L7 - Emotion: Physiological Factors Flashcards
What is the classical definition of emotion?
- Born with innate suite of emotions
- Feel emotions by perceiving stimulus = triggers circuit in brain
- Causes bodily response = behaviour in a certain way
What is prototypical emotions?
- Prototype preserves emotions from instances when we have been e.g angry, and this stays in memory and turns this into the bodily response
- Involve physiological change where emotions are not reactions to the world
- Emotions construct our world BECAUSE of interoception e.g pleasantness, unpleasantness, arousal and calmness
What is the textbook definition of emotion?
- A brief, specific response, involving appraisal, experiences, expressions and physiology that helps people meet goals, including social goals
What is appraisal?
Construal/interpretation an individual gives to a situation that gives rise to the experience of emotion
Why do we have emotions?
- Emotions help to interpret our surrounding circumstances, leading us to act in different ways
- Emotions guide our actions, motivating action that advance our goals
- Gives us different options of behaviour and emotions play a big role in the way we grow
What are evolutionary approaches for emotions?
- Emotions are adaptive reactions to promote survival and reproduction and emotional expression as physiologically based
- Emotions are universal but their expression is not
What are Constructive approaches for emotions? (Cultures)
- Emotions are influenced by language, social roles, values and institutions and emotional expression as varying between cultures
- Cultures are changing to help regulate emotions e.g what emotions are socially acceptable - cant be trained to show same emotions in same way in same situations
What was Darwin’s theory of emotional expression?
- Human emotions derive from motivations and displays that were evolutionarily advantageous for our mammalian and primate ancestors
What was Darwin’s hypotheses?
- Emotions are universal
- All humans have the same facial muscles
- As humans share an evolutionary history with other mammals, our emotionally expressive behaviours should resemble those of other species
- Blind people, lacking the visual input a culture provides relates to how display emotion, will show expressions similar to those of sighted people
What is the universality of facial expression? (Humans)
- Recognised cross culturally
- Cultures never exposed to western media can accurately identify expressions of happiness, surprise, anger, disgust and fear shown by westerners
- US college students accurately identifies facial expressions from the east.
How many emotions are there universally?
More than 25 distinct facial expressions which are similar cross-culturally
What are emotional expression in other animals?
- Human facial expressions resemble displays of other primates
- e.g anger resembles other primate’s threat displays
- Chimps have a relaxed open-mouth display that resembles human laughter
- Embarrassment resembles the appeasement displays of other social mammals
Expressions of the blind?
Facial expressions are similar between blind and sighted people e.g pride after winning a competition for both sighted and blind people
What are focal emotions?
- Emotions that are especially common within a particular culture?
- Societies with a culture of honor may express more anger at insults
What is James’ Theory 1?
- Natural way of thinking is that mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion and this state of mind gives rise to bodily expression
- Bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact and feelings of the changes as they occur is the emotion
(Perception = affect = body expression)
