The Nature of Emotions: Science and Psychology

• The nature of emotions pertains to describing what emotions are, how they are measured, and discussing some of the main theories of emotion.
• It involves describing the relationship between emotion, cognition, and behavior.
• Quiz 1 is scheduled on Chapter 1 in 4 weeks.

Why study emotion?

• A science of emotion uses scientific methodology to understand emotions.
• Science gathers knowledge through empirical methods.
• Empirical methods use systematic observations, reliable measurement, controlled conditions, clear and operational definitions and testable hypotheses.
• Emotions are universal and experienced daily.
• Understanding emotions is essential for understanding oneself, thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
• Understanding emotions is important in all relationships (friends, family, intimate relationships).
• Emotions help in decision making, planning, reducing prejudice and suspicion, and reducing in-group and intergroup conflict.
• Emotions are important to psychology for clinical, cognitive, social, and developmental applications.
• Clinical psychology: therapists need to understand emotions to help clients, with abnormal behavior often linked to severe emotions or the lack thereof.
• Cognitive psychology: thoughts affect emotions, and emotions affect thoughts and memory.
• Social psychology: emotions help people relate to one another in all relationships.
• Developmental psychology: emotions develop and change throughout the lifespan, growing emotional capacity and ability to express feelings.

Defining Emotion

• Emotion is difficult to define and study (measure) due to measurement challenges and difficulties in creating operational definitions.
• Operational definitions turn abstract concepts into observable and measurable phenomena.

Operationalization

• Operationalization is strictly defining variables into measurable factors.
• In 1884, William James wrote "What Is an Emotion".

Definition 1 (11 components)

• Emotion is an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus (including) cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic, neural arousal, impulses to action, and behavior: all designed to have an effect upon the stimulus that initiated the complex sequence.

Definition 2 (14 components)

• Emotion is a universal, functional reaction to an external stimulus event: temporarily integrating physiological, cognitive and behavioral channels to facilitate an adaptive response to the current situation.
• Emotions involve biology, cognitive changes (thinking about the environment), behavioral consequences, and stimulus (feeling, action).

Common Elements of both definitions

• Emotions are functional, adaptive, and help us to have a survival instinct.
• Feelings of fear can help one stop in their tracks.
• Emotions are reactions to stimuli (a specific event that takes place).
• Emotions include cognitive evaluation or appraisal of what the stimulus means for goals, concerns, and well-being.
• Appraisal means one is thinking of something that is causing a thought, and appraisals are subjective.

Feelings

• Feelings are also subjective changes.
• There's a difference between feelings and emotions, as feelings are subjective to the person.
• How one feels an emotion is different from another (example: pain tolerance).
• Emotions have physiological components (autonomic and neural arousal) and behavioral aspects (observable behavior).

Other Elements

• Emotions are based on biological processes, expressed in relationships, and shaped by culture.

Distinctions

• Emotions overlap with motivations, but wane over time, while motivations lessen when a goal is accomplished.
• Motivations (drives) are based on bodily needs and relate more to external factors, responding to external stimuli.
• Emotions respond to cognitive and social appraisal.
• Moods last longer than emotions, are more temporary, and persist.
• Personality is defined as habitual ways of behaving, feeling, and thinking.
• Emotions can be part of one's personality.
• Personality involves long-term ways of behaving, exhibiting characteristics that persist over time.
• Emotions are short term and short term ways of behaving.

Summary

• Emotions are based on biological processes, expressed in relationships, and shaped by culture, greatly impacted by appraisal.
• Emotions involve cognition, feeling, sensation, and action.
• Not all four elements are present in all emotions.
• When all four elements are present, the emotion is considered a prototype.
• Emotions are mostly functional-permit responses to situations and can react to an external stimulus.

Measuring Emotion

• Operationalizing "tired" involves measuring fatigue through self-report (ratings on a scale) and performance-based exams (measuring cognitive decline, counting yawns).

Research Methods

• Measuring emotion is imprecise because a construct that is an abstract idea and cannot be observed directly.
• Experimental manipulation is needed to demonstrate cause-effect relationships.
• Emotions evoked in a lab are not as strong as emotions in real life.

