Construal and Emotional States

• Construal, also known as appraisal, shapes emotional states.

Elements of emotional state evaluation

• An evaluation looks at the timing of an event as in the past, present, or future
• How relevant a situation is to personal goals helps determine the intensity of emotion.
• Evaluates cognitive and physiological resources allocated.
• Determines if a situation is positive or negative, and whether action is needed

Causation and course of action

• Determines the cause of a situation, guiding actions.
• Assesses necessary behavioral changes
• Considers feasibility and likely success of actions.

Types of Responsibility based evaluation

• Self: pride (past good), regret/guilt (past bad)
• Another: Gratitude (past good), Anger (past bad)
• No agent: Happiness (past good), Sadness (past bad)
• Future good: Excitement/anticipation
• Future bad: Fear

Emotion Regulation

• Although not all emotion states are desirable at all times, emotions guide behavior to achieve goals.
• If a different emotion is desired, strategies can be used:
• Reappraising the situation to change construal
• Suppressing emotion by changing its components
• Emotion is a temporary state motivating adaptive behavior with relevant cognitive and physiological changes.
• Attitudes are stable good/bad evaluations of people, objects, and ideas.
• Emotions can be responses to stimuli with existing attitudes

Origins of attitudes

• Object-elicited emotions in the past, conditioning
• Beliefs about an object's instrumentality
• Previous behavioral experiences with the object
• Repeatedly practicing an attitude makes it more automatic.

Cognitive and Affective Components of Attitudes

• Attitudes have cognitive and affective components ranging between:
• Hate to love
• Useless to useful
• Highly affective (high arousal) to Highly cognitive (low arousal)

The Sleeper Effect

• When speaker credibility is not remembered, later attitude shifts can occur
• Play involves fun, undirected exploration of the environment, social world, and ideas.

Forms of Play

• Rough and tumble, imaginary, social, and humor
• Mammals and some non-mammals engage in play, especially when young and occurs from infancy to 12 years
• Play's building blocks include broadening associations and novel connections, and increasing the pain threshold

Action Pendency

• Play involves unpredictable, inefficient, asymmetric, awkward movements
• Play uses communicative signals like laughter
• Feeling having fun, i.e. "hyper"

Downsides of Play

• Can cause injury
• Expends energy
• Play is Vunerable

Proposed Functions of Mammalian Play

• Developing physical and mental strength & skills
• Practicing adult behaviors like fighting (negotiating resources & status), hunting (chasing, catching, killing)
• Developing social skills
• Reading intentions of others
• Settling disputes
• Social bonding
• Learning aggression inhibition
• Stress inoculation

Stereotypes

• Stereotypes are inevitable when people are grouped by identity
• Everyone is stereotyped, but some face unjust burdens and prejudice due to it

Stereotype Definition

• Schemas about categories of people
• Guide expected behaviors and cues
• Drives attention and biased social information gathering

Stereotype Learning

• Stereotypes are learned like other schemas.
• Explicit or implicit schemas are inherited
• Behavioral patterns are copied

Patterns of stereotypes

• Discrimination/inequity
• What is paid attention to by society
• Media, culture
• Personal life observations

Examing Stereotypes: Black people and pain

• Survey of UVA med students
• Black people purportedly have thicker skin, less sensitive nerve endings, faster-coagulating blood
• These stereotypes produce racial disparities

Stereotype dimensions

• Stereotypes are specific, involving warmth and competence core features.

Prejudice

• Prejudice is an attitude that adds emotion to a stereotype.
• Prejudice towards transgender people correlates with certain schemas

Discrimination

• Discrimination is a behavior that may or may not stem from internal stereotypes/prejudice

Types of Discrimination

• Discrimination may or may not be intentional
• Automatic (implicit): sitting far away from someone
• Controlled (explicit): marching

Discrimination Impact

• Discrimination affects one's safety and health such as chronic stress, unequal access to healthcare, and harmful medical practices.
• Black men face anti-black bias.

Discrimination levels

• Higher levels means lower access to resources, space, opportunities, social capital, and well-being

Prejudice harms

• Ways it causes psychological harm:
• Chronic stress
• Internalized prejudice
• Threat of stereotype confirmed.
• Worried about living up to the stereotype
• Self-fulfilling prophecy
• Extra self-regulation, cognitive load, vigilance.
• Creates ambiguity about success/failure

Prejudice and psychological well-being

• Meta-analysis of correlational studies (328 studies, 144,246 participants) found that perceived discrimination:
• Reduces psychological well-being (sense of control, self-esteem, life satisfaction)
• The effect is stronger for disadvantaged groups Stronger for concealable and controllable identities like stigma around orientation, mental illness, disability, HIV, weight

Forms of Racism

• Being able to choose when to portray a concealable identity

Strategies to fight prejudice

• Changing minds through repeated contact within group and egalitarian, cooperative, shared goal, supported by the environment
• Use of implicit bias training:
  • Stereotype replacement: label and replace stereotypic thoughts
  • Counter-stereotypic imagine individuals who contradict stereotypes
  • Individuating: considering others from unique personal traits
  • Taking perspective: adopting stigmatized group member perspective -Contact: increased exposure to stigmatized group
• Changing behavior by:
  • Injunctive norms: statements of what people should do
  • Descriptive norms: statements of what people actually do (following others)
• Changing the environment to:
  • Remove opportunities for bias to influence outcomes
  • Remove physical barriers that segregate or oppress

Confronting prejudice strategies

• Internal vs. external attribution
• Stable vs. temporary attribution
• Global vs. specific attribution

Confronting behavior effects

• Behavior-focused confrontations change perpetrator behavior
• Perpetrators focus more on self-improvement
• Perpetrators appreciated are less hostile

Person focused confrontation

• Person-focused confrontation feels like rejection
• Leaves less room for repair

Aggression and Behavior

• Aggression is behavior intended to cause harm.
• Anger is an emotion that sometimes leads to aggression. Lethal aggression in mammals is common among primates

Types of Primates

• Chimpanzee: high instrumental and hostile aggression
• Bonobo: constant mating suppresses aggression
• Human: varying levels of aggression

Types of norms

• Injunctive: what you think you should do
• Descriptive: what people typically do

Hostile Aggression

• Hostile aggression is a reaction to threat/frustration, intending to remove the provoking stimulus
• It involves emotional arousal (anger) and communication of intent

Instrumental Aggression

• Purposeful attack with external/internal reward, with no warning
• No emotional arousal
• Aggressors normally initiate action when the cost is likely to be low, ex bullying, stalking, ambushes, premeditated homicides

Cycle of aggression

• Frustration-aggression hypothesis states that aggression is increased during COVID lockdowns.
• Evaluative process when hostile aggression arises
• Aggression is more likely during:
• Chronic goal frustration

Situational Analysis and aggression

• Assigning blame to the target
• Resource competition
• Need to protect self or group
• Perceived status/strength advantage
• Lack of control over frustration
• Opportunity to aggress
• Aggressive norms
• Reduced inhibition
• Other stressors
• No anticipated negative consequences
• Past success with aggression
• High competence, low warmth stereotype

When Expressing Anger is useful

• Integritty based -When followers breach standards in the workplace
• Competence -based -When people fail skill requirement