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.
