

Answer 33

Well suited to accessing the deeper brain regions that are associated with emotion processing
Provides precise spatial localisation of activity within the brain, helping differentiate the precise process happening

Question 34

fMRI Disadvantages

Answer 34

Involves expensive equipment
Can be noisy (problematic in music experiments)
Decoding the patterns of brain activations is a very complex task