emotions, judgments and decision-making and minority influence Flashcards
define emotions.
motivated states with various components: physiological arousal, expressive behaviours, and conscious experience.
state and describe the types of emotional states.
emotion - intense, short-lived, specific feelings about something.
mood - less intense, longer lasting, more general, not clearly liked to a event or cause
affect - generic term covering all of the above, often just means feeling ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
describe the evolutionary view of reasons for emotions.
emotions promote the “right” response to recurring situations of adaptive significance in our evolutionary past, such as fighting, falling in love, escaping predators, losing status.
define ‘hot-cold empathy gap”
tend to underestimate the influence of emotions.
causes us to make errors when predicting how emotions will influence future decisions.
are effects of emotion irrational?
philosophers have argued that emotion and rationality are separate, and we can support this anecdotally.
are emotions and cognition separate?
emotions and cognition are not localised in separate neural systems, the view that emotions battle with cognition to control behaviour isn’t how the brain works.
state and describe ways emotions influence memory.
mood congruent recall - we are more likely to retrieve memories consistent with current mood.
state-dependant memory - we remember best when mood at encoding matches mood at recall.
- generally better at recalling emotional memories
outline bower’s network theory 1981.
emotional arousal spreads through a network and primes other nodes its associated with, making them more accessible and more likely to be achieved.
state aspects included in bower’s network theory.
- fear
- pressured
- anger
- threat
- anxiety
- expressive behaviours and automatic responses.
give an example of how emotions influence the judgements we make about ourselves.
- mildly depressed people make more accurate self-ratings = they do not show the usual self-serving bias (“depressive realism”)
- depressed people show a positive bias when rating others, so they are not more accurate overall.
define “misattribution arousal”
describes the process whereby people make a mistake in assuming what is causing them to feel aroused. For example, when actually experiencing physiological responses related to fear, people mislabel those responses as romantic arousal (bridge study).
describe the ‘feelings as information’ model.
emotions are used as a source of information when we make judgements, we experience our feelings as reactions to whatever we are focusing on, and assume that they provide information relevant to the decision we are making.
describe the ‘feelings as information’ model.
emotions are used as a source of information when we make judgements, we experience our feelings as reactions to whatever we are focusing on, and assume that they provide information relevant to the decision we are making.
give an example about how emotions influence our decisions about how to behave.
study found that when males were sexually aroused, they rated themselves as being…
- more likely to engage in unsafe sexual behaviours, and date-apelike behaviours.
give findings from the ‘bridge’ study, studying how different levels of physiological arousal will effect emotion and behaviour.
- on the high, ‘scary’, bridge 39% called the female researcher, whereas on the low bridge only 9% called the female researcher.
- P’s who crossed the high bridge thus had higher physiological arousal, and seemed to misattribute that arousal as attraction for the experimenter.
