Unit 11 Emotion and Motivation 1 Unit 11 Emotion and Motivation Module 31 Experience of Emotion Introduction Emotion regulation the ability to control and productively use ones emotions Affect the experience of feeling or emotion Affect is an essential part of psychology because it plays an important role in everyday life It guides behavior helps make decisions has a major impact on mental and physical health The two components of affect are emotions and motivation These words have the same root meaning to move In contrast to cognitive processes that are calm collected and frequently rational emotions and motivations involve arousal Emotions and motivations are hot they charge drive or move our behavior Arousal experiences of the bodily responses created by the sympathetic division of the ANS When we experience emotions or strong motivations we feel the experiences When we become aroused the sympathetic nervous system provides us with energy to respond to our environment The liver puts extra sugar into the bloodstream the heart pumps more blood our pupils dilate to help us see better respiration increases and we begin to perspire to cool the body The stress hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine are released Emotion a mental physiological feeling state that directs our attention guides our behavior Includes arousal Emotions move our actions They normally serve an adaptive role Emotions may be destructive Motivation a driving force that initiated and directs behavior usually toward some goal Some motivations are biological food water sex Personal and social motivations can influence behavior We follow our motivations because they are rewarding Theories of Emotion Health psychology the study of interface between affect and physical health that principle that everything that is physiological is also psychological Unit 11 Emotion and Motivation 2 Cannon Bard theory proposes that emotions and arousal occur at the same time The experience of an emotion is accompanied by physiological arousal We become aware of danger and our heart rate increases James Lange theory our experience of an emotion is the result of the arousal that we experience The emotion depends on the arousal We feel sorry because we cry angry because we strike afraid because we tremble Patterns of arousal may create emotional experiences Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer s two factor theory the arousal that we experience is basically the same in every emotion emotions are differentiated only by our cognitive appraisal of the source of the arousal The experience of emotion is determined by the intensity of the arousal we are experiencing the cognitive appraisal of the situation determines what the emotion will be Emotion arousal cognition Research Support for the Theories of Emotion Research support for Cannon Bard and James Lange The operation of the fast emotional pathway supports the idea that arousal and emotions occur together The emotional circuits in the limbic system are activated when an emotional stimulus is experienced and they quickly create corresponding physical reactions This happens so quickly that it may feel as if emotion is simultaneous with our physical arousal Experiences of emotion are weaker without arousal Different emotions are produced by different patterns of arousal Research support for Schachter Singer misattributing arousal It may be difficult for a person who is experiencing a high level of arousal to accurately determine which emotion she is experiencing She may be certain that she is feeling arousal but the meaning of the arousal the cognitive factor may be less clear Some romantic relationships have a very high level of arousal and the partners alternatively experience extreme highs and lows One day they are madly in love and the next they are in a huge fight In situations with high arousal people may be unsure what emotion they are experiencing In the high arousal relationship the partners may be uncertain whether the emotion they are feeling is love hate or both Misattribution of arousal tendency for people to incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing Do we know what emotion we are experiencing by monitoring our feelings arousal or by monitoring our thoughts cognition Schachter and Singer believed that the cognitive part of the emotion was critical that the arousal that we experience could be interpreted as any emotion provided we had the right label for it They hypothesized that if an individual is experiencing arousal for which he has no immediate explanation he will label this state in terms of the cognitions that are created in his environment People who already have a label for their arousal would not need to search for a label and shouldn t experience an emotion Unit 11 Emotion and Motivation 3 Male participants were told that they would be participating in a study on the effects of a new drug on vision They were injected with a shot of epinephrine that creates feelings of tremors flushing and accelerated breathing The idea was to give the experience of arousal Some men were told the truth some a lie The idea was to make some of the men think that the arousal was caused by the drug whereas others would be unsure where the arousal came from The men were left alone with a confederate who they thought had received the same injection While they were waiting for the experiment to begin the confederate behaved in a wild and crazy manner Right before the vision experiment was to begin the participants were asked to indicate their current emotional states on a number of scales The men who had a label for their arousal informed group would not be experiencing much emotion because they already had a label available for their arousal The men in the misinformed group were expected to be unsure about the source of the arousal They needed to find an explanation and the confederate provided one The participants in the misinformed condition were more likely to be experiencing euphoria than were those in the informed condition Schachter and Singer conducted another part of the study Everything was exactly the same except for the behavior of the confederate he acted angry The misinformed participants experienced more anger than did the informed participants Given a state of physiological arousal for which an individual has no immediate explanation he will label this state and describe his feelings in terms of the cognitions available to him Excitation transfer the