Social Psychology, 6: Emotion Flashcards

1
Q

Affect

A

A general positive/negative evaluation of a situation. It is infants’ first ‘emotional’ range of reaction to the world and lacks the precision of even basic emotions.

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2
Q

Mood

A

Any ambient feeling state not directly tied to a specific event.

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3
Q

Emotion

A

An intuitive evaluative response to a specific event that blends various levels of positive/negative affect, low/high arousal,

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4
Q

What is the best predictor of happiness?

A

The number of meaningful social connections in which the person is a part. People with no or few meaningful connections are reliably unhappy.

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5
Q

What is the overall trend for the effect of emotions on social relationships?

A

Emotions, most of the time, foster greater connection in social relationships.

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6
Q

What are the six (or seven) basic emotions according to Paul Ekman?

A

Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust. Contempt was suggested later as a 7th addition.

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7
Q

Are women more emotional than men?

A

Not quite. Scientific investigations suggest that men are actually prone to stronger and more difficult to manage emotions. However, they are socialized to suppress and control those emotions, whereas women generally are not, leading them to be more open with emotions - and thus the widespread perception that women are more emotional.

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8
Q

Arousal

A

A physiological response and component of emotion reflected in alertness, attention, and readiness to act.

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9
Q

Misattribution of Arousal

A

Finding that experiences of arousal can generalize to irrelevant aspects of a context. A person may be aroused by fear or surprise, and attribute some of that arousal to increased interest in other aspects of the environment or persons present.

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10
Q

Affect balance

A

A coarse measure of a persons overall happiness that compares frequency of negative and positive emotions.

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11
Q

Children and happiness

A

A great deal of research confirms that having children decreases parents’ overall happiness over time. The same parents who respond this way rarely believe this finding, due to positive illusions that they and their cultures need to foster.

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12
Q

Hedonic treadmill

A

The finding that some time after big wins or losses in life, people generally return to their personally normal set point or range of happiness. This is a ‘treadmill’ because it keeps people trying in a futile way to ‘get ahead’ on a track that continually resets itself.

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13
Q

Coping with Anger via suppression

A

Not reccommended; associated with a greater risk of heart disease

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14
Q

Catharsis

A

Method of coping with negative emotions by venting them; typically by expressing rage through attacking a safe target (ie, a punching bag) or mimicking violence (ie, video games). A touchstone of psychoanalysis

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15
Q

Coping with Anger via Catharsis

A

Current scientific consensus - in social psychology - suggests that while this feels good immediately, this ‘afterglow’ is ironically the source of a harmful side effect - rewarding aggression, which increases the chance that repeated catharsis will lead a person down a path to violence.

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16
Q

Guilt vs. Shame

A

Guilt is a negative emotion regarding having made a specific poor choice. Shame is a sense that the entire self is bad or worthless. Proper feelings of guilt can lead to amending problems, whereas shame tends to lead a person to worse antisocial behavior due to both the overwhleming negative emotion and the internalized sense of being unable to become acceptable.

17
Q

Disgust

A

An emotion that evolved to protect us from poisoning, it has a few innate triggers. However, disgust responses can easily generalize (‘magical contamination’) and become a learned response to virtually anything or even a social group. Historically, disgust has been used to motivate genocide (ethnic “cleansing.”)

18
Q

The text suggest this is the reliable way to cultivate personal happiness:

A

Forming more social bonds. (Though, I think this is not quite correct, mistakes the effect for the cause, and misses the fundamental source of happiness.)

19
Q

“Nature says go, culture says stop” (emotions)

A

This theme of the text is illustrated by the observation that children gradually learn to conceal their emotions as they become adults.

20
Q

Decision making without emotion

A

Contrary to the themes of classical philosophy, patients with specific damage to the orbitofrontal cortex only (which connect emotion to the decision processing area of the brain) reveals that without emotion, patients made risky choices that led to overall losses, rather than learning to avoid the high payout-high loss choice set and switch to a more conservative option.

21
Q

Emotions and learning

A

Emotions are essential for learning; consider how much learning occurs via operant conditioning. Without preferences for pleasure and avoiding pain, the motivation to learn is lacking.

22
Q

Affective forecasting

A

Predicting how future scenarios will affect emotion; heavily used in much personal decision making. We tend to be accurate about the valence, but not the intensity and duration of future impacts on emotion.

23
Q

Yerkes-Dodson law

A

The relationship between arousal and performance always follows an inverted-U function (an arch). This means that there is one optimal point of arousal for each task. The location point on the arousal axis decreases with task complexity (the requirement to narrowly focus or diffuse attention to succeed at the task).