Emotion lecture 1 Flashcards
Name five key ideas (and errors) of inside out
There are a few basic emotions
Emotions are like reflexes
Emotions control our behaviour
Emotions are unconscious homunculi
Elaborate on the idea that there are a few basic basic emotions and how this is relevant to psychology
These basic emotion theories indicate is a prevailing view in psychology textbooks and indicate that there are a set of distinct basic emotions (e.g the big 5/6; joy, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, surprise) and additional “social” or “moral” emotions (e.g shame, embarrassment, pride etc). The general idea is that there is a fixed, relatively small, set of emotions corresponding to the emotion words in english. There are many proposed classification lists for these. (Ekman, pinksepp)
Describe the evidence available for these basic emotions
There is scant evidence available
Describe an alternate view of emotions using a chemistry metaphor
Basic emotion theories state that basic emotions are irreducible (like atoms) and distinct (they do not merge and share components)
Perhaps “basic” emotions are made up of a partly shared collection of components or building blocks (like molecules)
What other practical problem do these basic emotion theories face?
Why should scientific categories of emotion map on the names we have for them? Different cultures and languages have different words for different emotions
This raises the issue of how to taxonomize emotions: how many are there, what names should we give them? Are they different per species/ culture? How and when in evolution did emotions arise?
What is problematic with the notion that emotions are like reflexes?
Reflexes (e.g the patellar knee jerk reflex) are are always the same, is response to the stimuli, you can think what you want but you will still have that reflex as it is a monosynaptic pathway: the sensor and the motor.
In contrast to this emotions are very complex. The idea is that specific emotions are rigidly triggered by specific external stimuli, emotions are simple and pretty automatic. However emotions are flexible: many different stimuli can elicit emotions, depending on the context and the person.
Review the idea that emotions cause our behaviour
The idea portrayed is that specific emotions cause fixed and specific behaviours (e.g I run because I am afraid of the bear), however not everyone agrees with this (e.g William James “I feel afraid because I run from the bear.) This brings up the question of what the causal link is between stimuli, emotions and behaviour, and can we identify emotions in the absence of behaviour.
What idea about emotions gives an explanation for both of these ideas (reflexes and controlling behaviour)?
Emotions as decoupled reflexes i.e internal states that afford a flexible mapping from stimuli to behaviour
How accurate is the notion that emotions are localised to specific brain regions
Fear is traditionally associated with the amygdala and disgust with the insula (supported by focal brain lesions and older functional neuroimaging studies) however we are unsure whether this truly represented the target word or whether it could measure a bias (such as an unintended similarity in conditions) and not exactly supported by more recent work.
What alternate ideas are there to localised emotion brain regions? (2)
Any given emotional state produced in such a highly distributed manner that it is impossible to assign a specific function in emotion to any brain circuit.
Specific circuits to e.g for a response to a learned condition, not found at discrete brain regions but at the level of circuits- genetically marked neurons connected in a certain way from input to output.
What problem is associated with the idea that emotions are conscious homunculi?
The fallacy of the homunculus:
It suggests that emotions are conscious experiences produced by the brain and must therefore be literally found in the brain. However experience is a global property of a person (or animal) and the mechanism that produces it do not themselves have that property.
Describe four types of data about emotions
Conscious experience (you can feel emotions)
Behaviour: Attributing emotions through observation of behaviour (You can infer that other people are having emotions from their behaviour.)
Psychophysiology: heart rate, blood pressure, skin conductance etc reflect emotions
Neuroscience: You can record traces of emotions in the brain (neurobiological emotion state.)
What is an overarching idea between these types of emotion data?
There is an emotion state that can be described in different disciplines with different types of data but they are all about the same thing: the internal emotion state.
What did Darwin focus on in his research on emotions?
The physical expression of emotions- anatomical insights into the 17 pairs of facial muscles producing emotional facial expressions
Where did Darwin collect data from?
From his missionaries in different cultures, from his own children and animals
What did Darwin observe when analysing different cultures and what conclusions did he draw
-Similarities in expressions across people and cultures
=> There are several basic emotions that are largely innate (across and even possibly species.)
How did Darwin link his theory of evolution to emotion?
-Emotion expression served an adaptive function
=>”serviceable associated habits”: Expressions of emotions have an ancestral survival-related adaptive function
=> Emotional states can be observed in animal behavior
How may the original function of emotional expression changed for humans?
Emotion expression originally served survival, not social communication (co-opted for communication: not evolved for this function but now serve this function). In humans expressions may have lost their original function, and now primarily serves social communication.
What seems to affect the ease at which we assign emotions to different animals behavior?
Good consensus for animals which we interact so extensively that we have learned their social communicative signals (e.g dog showing fear, cat showing aggression),
those which we interact less with are harder to interpret without more contextual information or ethological training (mouse freezing in fear, chimpanzee hooting as affiliate signal)
Almost impossible to infer emotions from very alien behaviors in invertebrates (octopus fleeing in fear (ink), fly displaying wing threat in aggression)
Ekmen checked to see how recognisable faces depicting his big six emotions were across cultures, What were the results?
Pretty consistent across US, Brazil, Japan however these were students so could have had access to media etc. He then did the same study in an isolated neolithic cultures, they showed less but quite considerable consistency
Ekmen then took a step further and tested visually isolated Papua New Guineans who had never seen outsiders, photographs, magazines or television and even had no written language. How did he do this (2) and what were the results?
