Responding to Emotion Flashcards
If emotion expressions are adaptations, what is their function?
For many expressions, apparent links between action tendency / function of emotion and facial movements of expression.
Anger:
Action tendency = attack; facial movement looks like a snarl
Disgust:
Need to avoid or expel toxic substances; facial movement closes nasal passage and pushes objects out of mouth
Fear:
Need to detect threats in environment and signal fear to group members; wide eyes are recognisable and increase visual field; flared nostrils increase air capacity
Facial expressions:
reflect both internal feeling states and the social intentions / motivations of the expresser
Prosody:
refers to the nonverbal components of speech that convey information, particularly emotion information.
To a large extent, affective signals in the voice are uncontrollable.
Voice expression:
Voice primarily conveys the degree to which a person is physiologically aroused, but nothing about specific emotion states (Bachorowshki, 1999).
E.g. anger and joy involve increases in pitch and loudness (both high-arousal states)
Key acoustic properties of emotion:
- Pitch
- Loudness
- Rhythm and tempo
- Breathiness
- Nasality
- Glottal excitation (e.g., different vowels and consonants)
Attention refers to
a cluster of processes that focuses awareness on to a particular part of your experience.
Emotional faces capture attention…
- Particularly those that communicate threat (anger, fear expressions)
- Even when presentation is brief (20 ms)
Broaden-and-build theory predicted…
broadening of attention during positive emotion state
Fredrickson & Branigan, 2005
Whole-person emotion expression is…
contributed to by face, the body and voice emotion signals
Emotions hold…
our attention, making it more difficult to disengage from object
Suggested level of arousal, rather than valence, determines…
narrowing of attentional scope
Weapon focus
(Loftus et al., 1987)
Witnesses to a crim are in a state of heightened arousal, and scope of attention narrows to threatening stimulus (like a gun). This reduces the amount of extraneous information they can take in, like an accurate description of the suspect’s clothing.
Emotion-Congruence hypothesis…
- Predicted by associate network models
- Objects and events with same emotional significance as current emotion state will be perceived, processed, and categorised more efficiently.
Emotion-congruence hypothesis is tested using…
lexical decision task.
- Faster to correctly identify strings of letters as words when the words’ meaning matched their current affective state (happy participants recognised GLEE as a real word faster than sad participants).
- Emotion category specific (happiness does not facilitate processing of words related to other positive emotion states).
Memory is…
active, constructive process
Emotions influence what we remember…
how and when we are most likely to retrieve memories
What is the key predictor of how well an event is remembered?
Arousal
Mood-dependent memory
Better retrieval during a specific emotional state of any information that was learned during that same state.
Information Processing vs Heuristic Cues:
People vary in how deeply and analytically
they process and evaluate incoming information vs. relying on heuristic cues
Happiness makes people less likely to be influenced by the arguments contained
in a persuasive message and more likely to be influenced by heuristics (compared
to sad people)
Appraisal Tendency Framework…
can also explain these results: high certainty
emotions should be associated with more superficial processing because person feels in control and believes they understand environment
Hedonic View:
Individuals seek to experience and maintain positive affective states.
Happy people will avoid engaging in any task that could alter their positive state.
Negative affective states want to change what they are feeling and will therefore process information in a careful manner to find a way to change their emotional
state (Isen, 1987).
Informational Models:
Positive state informs person that the environment is secure, and no action is needed, so no need to engage in careful processing.
Negative state indicates problem in environment, so resources should be
invested to resolve it (Bless et al., 1990)
Somatic Processing:
Different choices in a decision are “marked” by a particular emotional expectation stored in memory (Damasio, 1994)
Bodily feedback, such as increased arousal, occurs in response to particular choices, signaling to the person that it is risky or undesirable
Emotion regulation…
Ways people influence the intensity, duration, and
type of emotions they do/do not experience,
the situations under which they experience a given
emotion, and how and whether they eventually
express those emotions (Gross, 1999).
Sometimes regulation either intentional or automatic
Emotions are sometimes undesirable because they are unpleasant or inconsistent with social norms
Hedonic motives:
Current emotion state is psychologically unpleasant
Instrumental motives:
Believe current emotion is inappropriate to the task you need to perform
Pro social motives:
Want to protect the feelings of others
Self protection motives:
Protect personal safety, avoid negative consequences, or elicit reaction from another
Impression Management motives:
Wanting to express or experience an emotion
that is prescribed as appropriate for a given context
Emotion regulation strategies… Antecedent focused emotion regulation:
Attempts to control or
modulate emotion before it has been elicited
Emotion regulation strategies… Response focused:
Modification of the expressive, subjective, or
physiological aspects of an emotion that is already occurring
