Emotion & Culture Flashcards
Describe what emotion is
Mental and physical outcomes of subjective experience.
What is subjective experience from?
Subjective experience is from the appraisals and evaluations made cognitively OR automatically.
What can emotion lead to…
Leads to bodily responses (e.g., facial expressions, peripheral nervous system arousal, speeded reaction times…)
Emotion has two components…
physiological experience (e.g. increased heart rate)
and conscious, subjective experience or feeling (e.g. feeling anxious)
How are emotions adaptive?
Contribute to general arousal to activate behaviour
Manage approach and withdrawal behaviours
Help us communicate nonverbally
emotions interact with cognitive processes such as…
memory
attention
decision making
perception
What are the basic emotions?
Happiness sadness surprise disgust anger fear
What do studies show about emotions?
Expressions appear to be innate - infants show the same range
Appear to be universal and similar across all societies even in cultures with little contact with others (e.g., in rain forests of Papua New Guinea)
People who are blind from birth also show the same range of emotions
Complex emotions are unlikely to be strongly linked to…?
particular facial display.
Love, guilt…
James-Lange Theory
person’s physical state provides cues for identification of an emotional state
(e.g. seeing a bear in the forest induces physical response that brain interprets as fear)
Perceived stimulus > specific physical responses > subjective feeling
The Cannon-Bard Theory
Simultaneous activation of physical responses and the recognition of subjective feelings occurs independently
(e.g. seeing a bear would trigger at the same time a subjective feeling of fear and the physiological fight-or-flight response).
Perceived stimulus >Physical responses or subjective feeling
Botox to frown muscles =
significantly slower to read emotional sentences…
reduced amygdala activity when making angry expressions
Biological Correlates of Emotion
The autonomic nervous system
- Fight-or-flight response
- ANS produces different patterns of arousal during different emotional states
Limbic system (e.g. The amygdala, cingulate cortex)
- The amygdala important for fear processing
- The anterior cingulate cortex important for processing of pain and social exclusion
The cerebral cortex
- Right Hemisphere model of emotion
- The valence model
The Valence model.
Left and right hemispheres, which is negative emotions, which is positive?
Right - negative
Left - positive
Right Hemisphere model of emotion
Right hemisphere is more important for emotional processing
