Understanding emotion Flashcards
We can manipulate emotion to try and investigate it by:
1) tone of voice
2) rhythm of videos (induce feelings of tension with certain rhythms)
Defining emotion
James(1984)
Arnold and Gasson (1954)
Keltner, Oatley &Jenkins (2013)
James (1984) - bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur. This is the emotion
Arnold & Gasson (1954) - the felt tendency towards an object judged suitable and away from one judged unsuitable, reinforced by bodily changes
Lazarus (1991) - organised psychophysiological reactions to news about ongoing relationships with the environment
Keltner, Oatley & Jenkins (2013) - multifaceted responses to events that we see as challenges or oppurtunities in our inner or outer world, events that are important to our goals - particularly our social goals
What are emotions? - different concepts of emotion and how they relate to each other: affect emotions moods emotional wellbeing
– Affect = can be viewed as the superordinate category. Looks at any mental state involving evaluative relationship with environment
Involves important subcategories of emotion and mood (when we talk about specific feelings we categorise our affect by these)
-- Emotions = usually relatively intense & short lived affective condition which involves taking an evaluative position with respect to an intentional object. Usually in response to something, or towards something Clearer trigger (Eg. frightened)
– Moods = usually less intense and longer lasting affective state which is not directed an any specific object, reflecting more diffuse and generalised evaluative processes (not a reaction) eg. calm
– Affective well-being = generalised evaluation of affect that is more enduring than mood. Made up of moods and emotions (more generalised evaluations) - when this is dysfunctional/ severely impaired = affective disorders (opposite of wellbeing)– most common: anxiety and depression
The structure of emotion
- components of an emotion
How do emotions relate to each other?
- 2 main models
reaction to stimulus: physiological response; attentional orientation
appraisal (thoughts): relevance to goals; evaluation of meaning
organisation of response: overt actions; facial expressions
1) DIMENSIONSAL (Wundt)
2) DISCRETE (Darwin)
Dimensional model
Basis for circumplex model?
circumplex found in studies of?
Choice and location of emotions can vary depending on…
WHY?
Therefore…?
‘circumplex model of affect’ (Remington, Fabrigor & Visser, 2000)
- a few variations on the circumplex (different dimensions emphasised)
- organise emotion/ mood words around circumplex according to where they come on certain dimensions
eg. Dimension of pleasure (horizontal)
Dimension of arousal (vertical)
- rotated dimensions:
Positive affect
Negative affect
(note: these are not opposite/ inverse, they are can correlate)
BASIS for circumplex model:
1) Blood = vigor = HIGH positive affect
(trait sanguine; state enthusiasm)
2) black bile = despair = LOW positive affect
(trait melancholic; state depressed)
3) yellow bile = anger = HIGH negative affect
(trait choleric; state anger)
4) phlegm = placidity = LOW negative affect
(trait phlegmatic; state calmness)
Wundt (1987) described similar dimensions to this based on his introspections concerning his response to auditory rhythm
circumplex found in studies of:
- facial expressions
- semantic similarity
- experienced affect
Choice and location of individual emotion terms varies due to disagreements on:
-number of dimensions
-independence and bipolarity
-termporal frame (now vs today)
- intensity (mild vs extreme)
- response format (how often an emotion is felt vs extent)
= can produce different results (Cropanzano et al, 2003)
WHY?
because we’re unlikley to be able to feel happiness and depression at same time = bipolarity between them, so, if we ask about how you feel over a day = more likely to get a range of emotion as we can feel happy and then down within the same day
Therefore, depends on questions we’re asking and methods we’re using as to what precise structure we come up with looks like
Discrete model
- proposes
- they have unique..?
- Izard
5 basic emotions?
complex emotions? - 2 types
compound emotions? -no. identified?
