Week 10 Summary - Brain and Behaviour PDF

WEEK 10: Emotion and Emotion Regulation Week Objective 1: List the defining characteristics of emotion Emotions are organised psychological and physiological reactions to changes in our relationship to the world. They are partly private or subjective experiences and partly objective, measurable pat...

WEEK 10: Emotion and Emotion Regulation Week Objective 1: List the defining characteristics of emotion Emotions are organised psychological and physiological reactions to changes in our relationship to the world. They are partly private or subjective experiences and partly objective, measurable patterns of behaviour and physiological activity. The subjective experience of emotion has several characteristics. Emotion or the emotional experience: 1. is usually temporary, having a relatively clear beginning, end, and short duration. Moods tend to last longer, 2. can vary in intensity and can be positive or negative or a mixture of both, 3. alters thought processes, often by directing attention toward some things and away from others; negative emotions such as fear, can narrow an individual’s focus, while positive emotions can widen out attention. 4. triggers an action tendency, the motivation to behave in certain ways, and 5. are passions that you feel, usually whether you want to or not. You have some control in that emotion depends in part on your interpretation of situations, but such control is limited. You cannot decide to experience a particular emotion. The objective aspects of emotion include learned and innate expressive displays and physiological responses. Emotions are temporary experiences with positive or negative or mixed qualities. People experience emotions with varying intensity as happening to the self, generated in part by a mental assessment of situations, and accompanied by both learned and innate physical responses. Through emotions, people communicate their internal states and intentions to others, whether they mean to or not. Emotions often disrupt thinking and behaviour, but they also trigger, and guide thinking and organise, motivate, and sustain behaviour and social relations. Weekly Objective 2: Describe Taxonomies of emotion- negative and positive affect; basic and complex emotions Psychologists have attempted to classify emotions using taxonomies. One way to classify emotions is through listing basic emotions that are believed to be common amongst all humans, such as anger, fear, happiness, and sadness. Emotions can also be classified as to whether they are subjectively experienced as positive or negative and by the degree of arousal that accompanies the emotional experience. Basic emotions include anger, fear, disgust, sadness, contempt, surprise, and joy. Basic emotions are thought to be universally experienced, are accompanied by universally recognised facial expressions and happen automatically. Complex emotions are an aggregate of two or more emotions and can vary across people, situations, and cultures. Complex emotions therefore may not be as easily recognizable, can be expressed with different facial features across people or may have no accompanying facial feature at all. Examples of complex emotions are grief, jealousy, regret, love, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, pride, and worry, among many others. Weekly Objective 3:Compare the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard and cognitive theories (Schachter-Singer and Lazarus) of emotion, and explain their strengths and weaknesses James’ Peripheral Theory (or James-Lange theory) According to this theory, people experience emotion based on observations of their own physical behaviour and peripheral responses. Observing Peripheral Responses - The brain interprets a situation and automatically directs a particular set of peripheral physiological changes. We are not conscious of the process until we become aware of these bodily changes. At that point, we experience an emotion. Each particular emotion is created by a particular pattern of physiological responses. Evaluating James’ Theory - Research shows that certain emotional states are indeed associated with certain patterns of autonomic activity. Also, different patterns of autonomic activity are closely tied to specific emotional facial expressions. According to the facial-feedback hypothesis, involuntary facial movements provide enough peripheral information to create emotional experience. This helps to explain why posed facial expressions generate the emotions normally associated with them. It also explains why many people with spinal cord injuries and thus reduced peripheral responses can still experience intense emotion. They get all the physiological information necessary to perceive an emotion from facial expressions. Cannon-Bard theory— According to Cannon’s central theory, also called the Cannon–Bard theory, emotion starts in the thalamus, which then sends signals simultaneously to the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and to the cerebral cortex, where it becomes conscious. Cannon said that the experience of emotion appears directly in the brain, with or without feedback from peripheral responses. Updating Cannon’s Theory - Recent evidence suggests that the thalamus does not produce the direct central experience of emotion but that activity in specific brain areas produces feelings associated with various emotions. Different parts of the central nervous system (for example, the amygdala, and the dopamine systems) may be activated for different emotions and for different aspects of the total emotional experience. Cognitive Theories of Emotion (or Schachter–Singer theory) - emotions are produced both by feedback from peripheral responses and by a cognitive interpretation of the nature and cause of those bodily responses. Labelling of arousal depends on attribution, the process of identifying the cause of an event. Physiological arousal might be attributed to one of several emotions depending on the information available about the situation. If you attribute physiological arousal to a nonemotional cause, your experience of emotion should be reduced. Studies on excitation transfer theory found that physiological arousal from one experience can carry over to affect emotion in an independent emotional situation. People sometimes attribute prior arousal to the new situation at hand, thereby intensifying their present feelings. Some theorists have argued that the cognitive interpretation of bodily responses is not as important as the cognitive interpretation of the events themselves in the experience of emotion. Lazarus’ cognitive