Emotions Flashcards

1
Q

What are emotions in terms of Martin and Carlson 2019?

A

Comes from Latin
Display of feelings that are evoked when important things happen to us
Relatively brief and occur in response to events
Distinct from moods that are longer lasting and can’t be attributed to specific events or stimulus

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2
Q

What did James 1884 define emotion as?

A

Bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is emotion

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3
Q

What did 1954 Arnold and Gason define emotion as?

A

The felt tendency towards an object judged suitable, or away from an object judged unsuitable, reinforced by bodily changes

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4
Q

What did 1991 Lazarus define emotion as?

A

Organised psycho-physiological reactions to news about ongoing relationships with the environment

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5
Q

What did 2013 Keltner, Oatley and Jenkins define emotion as?

A

Multifaceted responses to events that we see as challenges or opportunities in our inner or outer world, events that are important to our goals - particularly our social goals

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6
Q

Define affect

A

any mental state involving an evaluative relationship with the environment. Important subcategories are emotion and mood

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7
Q

Define emotion

A

usually relatively intense and short-lived affective condition which involves taking and evaluative position with respect to an intentional object (e.g anger disgust surprise)

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8
Q

Define mood

A

usually less intense and longer lasting affective state which is not directed at any specific object, reflecting more diffuse and generalised evaluative processes (e.g calm, tense,drowsy)

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9
Q

Define affective well-being

A

generalised evaluation of affect that is more enduring than mood. Severely impaired affective well-being is a feature of affective disorders (depression, anxiety)

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10
Q

What are the components of an emotion?

A

1) Reaction to stimulus; physiological response, attentional orientation
2) Appraisal; relevance to goals; evaluation of meaning
3) Organisation of response; overt actions; facial expressions

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11
Q

What are the two main type of models?

A

Discrete/categorical and dimensional

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12
Q

What is the discrete model?

A
  • A set of basic and fundamental emotions exists (Ekman 1973; Izard 1988; Plutchik 1980)
    • They are basic in being innate, universal, and irreducible, and they correspond to specific neurophysiological symptoms
    • Facial expression of the emotion is universally recognisable
    • Though the number of basic emotions and which emotions this includes varies
      Ekman’s1973 six basic emotions - now 7
      Plutchik 1980 also includes acceptance/trust, expectancy/anticipation
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13
Q

Describe Ekman et al’s 1972 study

A
  • Ekman et al 1972 - the South Fore tribe in New Guinea who had never been exposed to Western Culture
    • Asked tribespeople to imagine how they would feel in certain situations and their facial expressions were videotaped
    • The videotapes were shown to students in the US who were able to accurately identify the emotions (on average 86% of the time)
      Replicated recently in the UK/US (Sauters et al 2010)

Provides evidence for basic emotions

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14
Q

What did Zajonc 1985 say about basic emotions?

A

Facial expressions do not reflect the emotion but they are social tools to communicate emotions

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15
Q

Describe the recent study on Himba Cultural group

A

Found universality in the facial expression of the valence of the emotion chosen (positive or negative) but less so on the individual basic emotions (fear or anger)

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16
Q

What is the dimensional model of emotion?

A

The circumplex model of affect

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17
Q

What is the Circumplex model of affect

A

Emotions arise from two dimensions; pleasure and arousal. Each emotion is the linear combination of these two dimensions

Happiness - high pleasure and moderate arousal
Anxiety - low pleasure and high arousal

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18
Q

What is Darwin’s theory?

A

Emotions are innate, unlearned biological responses consisting of a complex set of movements

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19
Q

Why did emotions evolve?

A

Because they allowed humans and animals to survive and reproduce
Feelings of fear - fight or fight
Feelings of love - seek mate and reproduce

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20
Q

Describe emotion expression in species

A

Consistent within and across species

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21
Q

What is the James-Lange theory?

A

Emotions are the experience of the sets of bodily changes that occur in response to emotive cues in the world
1) Emotion producing situations elicit appropriate set of physiological responses (trembling, sweating) and behaviours (clenching of the fists)
2) Brain receives sensory feedback from muscles and organs producing these responses
3) Feelings of emotions consist of this feedback

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22
Q

What is critical evaluation of the James-Lange theory?

A
  • Autonomic activity does not differentiate all emotion states
    • Same bodily changes occur in non-emotional states such as fever, exposure to cold
    • Separating organs from brain in animals does not impair emotion behaviour
    • Body changes to slow to be a source of emotional feeling
    • Artificial activation of body is insufficient to generate emotion
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23
Q

What is the Cannon-Bard theory?

