Emotion KAREN

Question 1

What is the definition of emotion?

Answer 1

“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

Question 2

What are the three components of emotion?

Answer 2

1. Experiential component
2. Behavioural component
3. Physiological component

Question 3

What is the experiential component?

Answer 3

what the mind has conscious access to. E.g. I feel sacred

Question 4

What is the behavioural component?

Answer 4

What physical actions we perform with our body – the tendency the emotions produce

Question 5

What is the physiological component?

Answer 5

Prepares body for future actions

Question 6

What is the definition of a mood?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What are dimensional models?

Answer 7

Express emotion as points in continuous space

This location is specified by a series of numbers, with one corresponding to each dimension

Question 8

What is the circumflex model of emotion? (Russel, 1980)

Answer 8

2 dimensions

1. Arousal - links to energy levels
2. 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

Question 9

What is the Pleasure, arousal, dominance model? (PAD) (Mehrabian & Russel, 1974)

Answer 9

1. Pleasure - like valence
2. Arousal - links to energy levels
3. Dominance - distinguishes further - e.g. Fear and anger produce same pint on the circumflex model but a re very different when considering dominance

Question 10

What is Ekman’s concept of basic emotion? (Ekman, 1999)

Answer 10

He believes we should focus on core emotions

1. Distinctive universal signals – there function to communicate emotional state with conspecifics (should occur cross-culturally)
2. Distinctive physiological signature – e.g., heart rate
3. Have an automatic appraisal mechanism – emotion must be a spontaneous reaction to a situation
4. Must have universal antecedent events – same events should elicit same emotions cross culturally

Question 11

Positives of dimensional models

Answer 11

Efficient summary of relationships between emotions

The dimensions of the models can have underlying biological significance

Question 12

Negatives of dimensional models

Answer 12

Limited in expressivity – struggle to provide a complete account of human emotion

Question 13

Positives of categorical models

Answer 13

Capture subtle differences between emotions

Question 14

Negatives of categorical models

Answer 14

By being able to create many categories you end up with a long list with no clear structure
Are emotions continuous or categorical?

Question 15

What is the Geneva Musical Emotions Scale (GEMS)? (Zenter et al., 2008)

Answer 15

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

Question 16

How does Menninghaus at al., (2019) organise aesthetic emotions?

Answer 16

1. Aesthetic versions of ‘ordinary’ emotions

2. Appreciation of aesthetic virtues

Question 17

3 observations about aesthetic emotions

Answer 17

1. Aesthetic emotions are deeply linked with pleasure and displeasure
2. Pleasure is largely determined by the intensity of the aesthetic emotion
3. An intense experience can be pleasant – listening to something that evokes strong feelings of sadness can correspond to a pleasant aesthetic experience

Question 18

List the 3 ways of measuring emotional responses

Answer 18

1. Self report
2. Physiological
3. Neuroimaging

Question 19

How do we measure physiological responses?

Answer 19

a) Heart rate
b) Respiration
c) Goosebump recorder
d) Skin conductance response
e) Skin temperature
f) Facial electromyography
g) Pupillometry

Question 20

Advantages of measuring physiological responses

Answer 20

Avoids mediation through vocabulary, they are necessary to understand full response pattern

Question 21

Disadvantages of measuring physiological responses

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What is neuroimaging?

Answer 22

Gain insight into brain processing underlying a particular emotional response

Question 23

What is fMRI?

Answer 23

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

1. Amygdala – implicated in pleasant and unpleasant emotions, thought to be used to codify music’s affective positivity or negativity
2. Nucleus accumbens – is implicated in motivation, aversion and reward; particularly involved in pleasure
3. Hippocampus – linked to positive tender emotions

Question 24

fMRI Advantages

Answer 24

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

Question 25

fMRI Disadvantages

Answer 25

Involves expensive equipment
Can be noisy (problematic in music experiments)
Decoding the patterns of brain activations is a very complex task