Lecture 5: Emotions Flashcards
What are emotions?
- Specific, transient feeling states
- Two approaches to emotions
What is Cognition?
- Representations of knowledge, thoughts, beliefs, also the processes by which these representations are acquired and manipulated
What is Affect?
- Any of the feeling states
What are preferences?
- A pairing of a representation + feeling towards a thing
What are moods?
- Long-term, non-specific feeling states
Some basic emotions include:
- Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise
- (Ekman evidence) These appear early in development
Do people from different cultures agree on mapped facial expressions?
- (According to Ekman) Yes
Do different species agree on specific facial expressions?
- (Bloom and Friedman) Yes
What does Ekman believe about micro facial expressions?
- Leakages occur (even when trying to hide emotions) unless you’re highly trained
- Inner brow raise, outer brow raise, brow lower, jaw drop, etc.
Facial expressions evolutionary adaptation?
- e.g disgust, scrunching up your face, to stop yourself from smelling / seeing things you don’t like
- Hard to tell whether accurate or not
- Don’t overthink similarities between humans and non-humans
Where do other emotions come from?
- Pride = anger + joy?
- Other than basic emotions there are “social emotions” e.g jealousy
What is a dimensional model?
- Nothing special about basic emotions
- They’re just points on the Negative, Positive, Aroused, and Not Aroused cross
What does (William) James-Lange believe?
- Physiological responses cause emotion (“we are afraid because we run away”)
What’re some critiques of James-Lange’s theory?
- There are not enough physiological movements to express all the emotions (emojis)
What is “embodied emotion” (Niedenthal)?
- Potentially when you think about a dog your body feels the same way you actually feel when you see a dog
- Emotion concepts are grounded in bodily stimulations
- Pen in mouth, don’t touch teeth “smile” - they feel happy
What is Schacter and Singer’s two-factor theory of emotions?
- People will not be influenced by environment if given correct information
- If people are given incorrect information, they look to environment for answers
How did Schacter and Singer conduct their experiment?
- Awareness of unexplained arousal (given epinephrine with correct or incorrect info)
- Interpretation of arousal (confederate in room is either angry or euphoric)
What is misattribution?
- Attributing your arousal to the wrong cause : Dutton and Aaron (1974)
- Swing bridge arousal misinterpreted for arousal for person asking for a date
How does emotional experience influence how you think about the world?
- Content and process effects
How you feel at a specific time can influence how you feel about the world
- Mood congruence
If you’re happy, you’re more likely to see things in a positive way
- Processing style
If you’re in a negative mood, more energy is invested in slowing down to see what’s wrong and process information
Positive = faster problem sovers
Two conflicting theories:
- Mood on cognition
- Cognition on mood
What is the Affect infusion model? (Forgas, 1995)
- Four types of social judgements
- Direct access: retrieval of a stored evaluation
- Might be biased to reach a certain conclusion (motivated processing)
- Heuristic processing
- Substantive
- The less effortful your processing time is, the more likely that affect is not going to influence that (won’t be so influenced by emotional state)
Primacy of affect?
- Emotions and cognitions are independent
Some cognitions have no emotion attached to it, but you can remember what the emotion was
(When listening to nostalgic music)
- Emotions are immediate, inescapable, unfalsifiable
Unlike thoughts
- We have distinct (basic?) emotions
- Cognitive versus emotional expertise
