Social Psychology, 6: Emotion

Question 1

Affect

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

Mood

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Emotion

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What is the best predictor of happiness?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

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

Answer 5

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

Question 6

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

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Are women more emotional than men?

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

Arousal

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Misattribution of Arousal

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Affect balance

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Children and happiness

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

Hedonic treadmill

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

Coping with Anger via suppression

Answer 13

Not reccommended; associated with a greater risk of heart disease

Question 14

Catharsis

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Coping with Anger via Catharsis

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Guilt vs. Shame

Answer 16

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.

Question 17

Disgust

Answer 17

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.”)

Question 18

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

Answer 18

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.)

Question 19

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

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Decision making without emotion

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Emotions and learning

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

Affective forecasting

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

Yerkes-Dodson law

Answer 23

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).