Week 5 - Emotion perceptions and the Self Flashcards
What is an emotion? Do emotions start in the body or mind?
dont have to memorize
Emotions involve appraisals, experiences, expressive behaviour, physiological response, influences upon ensuing thought and action, and language-based representations of these unfolding processes.
Two influential theories of emotion
- Basic Emotion Theory
- Constructive Theory of Emotion
Differences between these two theories of emotion: BASIC EMOTION THEORY
dimensionality: emotion-related phenomena involve 5 to 10 qualitatively distinct underlying states
distribution: the boundaries between emotional states and discrete
conceptualisation: Specific emotions align with distinct dimensions that are primary in exprience and recognition
Differences between these two theories of emotion: CONSTRUCTIVE THEORY
dimensionality: emotion related phenomena involve two or three underlying dimensions of neurophysiological response.
distribution: the boundaries between emotional states are not discrete
conceptualisation: The dimensions are valence and arousal, and emotions are languange-dependent constructions along these dimensions
What are emotions for?
Two main functions of emotion:
adaptation: responding adaptively to the environment
communication: transmitting and interpreting social signals
What are the adaptive functions of emotion expression?
Physiological and Adaptive Functions
- Facial expression of emotion are not arbitrary configurations for social communication, but may
instead have originated in altering the sensory interface with the physical world
- Subjective visual field changes for participants posing fear and digust expressions
FEAR VS DISGUST
- Raised versus lowered eyebrows
- Increased versus decreased eye apature
- Vertical elongation verus compression of the nose
- Raised versus lowered lips
The form/appearance of fear and disgust expression may serve a function of enhancing/reducing sensory processing (by changing visual fields, speed of eye movements, and capacity of nasal volume)
How many emotions do we experience?
Darwin described the expressive behaviour of
over 40 psychological states (Darwin, 1872;
Keltner, 2009)
There are six or seven universal categories/families of emotion: Paul Ekman’s Basic Emotion Theory (Ekman, 1992, 1993; Ekman & Oster, 1979):
- Fear
- Enjoyment
- Digust
- Anger
- Saddness
- Contempt
How many emotions do we experience according to the theories?
Basic Emotion Theory: Specific emotions are not clearly separated by sharp boundaries, which is
different from the view of the basic emotion theory
Constructive Theory of Emotion: Emotion is high dimensional, may include about 20 distinct dimensions of emotion that cannot be reduced to valence and arousal
Are facial expressions of emotion universal?
Shared emotions across species:
- Animal emotions are homologues for human emotions (Darwin, 1872)
- Cross-species similarities in emotion expressions revealed from analysis of sketches and photographs of animals and people in different emotional states
Shared emotion across cultures: Paul Ekman’s Basic Emotion Theory (Ekman, 1992, 1993; Ekman & Oster, 1979)
Universality hypothesis:
Certain configurations of facial movements are
universally perceived as expressing particular emotions (e.g., anger, disgust, fear, happiness,
sadness, and surprise
Certain configurations of facial movements are universally recognised as emotional expressions because they evolved to signal emotional information in situations that posed fitness challenges for our hunting and gathering ancestors
Facial expressions of emotion in blind people
- 2004 Olympics and Paralympic Games
- Congenitally blind, non-congenitally blind, sighted
athletes - Analysed expressions after winning and losing
(Matsumoto and Willingham, 2009)
Production of spontaneous facial expressions
of emotion is not dependent on observational
learning
How are facial emotions encoded and decoded?
Facial Action Coding System (FACS; Ekman & Friesen, 1978)
- A common/calssic view, emotions are reliably specifically signalled with diagnostic and distinctive configurations of facial movements
- Facial emotions can be coded using a combination of facial movements
Challenges to universal emotions view
- Emotion recognition is not always consistent Free labelling of facial configurations does not show high agreement across different language groups.
- Emotion recognition is always consistent: Categorisation of facial expression of emotions is less consistency for non-western cultures than for western culture
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Cross culture differences:
People from Western culture represent each of the six basic emotions with a distinct set of facial movements common to the group, whereas people from East Asian culture do not
People from East Asian culture represent emotional
intensity with distinctive dynamic eye activity, whereas people from Western culture do not
Cross culture differences: small scale cultures
US participants showed strong consistency in labelling the faces with the expected emotion words;
Hadza participants displayed a weak level of agreement in providing the expected emotion labels
Hadza participants show different patterns of emotion differentiation than those observed with US participants.
Cross-Culture differences, what do the studies reveal?
- These new studies reveal diversity, rather than
uniformity, in how perceivers make sense of facial
movements, calling the universality thesis into
doubt - Instead, they support the view that people are
active perceivers who categorise facial movements
using culturally learned emotion concepts
