Emotions Flashcards
Problems with Canon’s theory of emotions
- it focuses on internal responses; social is marginalised
Evaluation of Schachter and Singer
+ it’s more social
- adrenaline-injected ppts didn’t report more emotion than placebos
- some ppts’ feelings were not congruent with their condition (happy in the angry condition)
- social situation may have been enough to cause emotion without adrenaline (though surely it would amplify it?!)
- ecological validity?
- self-reported emotions ; schachter himself though anger was under reported
- ethics
Appraisal theories- who and how relates to individual-social debate?
Accountability is a key element
Smith and Lazarus- appraisal stages
Primary: Motivational relevance
Motivational congruence
Secondary: Accountability
Coping potential
Problems with James’ theory of emotion
- It’s unscientific
- it can’t explain how the body knows to trigger the response
- it focuses on internal responses; social is marginalised
Smith and Lazarus- problem
Circularity: we only know that we think the other person is blameworthy because we’re angry at them, but we’re angry at them because we’ve appraised them as blameworthy
Who found that we can feel guilty by association just by belonging to a group?
Doosje (1998) - Germans-Nazis
People may privilege their group membership over ambiguous evidence -who?
Eliot Smith (1993)
Emotional labour- who researched?
Hochschild (1983) - flight attendants
Neurocultural theory of emotion -who?
Ekman
Neurocultural theory of emotion -what?
We’ve adapted to have ‘auto-appraisers’ to react automatically to improve our life chances
Event-> prewired body reactions/expressions -> social mediation -> expression of emotion
Flaws in Ekman’s research
- agreement was much lower than 100% except for happiness
- some words couldn’t be translated => not universal, basic emotions!
- situated/power relations
Faces do tell us if emotion is being experienced, but only elements of an expression are universal - name and eg.
Russell- upturned lips may indicate a pleasant emotion
Emotions are culturally constructed meanings, not a reflection of real psychological States
Russell
Problems with self-report (as in schachter and doosje)
Russell
- this will only tell us people’s interpretation of how they feel; it is not direct
- emotion concepts are fuzzy
- people aren’t even trying to give a transparent report of emotion, but a situated one for the researcher for a specific purpose
Russell is concerned that emotion words don’t match actual emotions. What’s Edwards’ reaction?
It doesn’t matter. We can’t access actual emotions anyway. We can’t know what’s actually happening. Emotion talk is more interesting
Criticisms of Edwards
- we feel emotion before we describe it, and we feel emotions we never tell others about (men/boys committing suicide!)
- we feel emotions regardless of how we describe them (or what our reasons are for describing them that way)
- what about prelinguistic emotion?
Prelinguistic emotion:
Who?
Criticism?
Defence
Criticism
Reddy- infants in mirrors: smile and then withdraw gaze
Subjective interpretation- what counts?
High inter-rater reliability
These facial expressions might just be sending a ‘leave me alone’ message (well, it’s a pretty crap ‘leave me alone’ message!
Emotion as relation realignment
Emotion talk is functional- it serves to communicate and achieve social effects, e.g. Emotional display- being ‘angry’ at someone to show that you aren’t happy with something they’ve done
What is the discursive view of the purpose of emotion talk and facial displays
- Emotion realignment:
- Communication (verbal or non-verbal)
