Emotional experience

Question 1

why study emotion?

Answer 1

1. Emotion influences almost everything!
2. Emotion science spans all areas of psychology
   You can take different perspectives: Developmental, Cognitive, Clinical, Social, Biological, Neuroscience
3. My feelings (others/you may disagree)
   * Life doesn’t occur in an emotional vacuum so we shouldn’t study it as if it does
   * Much of psychology (esp. lab studies) examine psychological processes under similar emotional conditions (boredom?!)
   * We won’t ever be able to truly understand the human mind without understanding our emotional lives

Question 2

To study emotion, what do you need to know?

Answer 2

• DEFINE What it is
• MEASURE How to measure it
• STUDY Understand causes/effects
  Can we change it?

Question 3

Affect

Answer 3

Any mental state involving an evaluative relationship with the environment (basically ‘feelings’)
Important subcategories are EMOTION and MOOD but affect also includes other feelings like impulses (thirst, hunger)

Question 4

What are the differences between emotion and mood?

Answer 4

CAUSE
Emotion- caused by a specific event or ‘intentional’ object- emotions are about something

Mood- individual may be unaware of cause/ cause is less well defined

DURATION
Emotion- brief but with more intensity

Mood- enduring but milder

TIMING:
Emotion- rises and dissipates quickly

Mood- rises and dissipates slower

Question 5

Emotion and moods timescale

Answer 5

seconds: expressions, autonomic changes

seconds, mins, hours: self-reported emotions

hours, days, weeks, months: moods
moods can lead to emotional disorders which can last for a longer time.

weeks, months , years: emotional disorders

years, lifetime: personality traits

Question 6

A consensual component model of emotional responding

Answer 6

Situation
|
Appraisal
|
Emotional responses

Question 7

1. What are emotions?
2. When do emotions arise?

Answer 7

1. Emotions are personal/meaningful!
2. Emotions arise when a situation is relevant to an person’s goals
   (link between a situation and how it is “appraised” in light of your goals and they may or may not trigger an emotional response)

Question 8

Goals

Answer 8

▫ Enduring (staying alive) or transient (wanting to complete Hogwarts Legacy)
▫ Widely shared (having friends) or idiosyncratic (collecting cute stickers)
* Whatever the goal, and whatever the source of meaning of a situation for you –it is this meaning that elicits emotion
* As the meaning changes over time (e.g., in the situation or the meaning the situation holds) so too will the emotion
* this also helps to explain people having different emotions to the same event

Question 9

Once an emotion is elicited there is a co-ordinated emotional response comprising 3 systems

What are these?

Answer 9

1. Experiential. Subjective experience – the internal mental representation that comes with experiencing emotion (this is very tied up with what we mean when we talk about emotion in everyday life)
2. Behavioural. Emotions affect our outward displays (e.g., facial expression, voice, actions). This may be because emotions often serve a communicative function (revealing our emotional state to others)
3. Physiological. This includes central nervous system and peripheral/autonomic nervous system

Question 10

Situation, appraisal and emotional responses for presentation anxiety

Answer 10

Situation: You have to give a talk in front of lots of people

Appraisal: Relevant to lots of goals (e.g., wanting to be perceived as competent, likable, important for work/study)

Emotional responses:
1. Experience (this feels horrible/sickening)
2. Behaviour (wobble voice, terrified expression, shaking)
3. Physiology (heart pounding, sweating, dry mouth)

Question 11

Measuring emotion

Answer 11

• Researchers will typically measure at least one emotional response system (but will often use combinations)
• 3 types of measures which correspond to each system: subjective, behavioural, physiological – we will look at each of these systems in turn
• Measures of emotional responding also give us insights into how we express, communicate and understand emotion in daily life
• Note: humans are probably better emotion decoders than the tools we use in- due to integrating different modalities and information about how people are feeling

Question 12

Self-report/ subjective experience

Answer 12

Give people adjectives to describe their emotions and they choose an answer such as from very slightly/ not at all to extremely

Question 13

Self report scales disadvantages

Answer 13

In order to tell people how you’re feeling, you need to know yourself therefore requires self-awareness and understanding of emotion (alexithymia –difficulty in processing and understanding of emotions)

Question 14

What is a lot of communication done through?

