Lecture 5: Emotions

Question 1

What are emotions?

Answer 1

• Specific, transient feeling states

- Two approaches to emotions

Question 2

What is Cognition?

Answer 2

• Representations of knowledge, thoughts, beliefs, also the processes by which these representations are acquired and manipulated

Question 3

What is Affect?

Answer 3

• Any of the feeling states

Question 4

What are preferences?

Answer 4

• A pairing of a representation + feeling towards a thing

Question 5

What are moods?

Answer 5

• Long-term, non-specific feeling states

Question 6

Some basic emotions include:

Answer 6

• Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise

- (Ekman evidence) These appear early in development

Question 7

Do people from different cultures agree on mapped facial expressions?

Answer 7

• (According to Ekman) Yes

Question 8

Do different species agree on specific facial expressions?

Answer 8

• (Bloom and Friedman) Yes

Question 9

What does Ekman believe about micro facial expressions?

Answer 9

• Leakages occur (even when trying to hide emotions) unless you’re highly trained
• Inner brow raise, outer brow raise, brow lower, jaw drop, etc.

Question 10

Facial expressions evolutionary adaptation?

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

Where do other emotions come from?

Answer 11

• Pride = anger + joy?

- Other than basic emotions there are “social emotions” e.g jealousy

Question 12

What is a dimensional model?

Answer 12

• Nothing special about basic emotions

- They’re just points on the Negative, Positive, Aroused, and Not Aroused cross

Question 13

What does (William) James-Lange believe?

Answer 13

• Physiological responses cause emotion (“we are afraid because we run away”)

Question 14

What’re some critiques of James-Lange’s theory?

Answer 14

• There are not enough physiological movements to express all the emotions (emojis)

Question 15

What is “embodied emotion” (Niedenthal)?

Answer 15

• 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

Question 16

What is Schacter and Singer’s two-factor theory of emotions?

Answer 16

• People will not be influenced by environment if given correct information
• If people are given incorrect information, they look to environment for answers

Question 17

How did Schacter and Singer conduct their experiment?

Answer 17

• Awareness of unexplained arousal (given epinephrine with correct or incorrect info)
• Interpretation of arousal (confederate in room is either angry or euphoric)

Question 18

What is misattribution?

Answer 18

• Attributing your arousal to the wrong cause : Dutton and Aaron (1974)
• Swing bridge arousal misinterpreted for arousal for person asking for a date

Question 19

How does emotional experience influence how you think about the world?

Answer 19

• 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

Question 20

Two conflicting theories:

Answer 20

• Mood on cognition

- Cognition on mood

Question 21

What is the Affect infusion model? (Forgas, 1995)

Answer 21

• 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)

Question 22

Primacy of affect?

Answer 22

• 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