critique = Feldman-Barrett et al (2007)
categorical approach
- propose there is a limited set of basic discrete emotions from which more complex emotions are derived
- they are basic in being innate, universal (in all cultures) and irreducible (not made up of other emotions), and they correspond to specific neuropsychological systems that coordinate them
- they have a unique: behavioural pattern, feeling component, regulatory function and motivational capacity, and depend on an ecologically valid stimulus to cause us to elicit them
- Izard (slightly different) - emotions can be seen as the combination of basic emotions and emotion schema (which involve emotion-related cognitions)
For each basic emotion, we can come up with the other emotions by specifying a script that goes with them which involves cognitions about the feeling (Izard, 2007)
5 basic emotions: (Power, 2006) joy (only positive basic emotion) anger fear disgust sadness - suprise/ shame/ love are on some lists but they may be COMPLEX emotions (emotions derived from other emotions) or COGNITIVE (combination)
Complex emotions:
Shaver et al(1987) produced a hierarchy of 135 emotion words to show emotions come from the basic ones
James distinguished between:
1) COARSE emotions = basic
2) NON-COARSE = emotions with refinement (Frijda & Sundararajan, 2007)
–> may involve higher level of awareness (experience of an experience) eg. aesthetic experience - being moved by art (meta awareness)
Compound emotions:
- Du, Tao & Martinez (2014) used facial action codes (Ekman et al) to identify 15 compound emotions, each constructed from 2 or more emotions, but with distinct features (eg. happily surprised)
–> looked at which muscles were activated when these compound emotions occur
Found: get some unique muscular activation during these compound emotions
F-B et al (2007) critiqued evidence for basic emotions:
instead, they proposed a conceptual act mode
- there is a continuum of dimensions where we decide whether a situation is good or bad and each of the discrete/basic emotions falls on this as a result of our judgement, which is based on our CONCEPTUAL/ SOCIAL construction
eg. good or bad and social construction
- ongoing primitive emotional response (dimensional) plus conceptual act model (categorical)
ie. just see everything as good or bad and everything else is our social construction
(use our experiences to make these judgements)
–> neuroimaging evidence to support this; that emotions are based on core affect - p’s in scanners during emotion ratings
found: evoked fear/ happiness and sadness correlated with activity in OFC (orbitofrontal cortex) and amygdala (Nilson, Mendenhall et al, 2013) = evidence that underlying these discrete emotions were dimensions of valence and arousal
measuring emotion
- self-report scales (+disadvantages)
- advantages of diary studies
self -report scales = most common method for measuring affect
- usually have adjectives for each dimension or category of affect that tap into emotional construct (enhances reliability)
- usually use words, but can also use faces/ emoticons (less culture-specific as they’re not reliant on knowlede of language, BUT also more ambiguous and restricted set)
- response format:
choose timescale (now/ today/ week)
use words that have meaning (are salient)
nature of experience (frequency/ intensity)
format (word anchors/ no. of points on scale)
– often used as part of a diary study/ experience sampling study = affect is recorded on many occassions by each p (includes reflection on feelings, and also means they’re less likely to act socially desirable as they can display different sides to self, not just negative on one occassion)
DISADVANTAGES:
- reliant on someone’s understanding and knowledge of their own emotions –> requires self-awareness (problem if they have alexithymia - a deficiency in processing and understanding of emotions)
- items may not be relevant to participant
- responses may be socially desirable
ADVANTAGES of diary studies:
(aka experience sampling and ecological momentary assessment)
- affect can be recorded at regular intervals (eg. hourly) or in response to a signal sent on a quasi-random (random interval sample) schedule during the day (experience sampling) or whenever events occur
- can use computers or smartphones to send signal and record response
- high ecological validity because its recorded in context of daily life
- minimises memory recall problems (response is less stereotyped as a result)
- can examine changes over time, using affect grid or PANAS scale (positive and negative affect scale)
Alternatives to self-report
- neuroimaging: restrictive environment = anxiey/ tension end up being measured (+emotion needs to be validated by self-report)
- physiological measures: skin conductance/ heart rate
Mapping these to specific emotions is imprecise and can’t distinguish all emotions - record facial expression (and other non-verbal indicators). Coding is complex. Must overcome suppression and faking emotion
- cognitive measures eg. stroop task assess nonconscious accessibility of emotions. Useful for particular research questions
Linguistics
quantitative accounts - rich data but idiographic (wide context)
peer reports - objective, but no access to persons internal experience + need good knowledge of person
senitment analysis from text (eg. online media) can get large set of data but contextual ambiguity (use of words eg. happy christmas – doesn’t necessarily mean person is happy)
Quantifying emotion value – eg. willingness to pay to avoid regret/ experience utter happiness
Measuring affect
multimethod approach may be needed (Mauss & Robinson, 2009)
limited convergence across measures
no ‘gold standard’ measure
all types of measure relevant
Manipulating emotion to study in labs
- affect induction
- mood induction
emotional stimuli is used
- film clips to elicit specific emotions –> developed by Gross & Levenson (disgust = v easy to elicit)
- International affect picture system (IAPS): photographs that have been normatively rated on dimesnions of pleasure, arousal and dominance (extent to which they elicit emotion) (Lang and Colleagues)
effectiveness of affect inductions
- comparison of 4 affect induction procedures (Zhang, Yu & Barrett, 2014)
1 - recall of valenced event and music
2 - guided imagery
3 - viewing images and music
4) posing face/ voice/ body (changing posture)
found:
all 4 = effective, but image with music was most
mood induction
-Velten, 1968 = consciously elicit emotion - present series of statements to people about how they might be feeling ( + or - self statements)
(can also be done with music)
- nonconsciously evoking emotion - decreased pain perception (Peleaz et al, 2016)
previously shown that subliminal affective primes can evoke global mood consistent with the valence of the prime
p’s subliminally exposed to emotion pic (negative vs neutral) from IAPS. Then received pain stimuli
Hypothesised that: activation of pain memories would predict higher pain intensity in response to negative emotional picture
BUT, found opposite! lower pain intensity and slower reaction time in response to negative images (distracted from pain) –> this unexpected result is explained by negative images capturing attention
Problems and future research
Kagan (2010) - problems with emotion research:
- language we use
- disagreement on what language refers to: brain/ appraisal/ behavioural response
- reliance on english words (some languages don’t have an equivalent word)
- insistence on specifying small set of fundamental emotions (what about mixed emotions?)
Future:
- shift from lab to everyday life (eg. using facebook)
- new ways to measure/ share/ analyse and learn from how people respond emotionally to the situations that matter to them. (by people for people = anyone can do it)
