Lecture 5 - Emotions in social interactions Flashcards
Do you remember the research in which they showed people loved ones, babies, unknown people etc?
Research: recorded vagus nerve, facial muscle response, heart rate -> in response to seeing loved ones, babies, unknown people
Findings:
=> Picture shows loved ones
- Not a difference in heart rate
What happened in the research about synchronization of signals in real life?
Procedure:
- measured heart rate, skin conductance, pupil size, facial expressions
- acquired participants during a musical event (instead of laboratory)
- What variables would indicate liking
Finding:
=> More synchrony in heart rate when they liked each other
=> May change over the course of conversation, relationship + depends on cognition
Do all people experience the same emotions? Provide example.
Emotions can differ across cultures
- E.g. people of Ifaluk, a small island in the Pacific, have an emotion that they refer to as fago, which could mean something like
“compassion/love/sadness”
=> Universality may be overestimated
What is the social approach to emotions?
In many cases emotions = interactions between people, rather than simply as one individual’s response to a particular stimulus.
=> Social function of emotions is
underestimated in other theories
Explain Averill’s social construct theory
= social constructions that give shape and meaning to our social world
- they have important social role i.e. inform and influence us greatly
= learned behaviors that can be acquired if people are exposed to them within a particular culture
Define Empathy.
= Capacity to perceive, share, and understand
other’s affective states
What’s the difference between affective and cognitive empathy
Affective empathy: taking over other’s emotions
- automatic
Cognitive empathy: appraisal of the other’s situation and attempts to understand the cause of the other’s emotions.
- requires more higher cognition
What’s the distinction between fake and real emotions? What could be their indicators?
- Fake emotions are consciously controlled
- Real emotions occur automatically (control eye regions)
- Some muscles can be informative in this evaluation (depends on emotions - here we’re talking about happiness)
- Especially Orbicularic oculi, Zygomaticus major
What are the two types of faces of empathy?
- The person showing empathy
- The person receiving empathy - accepted, understood, acknowledged
Wha are the purposes of empathy?
- ADAPTIVE ROLE: mother-child bonding, parental care of offspring
- EPISTEMOLOGICAL ROLE: to make faster and more accurate predictions of other people’s needs and actions and discover salient aspects of our environment
- SOCIAL ROLE: reciprocal altruism, social
communication, cooperation and moral reasoning
What is imitation? What are 2 broad categories of it?
= Action replication – similarity between the observed and the reactive movement
- Mimicry = Ability to duplicate observed
movements - True imitation = Ability to perceive and understand the intention of another agent, or the goal of his/her action, and to re-enact that
action to achieve the intended goal
(immediately or offline)
Give example of empathy and imitation in the animal kingdom.
- Empahy:
- Procedure: Monkeys got food when they
pulled a chain -> Food was accompanied
with shock for other monkey -> Monkeys
were less likely to pull chain or stopped
pulling chain - Imitation: flock of birds, sheep
When does mimicry occur in human development?
- Starts very early in life
- Newborns (42 min old!) can replicate some gestures from adults e.g. facial expressions
- 14th-month-olds recognized when they’re being imitated
- 18-month-old children are able to ‘reenact’ intended actions
- Objects either move alone or moved by humans -> infants prefer to imitate humans
How can facial expression of someone cause a “physical empathy”?
Viewing Facial expressions
=> automatic acitivity in brain regions involved involved in experiencing similar emotions
=> trigger facial muscle activity similar to the observed expression
- Even in the absense of conscious recognition of the stimulus
What are action units?
= aspects of the face that show various patters of emotions - put into a large database
- E.g. eyebrows, mouth
List the study related to facial reddening.
Procedure: asked a group of women to manipulate pictures of men’s faces to make them as attractive as possible.
Findings:
=> Women in this study made the skin tone redder and even added more red when asked to make the men look more dominant.
=> also related to agression
What were the procedure of the “blushing” experiment?
Procedure: Participants played a computerized prisoner’s dilemma game with a virtual partner who defected in the second round of the game.
-> After the defection, a picture of the opponent was shown, displaying a blushing (reddened) or a non-blushing face.
What were the findings of the “blushing” experiment?
Findings:
=> In subsequent trust game: p. invested more money in the blushing opponent than in the non-blushing opponent.
=> p. trusted the blushing opponent more, that they expected a lower probability of future defeat
What may make us perceive the same stimulus in a different way?
- Dominance of left or right hemisphere (individual differences)
- Dominance of one picture category over the other
- Emotions
Explain binacular rivalry paradigm in the research involving diff facial expressions.
Procedure:
- Binacular rivalry = paradigm in which each eye is presented a diff picture -> we measure when and for how long the perception switches
- Here participants were presented with a face of various emotional expressions to one eye and a house to the other
Findings:
=> More perceptual attention was given to the faces over houses
=> Effect was strongest for fear
When performing binacular rivalry of images what 3 things would dominate?
Procedure: p. induced a certain state -> binacular rivalry
- Arousal = preference for positive or negative emotions over neutral
- Valence = preference for negative over positive
- Congruency = preference for emotions that the person is also currently experiencing
- implications for mood disorders