Measurement

• Emotion researchers use:
• Face Valid method: stories or images with emotional meaning on which most people can agree.
• Emotion is induced by:
• Prompting through having participants think about an emotional experience.
• Reading an emotion inducing vignette and imagine oneself in it.
• Showing emotion arousing photographs. Videos with emotional content.
• These strategies are ecologically valid, resembling real life situations.
• Experience Sampling technique solves researchers issue of eliciting strong emotions by giving participants a device that buzzes at unpredictable times throughout the day.

Measuring Emotions through Surveys / self-report

• Emotion psychologists use :
  • Self reports: participants descriptions of their emotional feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and other aspects of emotions.
  • Physiological measurements: blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, brain activity and hormones (molecules that carry instructions from one part of the body to another by way of the blood, collected via blood and spit).
  • Observable behaviors are actions we can observe and facial and vocal expression. -Actions we can observe: speech, running away and hurting someone.

Reliability and Validity

• All measurement instruments must be reliable, stable and consistent over time, accurate, and valid.
• Measurement can be reliable but not valid.

Measuring emotion: Self-Report

• Self-Assessment occurs through rating your feelings on a Likert scale , where 0 is 'not at all' and 4 is 'very anxious."
• Self-reports have some utility in examining relative strength or changes of emotions over time.
• Self reports are subjective(subjectivity.)
• Attribution: a person may not have insight as to what they are feeling.
• When verbal reports are unavailable emotions are difficult to infer in babies, animals, people with brain damage.

Measuring emotion : Physiological Measurements

• Emotions are related to action readiness, where a person is prepared to act or respond to a particular stimulus, so emotions are functional.

Divisions of the nervous system

The two divisions of the nervous system are the Central and Peripheral.

• central Nervous system (NS): consists of the brain and spinal cord.
• Peripheral NS (PNS): consists of nerves that form the communication network between the CNS and the body party's. The PNS is further subdivided into the Somatic Nervous System and the Automatic NS.
• Somatic NS
• associated with the voluntary control of body movements via skeletal muscles.
• automatic NS or automatic NS: controls the involuntary muscles and organs we do not have control over these such as for example, heart rate, breathing pupil dilation, Brian activity, chemical reactions, and occurs without thinking about it. The AUTOMATIC NS Is FURTHER DIVIDED In Sympathetic and Parasympathetic NS.
• Sympathetic is the activating system (fight, flight, freeze response).
• Parasympathetic calms us down as a maintenance system.

Further Measures

• These include:
• Physiological measures: blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, and brain activity.
• (fMRI), (MRI), (MEG), EEG.
• Problems with using a controlled lab includes the emotion being induced and difficulty finding accurate emotions compared to real life.

EEG (Electroencephalography)

• EEG measures an amplified recordings the waves of electric activity that sweep across brain's surface measured by electrodes placed on the sculp.
• EEG is mainly used to measure strokes and seizures and sleep.

Additional types of measurements

• Stimulation of areas of brain, ablations, stroked to help identify different areas of brain related to emotion.
• BUT: many emotional states share the same physiological indicators of anger and fear.
• This is one of the biggest issues with physiological measures.
• certain brain structures are heavily related to all emotions.
• brain scans of retain areas of the brain does not correspond 1.1 with a given emotion.
• the amygdala is the processing section with emotions.

###Measuring Emtions through BEHAVIOR Behaviors of emotions include facial, vocal expressions, running away, and freezing.

• These (anything observable) are similar to how we study animals.
• Behavioral observations help us understand what a person is feeling (we observe gestures, posture and facial expression).
• Observations help us know when a person is in a state of "Action readiness"or action preparedness, which is when we by observing people it alerts us to know whether the person is going to do something.

Which measurement technique is the best ?

Using every possible measurement.

• incorporate every type into your research study
• all 3 will offer the most reliable technique to understand which emotions is being presented. To some researchers, feelings are the most important aspect of emotion, and report are the gold standard for feelings.
• Feelings are how you experience the emotion.
• Those they consider feelings too subjective to trust as the ultimate criterion for emotion rely on physiological and / or behavioral measures.

