Emotions, Judgements and Decision Making Flashcards
What are emotions?
States with various different components. Not just the feelings (e.g. happy, sad), but also what happens in the body when you have that feeling (e.g. increased heart rate), changes in posture/voice, changes in behaviour. Emotions are coordinated responses across feelings, body and behaviour.
What are words for different types of emotional states?
Emotion = intense, short-lived, specific feelings about something. Mood = less intense, longer lasting, more general, not clearly linked to an event or cause. Affect = generic term covering all of the above.
Why do we have emotions?
Adaptations that can help us to solve problems. Increase our chances of survival. Make it quicker to flee, facial expression covey to others that they should be worried about something (for example). Basic idea is that emotions evolved because their effects were useful.
How can emotions affect how we think and behave?
Might make different decisions in different states that may not be in our best interest. Evolutionary stance say that this is effective. Tend to underestimate the effect of emotions = the ‘hot-cold empathy gap’. Underestimate the effect emotions will have on our decision making (Loewenstein et al., 2001).
Are the effects of emotions irrational?
Think anger will have a negative effect, make you act irrational. Make rational and logical decisions when not going through emotions, irrational when you are.
Can you separate emotions from cognition?
Zajonc versus Lazarus. Argued whether emotions of cognition come first. Zajonc argued emotions comes first, and then thoughts about emotions come after. Lazarus thought cognition comes first, and this is what creates the emotion.
Answer - depends on what you mean by emotion. On a neurological level these things are not separated.
How do emotions influence memory?
Mood congruent recall - we are more likely to retrieve memories consistent with current mood (Lloyd and Lishman, 1975).
State-dependent memory - we remember best when mood at encoding matches mood at recall (Bower, 1981).
We’re also generally better at recalling emotional memories (Cahill et al., 1996).
Important for things like depression.
What is Bower’s Network Theory (1981)?
Emotional arousal spreads through a network and primes other nodes it’s associated with, making them more accessible and more likely to be retrieved. Theory also been referred to as priming. Relevant to decision making - memory has an impact on what decisions we make.
How do emotions influence the judgements we make about ourselves?
Mildly depressed people make more accurate self-ratings: they don’t show the usual self-serving bias (“depressive realism, Alloy & Abramson, 1988).
Depressed people show a positive bias when rating others, so they’re not more accurate overall: they are just making self-judgements differently.
What is the misattribution of arousal (Dutton and Aron, 1974)
People misattributed the physiological arousal they felt on the bridge as attraction for the experimenter.
How do emotions influence the judgements we make about other people?
Used weather as a natural manipulation of people’s mood - they misattribute their feelings about the weather to aspects of themselves:
University admissions tutors make different decisions on cloudy days vs. sunny days (Simonsohn, 2007).
People report being more satisfied with their lives on sunny days, although asking people about the weather first eliminates this effect (Schwarz and Close, 1983). If we know why we’re feeling the way we do, we’re less likely to misattribute this emotion.
What is the idea of feelings as information (Schwarz and Clore, 1983)
Emotions are used as a source of information when we make judgements: we experience our feelings as reaction to whatever we are focusing on, and assume that they provide information relevant to the decision we’re making.
Cold state versus hot state - does it affect our behaviour.
Ratings of sexual behaviour in ‘cold state’ versus ‘hot state’. Gave completely different answers in two conditions - in ‘hot state’ agreed to almost all of risky sexual behaviour that they wouldn’t in the cold state. Suggests we should perform as much decision making as possible in cold states. Emotions make us behave in less logical ways.
What happens if people don’t have emotions?
Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs emotions processing, but this doesn’t make people more rational: instead, it impairs their ability to make decisions and learn from their mistakes (Bechara et al., 1994). Emotions seem to be a key integral part of decision making, even if their initial cause is a negative one.
