Emotion and emotion regulation (theories) ✓ Flashcards
What is emotion? What does it involve and what is its purpose?
Coordinatied responses that orient attention towards a specific stimulus. Emotions are in other words generated when a situation is interpreted as being relevant to ones personal, social or cultural goal. This will stimulate a motivated response which includes:
- Physiological arousal
- Arousal is a physiological and psychological state that correspond to an increase in reactivity or wakefullness.
- Behavior responses
Emotion involves:
- Attention to a situation (could also be a thought or memory)
- Giving the situation/thought or memory and important meaning
- Cognitive, physiological and behavioral responses
Emotions purpose:
- Promote survival (feeling fear will trigger beavioral responses for survival)
- Social signaling (emotions can be interpreted by others and let them know what you’re feeling)
- Social hieararky
- Motivation and coordination of adaptive behaviors
- Motivation is an incentive system that coordinates action based on an emotional experience. (including both the urge to act and the reward or release of punishment experienced during or after the action.
Is mood the same as emotion?
No, mood is more like a prolonged and less intense affective state that occures in response to something we’ve experienced.
What is emotion regulation?
Emotion regulation: the implementation of a set of actions (conscious or non-conscious), to start, stop or otherwise modulate the trajectory of an emotion.
The purpose of emotion regulation is to respond accordingly to a social context and cultural norms so that we respond in a way that is socially acceptable. Eg we will not yell at somebody in public because it is socially unaccebtable.
Emotion that is dysregulated (difficulty in controlling and modulating emotions): will drive psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety.
What theories of emotions do we have?
Two competing perspectives on emotion models
Basic approach: Complex reflexes that are automatically triggered by objects/events
Constructivist theory: Automatically triggered by a meaningful interpretation of the situation
Darwin founded the theory of basic emotion, how does he motivate this theory?
Darwin was one of the first to study emotion, he proposed that there are fundamental/basic emotions that are similar throughout species.
He motivated this approach through an evolutionary approach to emotional expression in term of the continuity between various animal species.
Emotions have a primitive adaptive quality that is linked both to our species evolutionary past and also to our own personal history.
Following darwins steps, Paul Ekman defined the basic emotions. Which are the basic emotions? How did he find these?
Enjoyment, anger, fear, contempt, disgust and sadness.
Pauls research
He showed pictures of emotions to people in isolated cultures and asked them to choose an emotion from a provided list and express them. The way they were expressed matched well with the way they are expressed in western culture.
- These are basic emotions that are universally recognized regardless of languade and culture.*
- Som say this study was very biased, because he presented a very defined set of emotions that could have introduced a bias of in the population that did the study.*
What is Robert Plutchicks weel of emotions?
Basic emotions can be expressed in different intensities, and can be combined to form several different emotions.
Robert Plutchiks weel of emotions
8 primary emotions: anger, disgust, sadness joy osv…
Then other emotions are combinations, eg anger is a combination of anticipation and disgust.
What is the constructionists approach of emotion by William James?
Anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness osv are not the basic buildingblocks of emotion as seen in the basic approach, but instead muliple events that result from the interplay of more psychological systems.
In this theory there are not a finit, discrete set of emotions with their own specialised circuitry. Instead the emotions are constructed in the moment by core systems that interact across the whole brain and are aided by a lifetime of learning.
“emotions are constructions that our brain create to guide our action and explain how we are feeling in a specific situation”
How are emotions produced according to affective circumplex?
Arousal and valence are dimensions of core effect and used to describe emotional experience. Emotions are therefore a mix between incoming sensory information from the external world and homeostatic/interoceptive information from the body and this will produce an emotion.
Arousal: is conceptualized as the level of activation in response
Valence: is the level corresponding to the value of the experience (unpleasant → pleasant).
Examples of emotions
Excitement is a combination of high arousal (activation) and mid to high level of pleasantness.
Fatigue is a combination between low level of arousal and low valence
Summarise the difference between basic and constructive theories to emotion.
