Midterm Flashcards
Emotion
episodic, short-term pattern of perception, experience, action and communication in response to social challenges/opportunities
Mood
persisting group of emotion that influences all future evaluations, feelings, and actions
Mood Disorder
disruptions in emotions from what is expected in the typical population & cause significant distress/impairment in an individual
Psychological Constructionism
- explore wide variation of how emotions look and feel within/between individuals
- stimulus –> feel or act in ways; later introspect on feelings and behavior to form an emotional experience
Emotional categorization
- emotions elicited by associated learning, not stimuli
- to construct emotions, individuals engage in mental process to give structure and meaning
- categories: reasons for feeling, bodily changes, predictions of appropriate behavior in response
Core Affect
- Constructionists assume the existence of an innate component of emotion called core affect.
- Core Affect is made of two dimensions: Valence + Activation
Valence
The degree to which a state is pleasant vs. unpleasant.
Arousal
We feel or act in a variety of ways when we experience an “emotionally arousing stimulus.”
Evolutionary Theories of Emotion
- Based on evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin
- Serviceable habits or gestures
- Functional, help to solve problems
- Address challenges to survival or opportunities for reproducing
Basic Emotion Theory
- Silvan Thomson & Paul Ekman
- Emotions are universal across human species & cross-cultural thru expression, physiological activation & other activation
Know the basic emotions
- joy/happiness
- sadness
- anger
- disgust
- fear
- surprise
- contempt
- shame
- pride
Appraisal Theory
- emotions are a person’s immediate evaluation of their circumstances
- emotions determined by how an individual appraises their circumstances
Schacter & Singer’s 2-Factor Theory of Emotion
Stimulus -> Arousal -> Label -> Emotion
Appraisal
- Allows individuals to detect objects/events in one’s environment and evaluate their significance to their immediate well-being.
Table 1 of Fox 2018
View the study guide.
Know the different way of inducing emotions
- Using images
- Memories
- Films
- Music
- Scripted Social Interactions
Know method considerations from slide 14 (Lecture 2)
View the study guide.
The Component Method
A method of measuring facial expressions that focuses on facial muscles and how different muscles combine into production different expressions.
The Judgement Method
A method of measuring facial expressions that is more focused on what observers can infer from expressions.
Components of the PNS and their functions
- Peripheral Nervous System
- Composed of cranial nerves, spinal nerves, autonomic nerves
- Connects the CNS to organs, muscles, vessels, and glands
Sources of Blunted Emotions (Slide 4 of Lecture 3)
- Childhood trauma and maltreatment
- Damage to the brain/brain lesions
- Neurodevelopmental processes or conditions (e.g., autism spectrum disorder)
- Certain disease processes like Parkinson’s disease
Functional Consequences of Emotional Deficits
- Increased likelihood of antisocial & harmful behavior due to lack of empathy or difficulties understanding distressed emotional expression
- Poor behavioral regulation & decision-making
- Limited social engagement & networks
- Economic viability
Emotional Intelligence
- One’s capacity to pat attention to and understand one’s own emotions and those of others, and subsequentially to use those emotions to guide behavior and decisions.
Fight vs. Flight vs. Freeze and the branch of the ANS involved with them
- Sympathetic branch
- Fight: Response that could lead to a danger to be fought off, killed, or scared away.
- Flight: Response that leads to staying alive and aware of the danger.
- Freeze: Response that communicates a lack of potential threat or release from attack.
Rest & relax responses and the branch of the ANS involved in them (Slide 12)
- Parasympathetic branch
- When you are in a situation when you can rest and relax, your body actively calms itself and prepares for rest and relaxation.
Polyvagal Theory
- Autonomic Nervous System evolved in mammals to mediate specific behavioral and biological functions
- Immobilization
- Mobilization
- Social Communication
Cognitive Theory of Emotion
- Oatley & Johnson-Laird (1987)
- Emotions serve the primary function to coordinating adaptive behavior.