appraisal theory suggests that our emotion is a result of our evaluation of how an event affects our wellbeing. If the event is relevant to our wellbeing, we will experience an emotional reaction to it. The reaction will be positive or negative depending on whether we see the event as advancing our personal goals or obstructing them. In the conceptual act model of emotion, core affect – pleasant or unpleasant feelings – is distinguished from emotion. According to this model, emotion results when we attach to our feelings a category label – such as guilt, shame, anger, or resentment – that our cultural and language training has taught us to use. Models like this one are valuable because they incorporate research on language and culture into efforts to better understand the labelling processes involved in human emotional experience. Weekly Objective 4: Explain which emotions are innate, which are learned and which are universally recognised Innate / Universal Expressions of Emotion - Darwin proposed that some facial expressions are universal and that these are genetically determined. Infants show facial expressions appropriate to their current state, and, apart from subtle cultural differences, for basic emotions all people show similar facial responses to similar emotional stimuli. Ekman and Friesen (1975) identified six emotions that have been associated with universal facial expressions in every study over 30 years. The emotions are: surprise, fear, disgust, anger, happiness, and sadness. However, although there is a basic pattern of facial expression for each emotion, there are individual differences, and some emotions have as many as 100 varied expressions. Social and Cultural influences on emotional expression (learned emotions) Although a core of emotional responses is recognised universally, there is a degree of cultural variation in recognising some emotions and people learn to express certain emotions in particular ways as specified by cultural rules. Social situations also influence emotional expressions. Researchers catalogued 17 types of smiles people learn to use to communicate certain feelings. They called the smile that occurs with real happiness the Duchenne smile. Learning about Emotions As children grow, they learn emotional expressions through operant shaping and they also learn an emotion culture, rules that govern what emotions are appropriate in what circumstances and what emotional expressions are allowed. These rules can vary between genders and from culture to culture. Social Referencing The process of letting another person’s emotional state guide our own behaviour is called social referencing. It is most often used in ambiguous situations when we are not sure what to do. Weekly Objective 5: Describe emotion regulation Emotional regulation refers to the way we manage our emotions –strategies are used to manage emotional experiences in ways that emotional states are adjusted to a more comfortable level so that we can achieve our goals. It requires voluntary, effortful management of our emotions. In infancy, babies are easily overwhelmed by both internal and external stimuli and depend on the quality of soothing given by caregivers for such emotional adjustment. When parents fail to regulate stressful experiences for infants, brain structures that buffer stress fail to develop properly resulting in anxious, emotionally reactive children with a reduced capacity for regulating emotion. By 2 years, language acquisition allows for talk about feelings and provides the environment for control of the emotions –children can make their own decisions, parents prepare children for pleasant and unpleasant events –dentist, injections, school, kinder, etc. Stability of emotion normally occurs at about age 4-5 years old. When emotional self-regulation has developed well, young people acquire a sense of emotional self-efficacy that fosters a favourable self-image and an optimistic outlook, which, in turn, helps them to face further emotional challenges. Psychological research on emotion regulation examines the strategies we use to influence which emotions we have and how we experience and express these emotions. Antecedent-focused strategies refer to things we do before response tendencies have become fully activated and have changed our behaviour and physiological responses. E.g. viewing an admissions interview at a school you have applied to as an opportunity to see how much you like the school, rather than a test of your worth. Response-focused strategies refer to things we do once an emotion is already under way, after response tendencies have been generated. E.g. keeping a poker face while holding a great hand during an exciting card game. There are two widely used strategies for down-regulating emotion: • • Reappraisal comes early in the emotion-generative process. It consists of changing how we think about a situation in order to decrease its emotional impact. It is an antecedent-focused strategy. Suppression comes later in the emotion-generative process. It involves inhibiting the outward signs of emotion. It is a response focused strategy Reappraisal is generally considered to be more effective than suppression as it decreases the experience and behavioural expression of emotion, and has no impact on memory. Weekly Objective 6: Describe the relationship between emotions and facial/bodily expressions, and outline some of the social and cultural influences on emotional expressions. The relationship between emotions and facial/bodily expressions: Emotions can be communicated through words, body cues, tone of voice, and especially through facial movements and expressions. The human face can create thousands of different expressions and people are good at detecting them. In general, women are more likely than men to talk about their emotions and are better at identifying and interpreting the non-verbal emotion cues conveyed by facial expression. Social and Cultural Influences on Emotional Expression Although a core of emotional responses is recognised universally, there is a degree of cultural variation in recognising some emotions and people learn to express certain emotions in particular ways as specified by cultural rules. Social situations also influence emotional expressions. Researchers catalogued 17 types of smiles people learn to use to communicate certain feelings. They called the smile that occurs with real happiness the Duchenne smile. Social Referencing The process of letting another person’s emotional state guide our own behaviour is called social referencing. It is most often used in ambiguous situations when we are not sure what to do.