Inside Out: Emotions and Social Behavior

• Pixar director Pete Docter, after the success of his movie Up, sought a subject for his next film
• Docter's inspiration came from observing his own daughter's emotions during her transition to adolescence
• Adolescence is described as an emotional time when childhood joys are replaced by anxieties and pressures
• Docter's new movie, Inside Out, portrays emotions themselves as characters
• Docter researched the science of emotion to better understand his subject
• Inside Out explores the emotional turmoil of an 11-year-old girl named Riley who moves from Minnesota to San Francisco
• Riley's experiences include leaving behind her best friend, ice skating moments, and her hockey team
• The plot of Inside Out is driven by emotions within Riley's mind, including anger, disgust, fear, joy, and sadness
• The film highlights two important ideas: emotions guide how we construe the social world, and they drive our social behavior
• Emotions influence how Riley construes her present circumstances, as seen when disgust influences her reaction to her dad walking her to school
• Emotions also influence how Riley thinks about the past, as current sadness adds a blue tint to her childhood memories
• Anger drives Riley's behavior when she competes or storms upstairs, while sadness prompts her to comfort her imaginary friend
• Docter's depiction counters the idea that emotions are disruptive to rationality
• The film shows how emotions guide perception and action
• The chapter aims to explore the science behind Inside Out and address questions about universality, cultural variations, and emotions' roles in social relationships
• It will also examine how emotions influence reasoning and what happiness entails

Characterizing Emotion

• Emotions are defined as brief, specific, subjective responses to challenges or opportunities important to our goals
• Emotions typically last seconds or minutes, with facial expressions lasting 1-5 seconds and physiological responses lasting dozens of seconds
• Moods, like irritability, can last hours or days, while emotional disorders can persist for weeks, months, or years
• Emotions are specific because they arise in response to specific people and events in our social environment
• Emotional experiences have an "intentional object"; for instance, anger is directed at something specific
• Moods and disorders are more diffuse feelings
• One function of emotions is to help us interpret our surrounding circumstances, allowing us to respond in a variety of ways
• Emotions prioritize events, influence assessment, and affect reasoning
• A second purpose is to prompt us to act
• Without emotions, we would remain lost in thought
• Sympathy encourages altruism, while fear activates physiology to enable escape
• Even anger produces actions to remedy injustice
• Emotions can motivate specific actions that advance our goals
• Brief emotional experiences enable effective responses, especially when involving others

Emotional Expression: Universal and Culturally Specific

• An evolutionary approach views emotions as adaptive reactions to survival-related situations, suggesting they should be universal
• A cultural approach assumes emotions are strongly influenced by cultural values and socialization, suggesting variations in expression
• Scientific studies of emotional expression support both perspectives
• The ways we express emotions have universal aspects and cultural differences
• Emotions can drive a search for understanding
• Soliciting narratives from people about the cause of their emotions is a widely used method in emotion science
• When giving causal accounts of emotional experiences, vivid descriptions likely correspond to actual causes
• Nevertheless, people's verbal accounts will likely miss important influences on their emotional experience.
• Darwin proposed that expressions of emotion derive from actions useful in our evolutionary past
• Darwin reasoned that all humans should communicate and perceive emotion similarly.
• Darwin believed nonhuman emotional behaviors resemble those of species that share an evolutionary history with humans, and that blind people would also display emotions similarly
• Darwin asked missionaries living in other cultures whether they had observed expressions not seen in contemporary Victorian England
• Ekman and Friesen took more than 3,000 photos of people portraying basic emotions
• They presented photos to people in Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the United States.
• Across these five cultures, accuracy rates ranged from 70-90 percent
• Ekman traveled to Papua New Guinea to study the Fore, an isolated hill tribe.
• Participants matched an emotion-appropriate story for each of the six emotions.
• The Fore adults achieved accuracy rates ranging from 68 to 92 percent in judging the six emotions.
• Over 90 subsequent studies have confirmed these results.
• In one study, two capuchin monkeys sat next to each other and traded tokens with an experimenter in exchange for food.
• Darwin's second claim is that human emotional expressions look like the ones mammals use
• Chimps show threat displays and emit whimpers that are remarkably similar to human displays of anger and sadness
• People who are feeling embarrassed shift their gaze down, smile in a self conscious way, move their head down, and often touch their face or shrug their shoulders.
• Expression of embarrassment resembles appeasement
• Humas signal remorse for social transgressions, and trigger affiliation
• Studies of blind individuals have shown that their expressions of emotion are remarkably similar to those of sighted people
• Pride is associated with gaining status
• When Jessica Tracy and Richard Robins traveled to Burkina Faso, in Africa, they found that a remote tribe readily identify displays of pride from photos
• In Olympic athletes, the congenitality blind athletes, expressed pride with smiles and by tilting their head back.

Cultural Specificity of Emotional Expression

• A focal emotion is specifically common within a certain culture
• Cultures vary I n focaLemotions, those are relatively common in everyday lives of the members of a culture
• Affect valuation theory, is our emotions that promote important cultural ideas are valued
• Tibet is compassionable
• Mexico is pure
• Brazil is affectionate
• In interdependent cultures, show more intense shoulder shrugs shame and respns to losing than athletes from independent cultures for example such as the United States

Emotions and Social Relationships

• Emotions act as a language that guides our social interactions
• The expression of emotions signals our commitment to others well-being

Emotions and Understanding the Social World

• Daniel Gilber and Timothy Wilson have documented a variety of biases that undermine attempts to predict what will make us happy, calling it affective forecasting.
• Immune Neglect, is an example of negative forecasting. We are resilient in responding to painful setbacks.
• Focalism is where we focus too much on a central element of signification events
• The most consistent that helps with this is that it is always good to be with other people.
• An affective forecasting study with college students, it was shown that both the "luckies," those who hadn't had a romantic breakup, and "leftovers," those who had recently broken up, we're just as about happy.

Happiness

• According to Declaration of Independence, the pursuit of happiness is one of the most important rights
• There are different means by which we achieve this with different eras.
• Ethical Behavior was followed in classical Greek times
• The Enlightenment encouraged actions that advanced the well-being of many
• Life Satisfaction relates to General evaluations and how well you think your life is going
• Emotions and well-being and the quality of a moment feel matters.
• Two time honored questions include, do we know what makes this happy and how should we pursure happiness
• Do the circumstances influence the happiness after they have already happened?
• Knowing how others feel helps us to give savvy actions
• Social and Neurosciences states that damaging brain in the the orbitofrontal cortex can make someone become a remote, Aloof, and cold person.
• Robert Flank, the committee Probel shows, successful long-term relationships require people to sacrifice