Emotions, Judgements and Decisions

Question 1

What is an individual perspective?

Answer 1

How our emotions influence us

Question 2

What are emotions?

Answer 2

Motivated states with various compartments - physiological arousal (nervous system and hormones), expressive behaviours (facial expressions) and conscious experience (feeling a certain way)

Question 3

What words do people use for types of emotional states?

Answer 3

Emotion - intense, short lived, specific feelings about something - can go quick

Mood - less intense, longer lasting, more general, not clearly linked to an event or cause

Affect - generic term covering above, usually good or bad

Question 4

Why do we have emotions?

Answer 4

Evolutionary perspective - they promote the right response to situations of adaptive significance, such as fighting, falling in love, escaping predators, losing status - positive, signals us it is safe, enable to us to survive long term

Question 5

Are the effects of emotion undesirable?

Answer 5

Laughing in an awkward situation - uncontrollable

Question 6

When do we make bad decisions?

Answer 6

When we are in states which aren’t best - we underestimate the hot cold empathy gap - don’t go food shopping when you’re hungry

Question 7

What is the hot cold empathy gap?

Answer 7

Tendency to neglect the impact that an emotional state will have on our future behaviour e.g. hungover - never drink again
if in hot or cold state - can’t predict what we will do in other states

Question 8

Are the effects of emotions irrational?

Answer 8

People regret how they behave when angry - might be rational when not emotional, but irrational when we have emotions

Question 9

Can we separate emotions from cognition?

Answer 9

Zajonc - emotion comes first
Lazarus - cognition comes first, triggers emotions
maybe the way it is defined which changes these
emotion and cognition aren’t located in separate neural systems; the view that emotions battle with cognition to control behaviour isn’t how the brain works

Question 10

Do emotions influence memory?

Answer 10

Mood congruent recall: more likely to retrieve memories consistent with current mood
State-dependent memory: we remember best when mood at encoding matches mood at recall
We are also better at recalling emotional memories

Question 11

What is Bower’s network theory?

Answer 11

Emotional arousal spreads through a network and primes other nodes its associated with, making them more accessible and more likely to be retrieved - bad mood increases activation of all the things it is connected with in the brain

Question 12

How do emotions affect the judgements we make about ourselves?

Answer 12

Mildly depressed people make more accurate self-ratings - don’t show the usual self-serving biases (fundamental attribution error, better than average effect)
Depressed people show a positive bias when rating others, so they’re not more accurate overall, just make self-judgements differently

Question 13

How do emotions influence the judgements we make about other people?

Answer 13

If in an aroused state, attribute this to someone else

Question 14

Bridge study

Answer 14

Attractive women stand on a bridge, asked people to complete questionnaire. then they had to write dramatic story based on picture, almost all men did it even if scary. Gave number, ring to find out more. Did it again on the non scary bridge.
high bridge: 39% called researcher
low bridge: 9% called the researcher
ppts who just crossed the bridge, had higher physiological arousal, seemed to misattribute that arousal as attraction for the experimenter - thought they fancied her cos heart was pounding but attributed it to the wrong thing

Question 15

How does the weather influence emotions?

Answer 15

People are often in a better mood on sunny days

Question 16

How does the weather influence how people judge others?

Answer 16

University tutors make different decisions on cloudy days vs sunny days
People report being more satisfied with their lives on sunny days, although asking people about the weather first eliminates this effect

Question 17

Feeling as information model

Answer 17

Emotions are used as a source of information when we make judgements, we experience our feelings as reactions to whatever we are focussed on and assume that they provide info relevant to the decision we are making - use our current mood as extras information about what we are considering

Question 18

How do emotions influence our decisions about how to behave?

Answer 18

Asked people about sexual behaviours, when in a cold state, and then gave them a laptop with images of sexual women, asked them to self-stimulate
when aroused, asked them the questions again
they rated themselves as being more likely to engage in unsafe sexual behaviours and more likely to engage in date rape like behaviours

Question 19

Are we better off without them?

Answer 19

Hard to find evidence that emotions are good, but if they were bad, people without them would do better - evidence that people without emotions are psychopaths

Question 20

What happens if people don’t have emotions?

Answer 20

Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs emotional processing, but doesn’t make people more rational, instead it impairs their ability to make decisions and learn from mistakes

Question 21

Overall, are emotions good?

Answer 21

Choosing on the basis of ones current emotional state is not an effective decision making strategy for humans, but decision making that makes use of lessons learned from motional experiences and consideration of anticipated emotional states may be beneficial and successful for decision making - short term, may not be helpful, long term, help decision making