A

Thalamic theory of emotion
- Hypothalamus is the brain region involved in emotional response to stimuli
- Physiological changes in the body and the subjective experience of emotion occur simultaneously
- Responses are inhibited by neocortical regions - removal of cortex allows uncontrolled emotion displays - e.g sham rage
Influenced by decortication/lesion studies
- Decorticated cats had sudden and inappropriate anger outbursts - sham rage
- Lesions e.g Case of Phineas Gage injuries to prefrontal cortices - problems with emotional processing
- Given that the removal of cortex does not eliminate emotions undermines James-Lange theory

24
Q

What is Schacter and Singer’s theory?

A
  • Physiological arousal alone does not explain all emotional reactions and can be interpreted as any emotion
    • Physiological arousal requires cognitive assessment to determine whether the state of arousal corresponds to anger, happiness, fear and so on
      Emotions determined jointly by perception of physiological responses+ cognitive appraisal
25
Q

Describe the experiment for Schacter and Singer’s theory?

A
  • Participants told they are receiving a vitamin - given injections of adrenaline vs placebo
    • Four different conditions; placed in either anger provoking situations or neutral situation AND either told about potential side effects like trembling, pounding heart or not
    • Those informed about the physiological effects of the injection reported feeling less angry than those who were not told of any side effects –> appraisal of physiological response determined the emotion
26
Q

Describe how emotions are social?

A

The object at which emotions are directed have a social direction

27
Q

How does the appraisal of emotion depend on social factors?

A

Insult may be taken more seriously in the presence of others who express shock

28
Q

How do our emotions affect other people?

A

Anger may lead to counter anger from the person who insulted you

29
Q

How do emotions elicit social sharing of emotions?

A

We share with others how something/someone has made us angry

30
Q

What is emotion contagion?

A

‘The tendency to automatically mimic and synchronise expressions, vocalisations, postures and movements with those of another person’s and consequently, to converge emotionally (Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson 1994)

31
Q

What are the functions of emotion contagion?

A

Function of emotion contagion; Hazy and Boyatzis 2015
- Enable emotional understanding and identification with others
- Provide a proto-organising state that enables or prevents cooperative responses

32
Q

What is the evidence for emotion contagion in the home?

A

Joiner 1994 showed that individuals living with a depressed roommate were more likely to become depressed themselves

33
Q

Provide evidence for emotion contagion in the workplac?

A

Totterdell et al 2004 examined the spread of affect in employee networks in two organisations. An employee’s affect could be predicted from the weighted affect of everyone else in the network

34
Q

What is the evidence for emotion contagion in the community?

A

Fowler and Christakis 2008 conducted a 20-year community study of 4739 people and found that people’s happiness was related to the happiness of the people to whom they were connected, even when those connections were indirect

35
Q

What is the evidence that emotion contagion is not just limited to face to face interaction?

A
  • Kramer, Guillory and Hancock 2014 provided experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks by manipulating the emotional content in people’s facebook news feed
    When positive expression was reduced, people produced fewer positive posts; when negative expression was reduced they produced fewer negative posts
    Coviello et al 2014 used data from millions of facebook users to show that rainfall not only influenced the emotional content of user’s status messages (direct influence) but also affected the emotional content of the status messages of friends in cities where it was not raining (indirect influence)
36
Q

What are the two processes that emotion contagion occurs through?

A

Reactive and inferential

37
Q

What is the reactive process?

A

automatic processes that occur without awareness (e.g motor mimicry). Also known as the primitive emotional contagion (Hadfield et al 1994)

38
Q

What is the inferential process?

A

conscious processes that occur through social appraisal of other people’s emotions or by social comparison e.g my mates seem happy - perhaps I am too

39
Q

Describe motor mimicry as part of primitive emotion contagion

A
  • Merely perceiving a behaviour can be enough to make others behave similarly
    • People often autonomically mimic the gestures of people around them e.g yawning
    • Emotions communicated through unintentional imitation of expressive gestures, is a process known as motor mimicry (Chartrand and Bargh 1999)
      Motor mimicry followed by facial feedback results in emotion contagion - the observer experiences the same emotion as the person observed
      Primitive emotion contagion; mimicry and interoceptive feedback from facial expressions
40
Q

Describe Stack, Martin and Stepper’s 1988 study on primitive emotion contagion

A
  • Presented to participants as a psychomotor coordination study
  • Participants told to grip the pen between their teeth vs between their lips whilst watching video clips
  • Participants rated videos as funnier when the pen was held between their teeth (i.e. smiling) than between their lips.
41
Q

What are the two possible mechanisms involved on the facial feedback study?

