Quiz 1 Flashcards
What are the characteristics of an angry face?
- Having a scrunched face leads to looking older
- Conveys higher status and more power
- Can be interpreted differently in different contexts (e.i; competitive)
What are the characteristics of a happy face?
- Reward smile
- Signaling positive intentions or just being happy about something
What are the characteristics of face showing fear?
- Eyes are large
- Adaptive to widen peripheral vision
- Adaptive as social function were others can see where the danger is
What are the characteristics of showing a sad face?
- Sadness depends on pupil size
- Smaller the pupil size the more sad you are
- Not aware of this effect
- Empathetic people are more conscious of this
What are the effects of seeing other peoples facial expression?
- Show a corresponding activation of facial muscles when seeing facial expressions of emotion
- When you see someone smile you will smile at a micro level (not fully conscious of it) = emotional reaction
How do emotions work in social contexts?
- Emotions is needed for individual and group survival
- Emotions allows for reproduction (love for long term bonds) and group governance (guilt that leads to amends)
What are the three types of smile that serve as a social function?
- Reward smile: convey positive experience and/or intentions
- Affiliative smile: acknowledge social bonds to create or keep this connection
- Dominant smile: convey higher moral and/or social status
What are the two components of the universality thesis?
- Facial expression of emotions are consistent across cultures
- Facials expression of emotions are recognized in the same way across cultures
What was found in smaller scale societies for the universality of emotions?
- Minimal universality
- Most cultures pointed out the valence (pleasant or unpleasant) and the activation (low vs high arousal)
- No label of actual emotion
What is emotion?
- A type of reaction of a person to a situation
- 5 components = meaning, subjective experience, state of action readiness, behavior and embodiment
When defining emotion what is the component meaning?
- The person considers the situation to their own values, goals and needs
- Interprets ability to deal with the situation
- Positive and negative emotion = harm or satisfy needs, goal or values
- Emotion is based on meaning
When defining emotion what is the component subjective experience?
- Pleasure versus pain
- Sense of physiological reactions
- Sense of wanting to do things
When defining emotion what is the component of action readiness?
- Prepared for fight or flight
- Prepared for avoidance or approach
- Can be expressed but not always
- Tied to expressive behavior
- linked to physiological reaction
When defining emotion what is the component of behavior?
- Varies a lot across situations
- The behavior may be that emotional expression is inhibited or exaggerated, in line with normative or cultural expectations
When defining emotion what is the component of embodiment?
- Representation of an emotion episode in memory includes a memory of motor behavior
Is experiencing emotion in the body important?
- If people cant experience the emotion in their body then it will interfere with their subjective emotional experience (people with Botox = less positive reaction)
What are other emotional experiences outside of the core definition of emotion?
- People may experience emotion outside of their awareness
- People who lost someone may say they are fine but physiological levels say otherwise
- People who feel shame may not know they are feeling shame
What are the ways to empirically study emotion?
- Emotional experience: induce it in labs or from daily life (retrospective reports)
- Measure emotion: self report, facial expression, physiological reactions, behavior
Can you experience multiple emotions and when does it happen most typically?
Yes and during meaningful events
What is affect intensity?
-Disposition to react strongly to emotion eliciting events (positive or negative events) rather than to experience intense affect all the time
Which personality characteristics have strong heritability and are stable in adulthood?
- Neuroticism (experience distress), extraversion (positive affect), conscientiousness and agreeableness
How to define mood?
- Watered down version of emotion
- Mood lasts a longer time,
- The cause is not quite clear
- Intensity is not too much
- Moods are not specific
- Moods don’t have specific action tendencies but do slightly influence acts and thoughts
How can emotion be contrasted with reason?
- Emotions have subjective sense of bodily reactions
- Emotions are involuntary
- Subjective sense of wanting to behave a certain way
- Emotions can get in the way of plans or situational demands
- Behavior based on emotion can be viewed as impulsive
Is emotion viewed as primitive or modern?
Primitive
Difference between objective and subjective well being?
