Emotion KAREN Flashcards
What is the definition of emotion?
“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
What are the three components of emotion?
- Experiential component
- Behavioural component
- Physiological component
What is the experiential component?
what the mind has conscious access to. E.g. I feel sacred
What is the behavioural component?
What physical actions we perform with our body – the tendency the emotions produce
What is the physiological component?
Prepares body for future actions
What is the definition of a mood?
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
What are dimensional models?
Express emotion as points in continuous space
This location is specified by a series of numbers, with one corresponding to each dimension
What is the circumflex model of emotion? (Russel, 1980)
2 dimensions
- Arousal - links to energy levels
- 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
What is the Pleasure, arousal, dominance model? (PAD) (Mehrabian & Russel, 1974)
- Pleasure - like valence
- Arousal - links to energy levels
- Dominance - distinguishes further - e.g. Fear and anger produce same pint on the circumflex model but a re very different when considering dominance
What is Ekman’s concept of basic emotion? (Ekman, 1999)
He believes we should focus on core emotions
- Distinctive universal signals – there function to communicate emotional state with conspecifics (should occur cross-culturally)
- Distinctive physiological signature – e.g., heart rate
- Have an automatic appraisal mechanism – emotion must be a spontaneous reaction to a situation
- Must have universal antecedent events – same events should elicit same emotions cross culturally
Positives of dimensional models
Efficient summary of relationships between emotions
The dimensions of the models can have underlying biological significance
Negatives of dimensional models
Limited in expressivity – struggle to provide a complete account of human emotion
Positives of categorical models
Capture subtle differences between emotions
Negatives of categorical models
By being able to create many categories you end up with a long list with no clear structure
Are emotions continuous or categorical?
What is the Geneva Musical Emotions Scale (GEMS)? (Zenter et al., 2008)
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
How does Menninghaus at al., (2019) organise aesthetic emotions?
- Aesthetic versions of ‘ordinary’ emotions
2. Appreciation of aesthetic virtues
3 observations about aesthetic emotions
- Aesthetic emotions are deeply linked with pleasure and displeasure
- Pleasure is largely determined by the intensity of the aesthetic emotion
- An intense experience can be pleasant – listening to something that evokes strong feelings of sadness can correspond to a pleasant aesthetic experience
List the 3 ways of measuring emotional responses
- Self report
- Physiological
- Neuroimaging
How do we measure physiological responses?
a) Heart rate
b) Respiration
c) Goosebump recorder
d) Skin conductance response
e) Skin temperature
f) Facial electromyography
g) Pupillometry
Advantages of measuring physiological responses
Avoids mediation through vocabulary, they are necessary to understand full response pattern
Disadvantages of measuring physiological responses
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
What is neuroimaging?
Gain insight into brain processing underlying a particular emotional response
What is fMRI?
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
- Amygdala – implicated in pleasant and unpleasant emotions, thought to be used to codify music’s affective positivity or negativity
- Nucleus accumbens – is implicated in motivation, aversion and reward; particularly involved in pleasure
- Hippocampus – linked to positive tender emotions
fMRI Advantages
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
fMRI Disadvantages
Involves expensive equipment
Can be noisy (problematic in music experiments)
Decoding the patterns of brain activations is a very complex task
