Emotions, Judgements & Decision making - the individual perpspective

Question 1

how are emotions and moods different?

Answer 1

emotion = state with various components: physiological arousal, expressive behaviours, conscious experience. intense, short lived, specific
mood = less intense, longer lasting, more general

Question 2

what is the evolutionary perspective on why we have emotions?

Answer 2

emotions are adaptations that can guide us to the right way to respond to a situation - lowenstein 2010

Question 3

what is the hot-cold empathy gap?

Answer 3

describes the way in which we underestimate the influence of emotions on our behaviour - lowenstein 2001

Question 4

describe how emotions can influence memory

Answer 4

mood congruent recall - we are more likely to retrieve memories consistent with our current mood - lloyd and hishman 1975
state dependent recall - recall is at its best when our mood at recall matches our mood at encoding - bower 1981

Question 5

describe Bower’s network theory

Answer 5

1981
emotional arousal spreads through a network and primes other nodes. nodes that represent an emotion are triggered by words that invoke that emotion

Question 6

describe the studies showing how emotions influence the judgements we make about ourselves

Answer 6

depressive realism - depressed people don’t show self serving bias - Alloy and Abramson 1988
misattribution of arousal - 39% of people on the high bridge called the female researcher, only 9% on the low bridge - Dutton and Aron 1974

Question 7

what happens if we don’t have emotions?

Answer 7

impairs their ability to make decisions and learn from their mistakes - Bechera 1994