He told brief emotional stories and let them match a face photograph. There was high agreement except for fear and surprise where it is often difficult to distinguish
He also gave them scenarios and asked him to make a face to match the emotion he would feel in that scenario.
Describe Ekman’s Facial Affect Coding system (FACS)
Anatomically based system to describe all visible facial movements; breaks down facial expressions into components of certain muscle movements. These describe all facial movements as well as different emotions
Outside of the realm of science, what else is this FACS used for?
Animators (cartoon movies) and computer vision
What is meant by an action unit?
A macroexpression, a certain facial muscle movement which may not by itself convey an emotion but could play a part in it.
Name the first AU and the twelveth
Inner brow raiser (Frontalis, pars medialis muscle)
AU12: Lip corner puller (zygomatici muscles)
What does the system allow you to manipulate?
The intensity of the movement and combining the muscle movements
How would happiness or joy be described in this system
A combination of action unit 6 and action unit 12
AU6: Eye constriction (Orticularis oculi muscles)
Explain, using these movements how a smile could be perceived as disingenuous
duchenne smile seen as disingenuous when only using mouth and not constricting the eyes. The upper half of the face is more difficult to control volitionally than the lower half. Therefore this movement is seen as a more involuntary response to joy
What combination would the system use for disgust?
AU9, 15, 16
Nose is wrinkled, the mouth is moved
What combination would the system use for Sadness?
AU 1, 4, 15
Describe the possible adaptive functions of expressing fear and disgust according to the authors of a particular study
Using facial expressions to regulate sensory exposure; you pose a fear face or a disgust face because the expressions are associated with changes in how you process the world.
Fear expression increases sensory exposure to detect source of a threat or predator.
Disgust expression diminishes sensory exposure to avoid contaminants.
Describe the evidence that the authors provided for these adaptive functions for fear and disgust
They used the FACS programme to construct both a face and an ‘antiface’ (Opposite movements of target emotion) displaying fearful and disgusted emotions. They manipulated both the underlying muscles and the ‘flow fields’- the skin movements above them.
The opposite of fear was rated by participants as looking disgusted and the opposite of disgust was rated as looking fearful. Fearful faces displayed raised eyebrows, increased eye aperture and nose elongation while disgust displayed lowered brows, decreased eye aperture and nose compression.
They then had participants pose with the facial expressions of fear and disgust according to the action units, without manipulating actual fear or disgust. They then tested whether this had an effect on perception or action.
They found that if you pose fear, there was a larger visual field size than neutral and if you pose disgust there was a smaller size. Eye movements during target detection were also faster with fear and slower with disgust. They then measure air velocity during inspiration (breathing through the nostrils) and found that it increased with fear and decreased with disgust.
This provided some support for Darwin’s ideas that some facial expressions originally served as an adaptive function, now many human expressions primarily serve a communicative function.
How can a smile mean many things?
Could indicate happiness, anxiousness, submissiveness etc, not as often a result of experiencing joy or happiness in everyday life, more as a strategic and manipulative social signal.
A study demonstrated how context dependent our facial expressions are. What three types of smiles did they say we had minimum? How did these smiles differ in two ways?
They posited that we have at least three types of smiles:
Reward smiles: To communicate positive experiences/ intentions
Affiliative smiles: Signal appeasement, social bonds
Dominance smiles: negotiate status in social hierarcheys
These smiles all has specific AU differences beyond #12 (Zygomaticus, lip corner pull)
How were these smiles used in the study?
Instead of static pictures, they used dynamic sequences of faces that are morphed, using all sorts of muscle groups in a way that would be really difficult for people pose. Certain muscles (lip corner puller) would move in certain ways over time and would be randomly combined with other action units (e.g nose wrinkler, upper lip raiser) and an expression would be made over 1.3 seconds. Thousands of these were made. Participants had to watch these smile animations and rate them on dominance, affiliative and reward.
How did the researchers obtain their results and what conclusions did they draw?
The researchers then used reverse correlation to determine which muscle groups move in which way to be considered dominant/ affiliative or rewarding by observers and which muscle groups or facial movements are most informative to come to this label. The researchers notived that there were subtle differences between the muscle groups carrying out these functions and people are consistent in how they perceive these kinds of smiles.
Describe another study which used FACS to demonstrate a point
Researchers again used sequences of facial expressions of 1.3 seconds but used units already associated with certain expressions and randomly combined these action units. Participants then had to rate these labels as one of the big six emotions (happy, surprised, fear, disgust, anger, sad) on a 5 point intensity scale (very weak- very strong). Which was sometimes difficult due to the randomness. They used European Caucasian face models as well as east Asian face models. One set of observers were in Scotland and one set of observers whom were east Asian observers who just arrived in Scotland.
Describe the results of the study which used FACS to demonstrate differences between Scottish and Asian observers
There was a much higher rate of the muscle movements associated with an emotion to be rated as that emotion by Scottish participants than east Asian participants for each of the seven emotions. Overall there was much more confusion and overlap in the categories for east Asian people. when modelling the faces for both observers, they found that the mouth was more informative for western observers while the eyes are more informative for Asian observers.
How can manipulating the measurements used produce different results in these emotion identifying studies?
When you give a non western culture the labels of the possible emotions (e.g the big six) you can get a high consistency but if you have the participants freely describe the emotion conveyed, they may only use 2, 4 or even 16 categories which could not be measured by ekmen as he in a way ran a confirmatory study.
How else are these more recent studies better than ekmens original study regarding the stimulus?
The dyamic pictures allow for finer details than static pictures