A
  • Cognitive - people make inferences about what they are feeling based on their facial expression
    • Physiological - the physical position of the muscle in your face can influence emotion
42
Q

Critically evaluate primitive contagion?

A
  • Only one positive emotion was measured - difference between conditions could be due to relative comfort/pleasantness of one facial position over the other
  • Recent studies using the same procedure did not replicate the findings (Andreasson and Dimberg 2008 Soussignan 2002)
  • Effect sizes for facial feedback are too small to explain significant contagion
  • Influenced by individual susceptibility to contagion
43
Q

When does social appraisal occur?

A

when we understand the implications of others’ emotional expressions which affects our appraisal of the same objects and events

44
Q

What are the social effects of emotions?

A

Influencing behaviour - provides information to observers which may influence their behaviour through two processes
Observer inferences (observers infer information about others feelings and attitudes based on their emotional expression
Affective reactions - emotions may spread directly from expresser to observer via emotion contagion processes

45
Q

What is social sharing?

A

when individuals communicate openly with one or more persons about the circumstances of the emotion eliciting event and about their own feelings and emotional reaction

46
Q

Describe what Rime 2009 found about social sharing?

A
  • Social sharing occurs shortly following an emotion elicit event
  • It is repetitive and shared with multiple people
  • Social sharing is consistent across gender, age, and culture
  • The valence (positive/negative) or type of basic emotion does not affect sharing
  • But more intense emotions are shared more
    People share emotions with close others; parents, sisters/brothers, friends, spouse/partners
47
Q

What did Rime 2009 say the consequences of sharing emotions with others are?

A
  • Social sharing leads an interpersonal dynamic, similar to that of self-disclosure

Social sharing of emotions serves to;
- Strengthen social bonds between individuals (e.g people who share emotions are liked better)
Distribute knowledge about important events in a community (Christophe 1997) e.g sharing anger lets others know that something significant has occurred

48
Q

How are self-report measures used to measure emotion?

A
  • Most common method for measuring emotion e.g Basic Emotions Scale Power 2006
  • Usually have a number of items for each dimension or category of affect to enhance reliability
  • Response format; need to choose timescale, nature of experience, and format
  • Can also use faces. Less culture-specific, but also more ambiguous and restricted set
49
Q

What are the limitations of using self report scales?

A

Requires self-awareness and understanding of emotion
- Alexithymia - deficiency in processing and understanding of emotons
- Only captures one point in time - may depend on when you administer the scale
Social desirability may lead to lower reporting of negative emotions

50
Q

How are diary studies used to measure emotion?

A
  • Emotions can be recorded at regular intervals (e.g., hourly) or in response to a signal sent on a quasi-random schedule (experience-sampling) or whenever a designated event occurs.
  • Can use smartphones to send reminders and record response.
  • Ecological validity high because experience recorded in context of daily life.
  • Minimises memory recall problems
  • Can examine changes over time.
  • Participant burden: biased towards highly motivated & conscientious samples and response rate may be low
51
Q

How can you use an affect grid to measure emotion?

A
  • Based on two dimensions: pleasure and arousal continuums
  • Single item scale to measure emotions
  • Easy and rapid to administer
  • Advantageous over multiple item questionnaires that are too time consuming and are not appropriate for repeated administration
    Requires training of respondent
52
Q

How can neuroimaging be used to measure emotions?

A

Restrictive environment in which emotions can be elicited (e.g. in scanner), needs validation by self-report
But emotions are complex and likely to involve networks of brain regions

53
Q

How can physiological measures be used to measure emotions

A

Skin conductance, heart rate, perspiration, blood pressure etc.
- Pleasure and arousal seem to be related to physiological responses
However, mapping to specific emotions imprecise and cannot distinguish all emotions

54
Q

How can recording facial expressions measure emotions

A
  • Coding of facial behaviour to analyse emotions is complex
  • Facial expressions seem to be sensitive to the valence of the person’s emotional state
  • Facial behaviour is not always a direct reflection of the person’s emotional states = suppression and faking of emotions
55
Q

How can cognitive measures be used to measure emotion?

A

Stroop type tasks to assess nonconscious accessibility of emotions

56
Q

How can qualitative accounts measure emotions

A

Interview, focus groups, diary entries
Rich data but idiographic (person centred), difficult to generalise

57
Q

Describe Zhang, Yu, and Barrett’s study of effectiveness of affect inductions

A
  • Participants randomly assigned to either a pleasant or an unpleasant affect induction group,
  • Underwent four different affect induction procedures
    • recall of salient event + music;
    • guided imagery
    • viewing images + music;
    • posing face/voice/body
  • All four were effective in inducing pleasant and unpleasant affective states; but images with music was most generally effective.