Emotion Flashcards
What is the James-Lange Theory
Theory about the relationship between emotional experience and physiological activity suggesting that stimuli trigger activity in the autonomic nervous system, which IN TURN produces an emotional experience in the brain
What is the Cannon-Bard Theory
relationship between emotional experience and physiological activity suggests that a stimulus SIMULTANEOUSLY triggers activity in the autonomic nervous system and emotional experience in the brain
Two factor theory
Stimulus trigger general arousal of which the brain interprets the cause and this leads to emotional experience
Emotion has three components:
- Cognitions: “This is a dangerous situation”
- Feelings: “I feel frightened”
- Actions: “Run for the nearest exit”
Klein, 1993
Found spontaneous rapid breathing leads to worrying about suffocation and panic attacks
Strack et al., 1988
Found subjects rated a comic strip as funnier when holding the pen in their teeth
Calder et al. (2000)
Tested 3 MS people and found no impairment in
recognising basic types of facial affect (anger, fear, sad, happy, disgust). They did show mild impairment in face recognition - may be due to problems with eye movements. Suggests that simulation not necessary for facial emotion recognition.
Damasio (1994, 1999)
argues that one can bypass the generation
stage of producing the expression and utilise the direct modulation of somatic (feeling) structures to simulate.
What does the James-Lange Theory predict
- People with weak autonomic or skeletal responses will feel less emotion
- Causing or increasing someone’s action/response should enhance an emotion.
Cannon theory favoured because
Autonomic nervous system responds too slowly to account for rapid onset of emotional experience. For example, a blush is an autonomic response to embarrassment that takes 15-30 seconds to occur (long
after the experience of feeling embarrassed).
2. People have problems detecting changes in autonomic activity (e.g. heart rate) so how can this lead to a change in the experience of emotion?
3. If non-emotional stimuli (temperature rise) causes the same pattern of autonomic activity that emotion does then why don’t we feel afraid when we have a fever?
4. Not enough unique patterns of autonomic activity to represent the array of unique emotional experience we have.
Schacter & Singer (1962)
James & Lange right to equate emotion with bodily states
Cannon & Bard right to note that there are not enough distinct bodily reactions to account for the variety of emotions we experience.
– Different emotions may reflect different INTERPRETATIONS of a single pattern of bodily activity – “UNDIFFERENTIATED BODILY AROUSAL”
The Insular Cortex, Basal Ganglia, and Disgust
The anterior insula is connected to the ventro–posterior–medial thalamic nucleus, and has been identified in primates as gustatory cortex (Rolls, 1994), containing neurons that respond to pleasant and unpleasant tastes (Yaxley et al., 1988).
Calder et al. (2000) reported a patient with damage to left insula and left basal ganglia who was impaired at what?
recognizing disgust in facial expression and in the ability to experience disgust himself.
Adolphs et al. (2002) report a patient with bi-lateral insula
damage who was what?
severely impaired at experiencing and recognizing disgust from all types of stimuli.
Testosterone
linked with social dominance and aggression. Delays conscious recognition of facial threat (anger) signals.