- Objective: material condition and physical health
- Subjective: how much positive and negative affect, and judgment on life satisfaction (overall or by domain)
What is SWB?
- Affect balance is calculated by the person having more positive than negative affect on a day-to-day basis
What is the extreme condition for the relation between subjective well being and objective well being?
- People in very difficult conditions such as homelessness (their basic needs are not met)
What is the difference between rich and poor countries for SWB?
- In rich countries SWB is not related to income (objective)
- In poor countries the higher the income the more SWB increases (so it is related)
What does the curvilinear effect show for rich countries?
- The curve stays relatively flat so the peoples level of satisfaction stays relatively the same and does not really change
What matters more in poor countries?
- People in poor countries have higher SWB because they are supported by their religious belief and national pride
What is linked to a higher life satisfaction?
- Religion, national pride, free choice (matters most in rich countries)
Has the levels of well being climbed? and Why?
- Yes and because people have more free choice and so better economic conditions, democratization, increased social tolerance of other groups
What are set points for SWB?
- An average of peoples affect and life satisfaction over time
- Set points do not override the effects of any specific life conditions, it can change based on those life events
- Can be determined by genetic background
What was higher for better SWB?
- Unique genetic influence via lower neuroticism and higher extraversion
- genetic influences your SWB ONLY through the Big Five
What influenced peoples life satisfaction?
- Income in terms of perceived financial situation and having sense of control
Why are people with higher neuroticism less likely to experience negative affect if they had higher levels of social participation?
- Social participation allows people to be distracted from anxiogenic thought and facilitates venting and support
What life aspects can be affected negatively long term?
- Not widowhood or unemployment
- Long term disability
- People with highs neuroticism react more negatively to events
How to examine the impact of major life events on SWB?
- Look at what SWB was like on average before a certain event occurred which allows for better understanding of the effects of the event
What determines better SWB in individualistic vs collectivistic cultures?
- Collectivistic cultures = how much they perceive their friends and family to accept them, acceptance (their emotion)
- Individualistic cultures = self esteem is strong predictor for life satisfaction, their emotions (not acceptance)
Who seems to be showing a bias for self enhancement?
- Euro-Americans
- On daily basis had low life satisfaction, but when asked for overall they scored it as higher
- Compared to Asian Americans there was no self enhancement bias
What was shown in cross-cultural research for people who have higher SWB?
- Control of environment (autonomy)
- Competency
- Caring relationships with other (relatedness)
- In line with Self determination Theory
Is SWB a methodological artifact?
- No, because positive responses are found with methods other than direct one shot self-report
What is the broaden and build theory?
- All positive emotions can be considered equivalent and all negative emotions can be considered equivalent
What does positive emotions do?
- Broaden the information processing that people engage in = wider range of action tendencies
- More flexible and creative thinking and problem solving
What are the long term consequences of building a range of resources?
- Wider range of knowledge
- Better cardiovascular reactivity, to return faster to baseline after stress
- Extensive social network
What is the broaden effect with positive emotion?
- People pay attention to distractors more so interfere with performance when asked to identify target
- Use more global form of processing as opposed to local processing (negative emotion = fear & anxiety)
- Longer fixation to peripheral aspects of image
What is the broaden effect with positive emotion for cognition?
- More unusual associations to neutral words
- More inclusive categories (less amount of categories)
- More novel problem solving strategies
- Better performance creativity activities (candle creativity test and remote associates test)
- Generating larger and varied list of behaviors
What is the build effect when it comes to resilience?
- High resilient people have more positive emotions and it helps with cardiovascular recovery and lowers depression scores
What are the critiques of the broaden and build theory?
- Confound between valence of emotion and motivational intensity of the emotion
- Body posture while smiling influences breadth of categorization (low motivation/reclining back and smiling = broader categorization, whereas high motivation/leaning forward = narrow categorization)
- Sadness = broadening of attention, low motivational intensity
- Disgust = narrowing of attention, high withdrawal motivational intensity
What holds true for the broaden and build theory?
- Positive emotion of low motivational intensity in comparison to negative emotions of high motivational intensity
