Emotion Flashcards
Emotion
Transient neurophysiological reactions to events that have consequences for our welfare, and require an immediate behavioral response. They include feelings, but also physiological reactions, expressive behaviors, behavioral intentions, and cognitive changes
Emotions are functional
Shift from having emotions to how experience of normatively expected emotions is adaptive
- anger: assertiveness (individual goal pursuit)
- shame: relational harmony (drive you to apologize)
Universalism of emotions
Emotions are similar across cultures
Relativism of emotions
Emotions are different across cultures
Ekman on emotions
There is a wild bear in front of the door of the house. The woman looks at the bear and is afraid. She’s afraid that the bear will bite her
- anger
- fear
- sadness
- disgust
- surprise
- joy
–> later also content
Ekman’s basic emotions
- anger
- fear
- sadness
- disgust
- surprise
- joy
(- later also content)
Criticism on Ekman, Sorenson & Friesen, 1969
- bias in Ekman’s stimuli and method: forced choice paradigm / ecological validity / context effects / choice of emotion words
- recognition rated lower in non-Western cultures
- joy: 97% correct in Europe and 68% correct in Africa
- are basic emotions universal? what should be the cut-off?
Influences of culture on emotion
- regulation of basic emotions (display rules) - back-end calibration
- cultural calibration of how emotional experiences are perceived
- cultural construction of experiences
- cultural construction of concepts, attitudes, values and beliefs about emotions
Cultural decoding rules
Culturally prescribed rules learned early in life that manage the perception and interpretation of othe’s emtional expressions
Americans: expression > experience
Japanese: expression = experience
Emotion perception
Japanese attend more to the surrounding facial expressions to establish the target person’s emotion
» the surrounding people’s emotions affected Japanese participants, but not Western participants
Approaches to cultural and emotions
- dimensional approach
- emotion word approach
- componential approach
Dimensional approach of emotion
Osgood (1975): 3 dimensions for concepts
- Evaluation, potency, activity
Russel (1980): 2 dimensions for emotions
- Evaluation, activity
Fontaine et al (2007): 4 dimensions
- Evaluation, potency, activation, unpredictability
- 2 dimensional examples of the multidimensional space
- The smaller the circle, the more similar the respective terms across the languages
- valeence = pleasentness
Emotion word approach
Do they have a word for it? And can they experience it without having a word for it?
Componential approach of emotion
In an emotional episode are:
- appraisal
- action tendency
- experience
- expressive behavior
- phyciological response
Envy
Benign and malicious
- benign envy leads to a moving-up motivation aimed at improving one’s own position of the superior other
- malicious envy leads to a pulling down motivation aimed at damaging the position of the superior other