We want to understand not only the meaning of emotion and how they are made but also the temporal and causal aspects of emotion, do we run from the bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run?
Emotional stimuli cause bodily responses which in turn allow us to feel and realize a given emotion. In this description, experience of an emotion is felt only after a physiological arousal has taken place. They believe different arousal patterns are associated with different feelings.
Example
Somebody sees a snake, the sympathetic system is activated and causes physiological arousal, heart pounding, sweating and running away. Then our mind interpretes these bodily actions as fear.
Many disagree that emotion is something constructed after interpreting bodily symptoms, why? (cannon-bard theory)
- *Body-brain mapping of emotion is not correct**
1. Patients with severed spinalcords can still feel emotion
2. Emotions do not depend on the cerebral cortex
Emotion preceeds some bodily responds
Many body responses are to slow to regenerate emotion, one does not have to start running to feel scared.
Can’t differentiate between emotions based simply on bodyrespons
Many body responses like “pounding heart”, are not specific to a specific emotion. It can be fear and joy. Emotions can share similar body responses.
How did cannon-bard come up with this theory, with help from sham rage experiments?
Disconnect cerebral cortex from a cat, then they applied a light touch on the cat. This triggered sham rage (excessive anger) from the cat:
-Cerebral cortex is not neccesary to express emotion.
If they also removed the hypothalamus and the cortex, the cat showed no sham rage:
-Hypothalamus is neccessary for anger.
Sham rage in human
Sham rage has been observed in human when there is unhibited hypothalamic discharge, three reasons for hypothalamic discharge:
- Depolarisation of hypothalamus via electrode stimulation
- Carbonmonoxide poisoning
- Insulin hypoglycemia (eller var det hyper?)
What happens when we see a snake according to the cannon-bard theory?
Snake → hypothalamic activation → Emotion (fear) + autonomic arousal respons (heart pounding, sweating, running away)
The emotion + autonomic arousal appear at the same time and are independent.
What are the shortcomings of james-lange and cannon-bard theory?
The last theory of emotion (schachter-singer two factor theory), is a theory that takes in contex both the physiological arousal and the emotional experience. What does this theory
This theory consists of labeling the physiological experience with a cognitive appraisal:
Acording to this theory emotions are composed of two factors: physiological and cognitive factor (the physiological experience is labeled with the cognitiv appraisal).
Physiological arousal is interperated in contex to produce the emotional experience. Example with snake:
Snake stimuli appears and produces physiological arousal (activation of the sympathetic nervous system) together with a cognitiv appraisal (“i am afraid”)of what the stimuli is which gives us a label to the physiological arouasal.
The physiological arousal (sympathetic activation) plus the cognitiv appraisal (i am afraid), will in turn produce both the emotional feeling and the behavior.
“Arousal causes the brain to find a reason for the arousal. Once the arousal is labeled the emotion occurs” Therefore an emotion is not only produced by the bodily response but also by the context in with the stimulus appears, so a given stimulus may induce different emotions based on the person and the situation.
What experiment produced the schachter-singer theory?
- The participant was told that the aim of the experiment was to look at the effect of vitamin injection on visual skills.
- Participents where given either adrenalin shots or placebo.
- Adrenalins arousing effekts where explained or not explained (palpitation, tremor, flushing and faster breathing)
- After shot participents where placed in rooms with an actor who played either happy or angry.
If the participent who was not informed about adrenalins effects was placed in a room with someone who played happy, they themselves felt more happy thatn the participents who where informed of the sideeffects or had been given placebo.
The participent that was not informed about adrenalins effects felt more anger than the participents who knew the effects or had the placebo when placed in room with and angry actor.
Conclusion
The person with and adrenalin shot who was not informed about the effect was more succeptible to feel the emotion that the actor was playing. They took the explenation from what they could see in there surrounding.
This proves that the emotion is not only produced by what the body is feeling but also the cognitiv appraisal of the situation.