- Emotions appears when individuals realize their behavior requires adjustment.
Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions
- Fredrickson (1998, 2013)
- Positive emotions help an individual respond to opportunities to thrive.
Three Kinds of Smiles
- Reward smiles: rewarding oneself/others for pleasurable/adaptive behavior
- Affiliative smiles: Developing and maintaining social connections.
- Dominance smiles: Establishing social hierarchies (e.g., dominance)
4 Ways Emotions Influence Social Coordination
- Establishing groups
- Maintaining/enforcing group norms/structures
- Group governance
- Collective/group actions
Neurotransmitters vs. Peptides
- Neurotransmitters: “small moleculture”; faster acting + short-term activity
- Neuropeptides: large neurotransmitter molecultures; 3-30 amino acids within their molecular structure; slow-acting and prolonged acitvity
Locationist Perspective
- Specific areas of the brain are responsible for specific emotions.
Hemispheric Specialization
- The two hemispheres of the brain are very different in the functions they perform.
- Right hemisphere: Specialized for emotion, creativity, imagination, spatial ability.
Left hemisphere: Abstract and logical thinking, computation, language and comprehension.
The Right Hemisphere Hypothesis
- Right hemisphere is specialized for emotion, creativity, imagination, spatial ability.
- Suggests that positive/negative emotional expression, perception, and experience is mostly carried out by the right hemisphere of the brain.
The Valence Hypothesis
- Suggests that the experience, perception, and expression of negative emotions is localized within the right hemisphere, while the left hemisphere contains positive emotions.
The Approach-Withdraw Hypothesis
- Approach emotions: motivate us to move toward interaction with another individual or stimulus
- Withdrawal emotions: motivate us to move away from interaction with another individual or stimulus
Mirror Neurons
- Special class of motor neurons that activate during the production and perception of an action.
Associative Network Models & Emotions
Different units of information are connected by associations with other nodes.
Embodied Simulation Models
Modeling behaviors as intentional experiences on the basis of the equivalence between what the others do and feel and what we do and feel.
Know which kind of emotional object (positive or negative) attracts attention more quickly
- Emotional objects draw our attention more than non-emotional objects.
- Weapon focus: When under threat by a stimuli, we are driven to narrow and hold our attention to it.
Emotional-Congruence Hypothesis
- Emotional info tends to be processed more efficiently (e.g. we need less info to be able to categorize info into memory nodes) than non-emotional info.
The Positivity Effect
Age-related trend that favors positive over negative stimuli in cognitive processing.
Mood-Congruent Memory
Studies have illustrated patterns of recall where individuals tend to recall more information that shares commonalities with their current mood state.
Mood-State Dependent Memory
Studies have found that people generally have better retrieval of information they learned in a specific emotional state that shares with their current emotional state.
Mood-Congruent Judgement
Emotions can influence a person’s judgement, and studies have illustrated that people tend to make judgments that are congruent with their current emotional state.
Affect-As-Information Model
Emotional information is cognitively treated similarly to other kinds of information when making a judgment.
Somatic Marker Hypothesis
People tend to create internal simulations of possible choice outcomes, and expect emotions related to those outcomes serve to guide which choice is selected.
The effect of emotion on different cognitive domains reviewed in Lecture
- Amygdala: Fear and anxiety
- Insula: Disgust
- Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): Sadness and happiness
- Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC): anger
Know the main results of Laukka & Elfenbein (2021)
Perceivers can recognize emotional expressions via nonverbal behavior across cultural divides, and do better within their own cultural boundaries.
Know the results of Houben and colleagues (2015) in regards to what kinds of emotion dynamics are associated with low well-being
Lower levels of psychological well-being, be it in terms of general affectivity, eudemonic well-being, or several forms of psychopathology symptom severity or diagnosis, were characterized more unstable, but also more self-predictive or inert emotions.
