Social Psychology, 6: Emotion Flashcards
Affect
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.
Mood
Any ambient feeling state not directly tied to a specific event.
Emotion
An intuitive evaluative response to a specific event that blends various levels of positive/negative affect, low/high arousal,
What is the best predictor of happiness?
The number of meaningful social connections in which the person is a part. People with no or few meaningful connections are reliably unhappy.
What is the overall trend for the effect of emotions on social relationships?
Emotions, most of the time, foster greater connection in social relationships.
What are the six (or seven) basic emotions according to Paul Ekman?
Happiness, Sadness, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust. Contempt was suggested later as a 7th addition.
Are women more emotional than men?
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.
Arousal
A physiological response and component of emotion reflected in alertness, attention, and readiness to act.
Misattribution of Arousal
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.
Affect balance
A coarse measure of a persons overall happiness that compares frequency of negative and positive emotions.
Children and happiness
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.
Hedonic treadmill
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.
Coping with Anger via suppression
Not reccommended; associated with a greater risk of heart disease
Catharsis
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
Coping with Anger via Catharsis
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.