Untitled Quiz

• Emotions consist of physiological arousal, behavioral/expressive behaviors, and conscious/subjective experiences including thoughts and feelings.
• The Latin root of "emotion" is "movere," meaning "to move."
• Emotions prompt motivated behavior and can help set and achieve goals by maximizing positive and minimizing negative feelings.
• Facial expressions are innate for communicating with others, as Charles Darwin first proposed
• Emotions are absorbed in the body in approximately six seconds.

Emotions vs Moods

• Moods: Longer lasting, spanning minutes, hours, or days.
• Emotions: Shorter-lived, from seconds to minutes.
• Emotions: Directed at a specific person or situation.
• Moods: Diffuse, lack a clear object of focus.
• It is easier to identify an emotional trigger than the cause of a mood.
• Moods lack unique facial expressions, unlike universal emotions.

Evolutionary Perspective on Emotions

• Charles Darwin first studied emotion in the 1870s.
• Evolutionary psychologists: emotions evolved to help humans adapt and are biologically prepared to learn ancestral fears.
• Fear helps avoid danger, love promotes seeking a mate and caring for offspring, and anger aids in self-defense.
• Emotions extend beyond physical survival and influence all aspects of life.
• Six basic emotions recognized across cultures: fear, surprise, anger, disgust, happiness/joy, and sadness.
• Emotional experiences can be intricate and involve overlapping feelings.
• Emotions are classified by pleasantness, unpleasantness, level of activation or arousal, and interpersonal engagement.
• Interpersonal engagement is an emotion dimension that reflects the degree to which emotions involve other people.

Theories of Motivation

• James-Lange Theory: Feelings follow the body's response, our emotion is awareness of physical responses to emotional stimuli.
• Cannon-Bard Theory: Physical arousal and emotional experience happen simultaneously.
• Emotion-triggering stimulus is routed simultaneously to the brain's cortex, causing subjective awareness, and to the sympathetic nervous system, causing bodily arousal.
• Emotion can be experienced even without sympathetic nervous system arousal.
• Bodily reactions are similar for many emotions, but subjective experiences differ.
• Two-factor theory (Schachter-Singer): Experiencing emotion requires physical arousal and cognitive labeling of that arousal.
• Cognitive-appraisal theory: Emotional responses are triggered by cognitive evaluation.
• Emotion can be experienced without physical arousal by perceiving a reason for it.
• Current mood affects subsequent emotional responses via the spillover effect.
• The state you are in can determine the emotion experienced in the next situation.

Emotion, the Nervous System, and Response

• The autonomic nervous system regulates arousal.
• The sympathetic division releases epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine during emergencies, increasing heart rate, blood sugar, and blood pressure.
• The parasympathetic division inhibits further stress hormone release to gradually diminish arousal.
• Fight or Flight Response: An automatic physiological reaction to perceived danger or stress.
• Triggered by the sympathetic nervous system, the adrenal glands release norepinephrine.
• This response leads to dealing with or avoiding the situation.

Emotional Intelligence

• Emotional Intelligence: The ability to understand, manage, perceive, comprehend, and respond appropriately to one's own and others' emotions.

Brain Structures and Emotional Responses

• Cortex: The brain's thinking part.
• Amygdala: The brain's emotional control center.
• Neural pathways facilitate instinctual fear responses to perceived threats.
• The thalamus-amygdala pathway bypasses the cortex, causing immediate emotional reactions without thinking.

Culture and Emotional Expression

• Facial expressions and physiological states are universal.
• Facial expressions are the most universally understood way of expressing emotion.
• The ability to identify emotions expressed through facial expressions is accurate worldwide.
• Facial expressions of emotion are innate and universal, but there is exertion of control over facial expressions.
• Expression of emotion is influenced by cultural and environmental factors.
• Emotional intelligence is connected to the expression of emotion.
• Gestures are not universal and vary across cultures.

Nonverbal Communication

• Facial feedback hypothesis: Facial expressions trigger or intensify the subjective experience of emotion.
• Empathy and Facial Feedback: Imitating expressions can lead to experiencing the associated feelings.

Experienced Emotion

• Amygdala role in fear and other emotions results in bodily symptoms of diarrhea, shortness of breath, etc.
• Humans are biologically prepared to learn survival-related fears.
• Fear acquisition includes observational learning, which is learning by watching and not direct experience.

Anger

• Catharsis: The process of emotional release.
• Catharsis hypothesis: Catharsis can be achieved through both aggressive and non-aggressive actions.
• Best response to anger: Emotional intelligence and forgiveness.

Happiness

• Feel-good, do-good phenomenon: Heightened happiness increases the likelihood of helping others.
• Adaptation-level phenomenon: Tendency to form judgments based on prior experiences.
• Relative deprivation: Feeling worse off when comparing oneself to others.
• Subjective well-being: Self-perceived happiness.