Emotion lecture Flashcards
Emotions are central to our social psychology
Stories we tell
Relationships
Well-being and happiness
Moral judgements
Social identities
Definition of emotions:
brief specific responses, psychological and physiological, to challenges or opportunities that are important to the individuals life and goals
5 components of emotion
Fast and automatic construal
Physiological response
Expressive behavior
Facial reaction or body behavior
Subjective internal feeling (“i feel sad, disappointed, etc…)
Action tendency
Emotions are connected to an action
The experience compels us to act on our emotions
Empathy:
understanding (cognitive) and experiencing (emotional) the feelings of another person
5 components of empathy
Fast and automatic construal: feel empathy in response to observing harm
Physiological response: oxytocin (the social bonding hormone)
Expressive behavior-mirroring of the facial expression
subjective feeling- sharing of the feeling(sharing feeling with others)
Action tendency: social bonding, caring, etc
Evolutionary basis of empathy
empathy evolved from mammalian parental care
Attribution
shame is a global attribution(person), guilt is a specific attribution (behavior)
Shame is attributed to the individual person(i stole so im a bad person), guilt is attributed to the behavior(stealing is a bad behavior)
Situational elicitors
shame is more likely than guilt to be triggered by awareness or loss of social status
Different emotions-> achieve different goals
Fear-danger avoidance
Empathy- care for offspring (mammalian)
Emotional dysfunction if overgeneralized or overwhelming
Action tendency:
shame elicits social withdrawal (avoidance), guilt elicits social damage repair (approach)
Guilt elicits a response to repair the damage done from the behavior that elicited the guilt
Discrete (distinct) view of emotions
6 basic emotions: universally recognized
happiness,anger,sadness,surpise,disgust,fear
Dimensional view: Circumplex model of emotion
You can have mixed emotions, in between emotions
diagram: of 4 factors on a spectrum: high/low arousal and pos/neg valence
Darwin’s thesis:
humans emotions derive from motivations that were evolutionarily advantageous for our primate ancestors
Evolutionary origins
we share some basic emotional expressions with our primate relatives(ie monkeys)
Emotions in blind and seeing individuals
Evidence of innately prepared emotional displays congenitally blind athletes show similar emotional displays as sighted athletes
Cultural influence on emotions
Emotional accents
Focal Emotions
Ideal Emotions (emotions we strive for)
Display rules
Cultural meaning
Emotional accents
Some emotional expressions are highly recognized in some cultures and not as easily recognizable in other cultures
Focal Emotions
Some emotions are experienced more in certain cultures
Shame and embarrassment far more often experiences in more collectivistic and more hierarchical cultures
Ideal Emotions (emotions we strive for)
Evangelical service
People are striving to be excited and exuberance
Buddhist meditation
People strive to be calm and collected
Display rules: when/how to express emotions differ across cultures
in individualistic cultures it is normative to express positive emotions; in collectivist cultures people tend to suppress these positive emotional expressions
Cultural meaning
Same situation may have different cultural meanings, eliciting different emotions
Example (Nisbett and cohen, 1996): cultures of honor; insult or amusement?
Men from the southern US and northern US were insulted
Researchers observed the reactions of participants whether it was anger or amusement
Northern men felt amusement more than anger, southern men felt anger more than amusement