Summary of Measuring emotion

• Using all three measurement techniques, self report, physiological measures and behavioral observations yield the best results.

Classic theories of emotion

The James Lange Theory

• William James(1842-1910)
• Carl Lang (1834 -1900)
• Is the theory that emotions are the labels we give to the way the body reacts to certain situations where emotions are labels due to the body reacting first and increased heart rate, sweating, and autonomic system sensations must be present for emotion.
• Experience of emotion is awareness of physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli (your labeling what your going through.)

Cannon Bard Theory

• They came after James-Lange theory
• Cannon iscovered sympathetic NS is responsible for fight/flight response and disagreed with James because he argues that the autonomic nervous system responses are too slow to create an emotion.
• Cognitive, behavioral and action aspects of emotion occur independently and simultaneously when Emotion Arousing stimuli simultaneously trigger physiological responses and subjective experience of emotion.
• We experience the physical arousal and the emotion at the same time but they are independent

Overall Evaluation of Theories

• Some aspects of James theory appear to be accurate (appraisal, actions, sensation. /. Feelings.
• Reaction is not linear or unidirectional, but cyclical and bi-directional
• The arousal can lead to the emotion but the emotion can also lead to arousal.
• A common sense View of emotion is that a stimuli leads to feeling then action.

Summary

• Theories help solve issues such as that research difficult when emotions are complex, hard to define when researchers often disagree about definitions.
• Full experience of emotions include all three aspects of cognition, behavior / actions, and feeling / sensations so that (->) an emotional event leads to fast cognitive appraisal which leads to ANS activity and then(->) action readiness (behavior).

Modern Theories of Emotion

• Basic Discrete Emotion Model: the expression of the emotions in Man and Animals (1872) : Darwin described the similarity of peoples emotions where animals and humans show emotions in similar ways through facial expressions of happiness, sadness, fear and anger throughout the world as Paul Ekman founded this model in theory. (cognition/appraisals, feeling, physiological responses and behaviors) and cross basic emotions are universal Across cultures feeling, physiological changes, facial expressions and behaviors as the most important aspects of emotion.

###The Components Process Model

• This model has to do with our thoughts as our cognition evolves over time and we become more aware and better able to engage in critical thinking then our emotions would also evolve in the same way.

Culture and Emotion

• Evolutionary theories would argue that emotions are a part of human nature then that also means that emotions are universal so Social Construction of emotion includes processes by when people in power in a society determine how we should behave.
• Aspects of culture that predict differences in emotion
• Aspects of that:
• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis states that humans cannot experience an emotion for which they have no word where researchers have found that emotion vocabulary does not restrain our emotional experinces.
• Hyper - Versus Hypocognized Emotions : Lany (1984) found hypercoagnized emotions (words that are important to other.

Rachel Jack's theories (2014)

• Argues that there only four basic expressions of emotion instead of six she determined by using a computer programs to study facial expression ( Happiness sadness fear and surprise (they have the same facial expressions) Anger and disgust (are the same facial expressions)

TheORIES

Theories

• James-Lange: stimuli -arousal- emotion
• Cannon-bard: arousal&emotion - stimuli
• Schachter: Stimuli- arousal- cognitive label emotions
• Basic discrete
• Cultural and Emotional Expression

Emotions In Posture and the Voice

Aviezar (2012) asked participants to guess whether tennis players had won or lost based on faces, oney, body, they guessed correctly when participants could see the body with or without the face.. they could not tell the difference

Does expression influence emotional feelings?

• Mobius Syndrome: a congenital condition in which a person cannot smile, but these people report feelings happy or amuse.
• Can facial expressions help create feelings : y
• facail feedback loop: a theory that smiling makes a person feel happy, and frwoning makes a person feels annoyed

Explore the science of emotion, its measurement, and main theories. Understand the connection between emotion, cognition, and behavior. Learn why studying emotions is crucial for self-understanding and relationships. Quiz 1 covers Chapter 1 in 4 weeks.