Answer 14

Our face

Question 15

2 ways to measure facial expression

Answer 15

1. Facial Coding: Trained coders detect facial muscle movements using reliable scoring protocols. Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is most commonly used. It assesses 44 different muscle movements (e.g., raising of the brows, tightening of the lips).
2. Electromyography (EMG): Involves measuring electrical potential from facial muscles via the placement of electrodes on the face.

Question 16

Posture:
Bodily behavioural signatures

Answer 16

PRIDE = associated with expansive body posture

EMBARRASSMENT = associated with diminutive body posture

Question 17

de Gelder & Van den Stock (2011)

Lopez et al., (2017)

Answer 17

sadness being the easiest, followed by fear, whereas happiness was the most difficult

no head

Question 18

Voice:
two most common measures…

Answer 18

1. Voice amplitude (loudness)
2. Pitch (frequency)

• High arousal emotions (fear, joy, anger) tend to have higher pitch compared to low arousal emotions such as sadness.
• But hard to distinguish between some emotions only on the basis of amplitude and pitch – e.g., joy and anger have comparable vocal pitch and amplitude.

Question 19

Can you infer a person’s emotional state from vocal characteristics, facial displays, and whole-body behaviours?

Answer 19

• Yes, to an extent – probably best for distinguishing valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high vs. low) rather than distinct emotions.
• We likely use a combination/integration of all these and more when trying to figure out how someone else is feeling (e.g., other information that we know about them and/or the context).
• Other factors affect the extent to which outward behaviour is indicative of emotional experience (e.g., gender, culture, expressiveness)
• For example, you might deliberately supress your outward displays of emotion to be polite/ socially appropriate

Question 20

TOUCHY-FEELY?

Answer 20

• Touch has received far less attention as a method of communicating emotions compared to facial expression, body posture, and vocal tone
• Hernstein et al. (2009) showed that people can accurately decode emotions through touch alone
• Participants were able to decode anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, gratitude, sympathy and love
• Patterns of touch were associated with different emotions

Question 21

Evidence about the role of brain structures in generating, processing and regulating emotions comes from many methods:

Answer 21

• Neuroimaging (fMRI, PET, NIRS, EEG);
• Experiments (e.g., electrical stimulation) – TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) which creates temporary disruption in neural activity.
• Brain damage / lesion studies;
• Emotion disorders; and
• Combinations of these (e.g. neural activation in depressed patients).

Question 22

A note about brain regions

Answer 22

1. Specific brain regions are involved in diverse psychological processes and
2. Psychological processes are underlined by multiple and often diverse brain regions.

Question 23

Brain areas linked to emotion

Answer 23

Orbital Frontal Cortex- Anger

Amygdala- Fear

Insula- Disgust

Anterior Cingulate Cortex- Sadness

But evidence suggests that emotions and brain location don’t have this 1 to 1 mapping.

Question 24

• Meta-Analysis of the Brain Basis of Emotion (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau & Feldman Barrett, 2012)

Answer 24

Proportion of study contrasts with increased activation in four key brain areas.

Question 25

Nummenmaa et al., 2014
Where do we feel emotion?

Answer 25

We feel emotion in our bodies – it is often an embodied experience

Got people to draw maps of body locations where they felt stimulation.

Question 26

Autonomic Nervous System and emotion

Answer 26

We can measure aspects of autonomic function to help us understand aspects of emotion.

Monitors internal world, carries out automatic processes.

2 systems: sympathetic and parasympathetic

Question 27

What are the 2 main measures of blood and sweat

Answer 27

1. Cardiovascular (i.e., blood circulatory system)
   Measures such as heart rate, blood pressure, heart rate variability, cardiac output
2. Electrodermal (i.e., sweat glands)
   * Skin conductance – applied current – more sweat increases conductance
   * Measured as SCL (level) or short-duration skin conductance responses (SCRs)

• Each of these features varies in terms of whether it reflects sympathetic, parasympathetic activity or a combination of both.
• It is problematic to view any ANS (autonomic nervous system) pattern as a straightforward reflection of the emotional state of a person – but it can give insights into dimensions of emotional states, especially the level of arousal.