Chapter 6 Emotion and affect Emotion and affect o Influence actions and decisions o Prepare us to Face threats anger fear Make friends loneliness Find a mate romantic sexual arousal Maintain relationships guilt shame embarrassment jealousy Ex Typically feel guilty when participate in action that would hurt the other person in the relationship and we will try and repair the damage that has been done Emotion mood affect o Emotion How you consciously feel about a specific event Full blown conscious state that includes an evaluative reaction to some event Ex I was angry when he called me an idiot How you consciously feel in general not clearly linked to a specific o Mood o Affect event Ex I was in a good mood Automatic response that something is good or bad May or may not be consciously aware of feelings Positive affect encompasses all good emotions such as joy bliss love Negative affect encompasses all bad emotions such as anger anxiety and contentment fear jealousy and grief Ex Subliminal priming with angry faces produces negative affect Some researchers argue that positive and negative affect are separate dimensions not opposite ends of the same dimension Emotion and affect o The duplex mind Conscious emotion Automatic affect Powerful and unified feeling state Initial liking or disliking of something Liking or disliking of good and bad feelings toward something o Interaction o Demonstration Automatic affect can influence conscious emotion Conscious processes can override automatic ones Write down as many emotion words as you can think of Count the number of good and bad emotions More focus on bad emotions than good emotions This is the study of emotional language 62 of emotion words refer to bad 74 emotional traits were negative Of 12 most common emotions listed 11 are negative Emotional arousal o James Lange theory of emotion Physiological arousal precedes emotional experience Bodily processes of emotion come first and then the minds perception of these bodily reactions creates the subjective feeling of emotion When something happens your body and brain supposedly perceive it and respond to it and these physiological events form the basis for the emotion you feel Emotional stimulus physiological arousal experienced emotion Weaknesses Different reactions to similar stimuli Similar patterns of arousal with different emotional states o Facial feedback hypothesis Feedback from face muscles evokes or magnifies emotions because the brain reacts to what the facial muscles are doing Smiling makes you happy frowning makes you sad Pen in lips teeth rate cartoons Strack et al 1988 Rated as funnier when pen in teeth Several studies habe found support for this hypothesis o Canon Bard theory of emotion Thalamus sends two simultaneous messages to produce emotional experience physiological arousal Proposed that the feeling and the physical responses are parallel effects and processes o Schacter Singer theory of emotion Emotion has two components Bodily state of arousal physiological arousal o Similar in all emotions Cognitive label specifying the emotion o Different for each emotion Both of these components together specify the emotion Key issue of all three of these theories is how the mind deals with the body s arousal state Sometimes the mind might not realize that the body is aroused or why Misattribution of arousal o Dutton Aron 1974 Arguing for excitation transfer Excitation transfer The idea that arousal from one event can transfer to a later event Hypothesized that people who were put into a fear inducing situation and immediately saw an attractive individual would find that individual more attractive compared to a non fear scenario Scary bridge vs normal bridge Attractive female vs male interviewer Asked participant to fill out some questionnaires TAT arousal When approached by a female experimenter Interviewer gave participant their phone number More arousal on TAT when on the fear bridge More likely to call the experimenter on the fear bridge No differences between conditions when approached by a male experimenter Second study Study three Ran to address population concerns Found the same results Conducted in the lab Looking to demonstrate that the effect was due to being in an arousal inducing situation not because the female was in distress Told participants they were going to be shocked Had a partner who was an attractive female male Only when in the high shock condition did they express attraction to the female confederate Higher arousal in high shock condition How is this related to the Schachter Singer theory of emotion Misattribution of arousal o Relabeling arousal Ex development of public speaking ability Relabel arousal o From nervousness fear o To excitement enthusiasm Two dimensions o Emotions can be classified using 2 dimensions Valence pleasant unpleasant Arousal high low New learning objective o What is the broaden and build theory of emotion according to this theory what are the benefits of positive emotions and what is the ratio of positive to negative emotions necessary to experience these benefits Negative vs positive o Negative emotions narrows focus and ideas about possible actions to take in a situation o Positive emotions broaden and build o Broaden one s viewpoint Think of more ideas both qualitatively and quantitatively See images more abstractly think bigger picture Self views affected such that they see that they have more in common with another person o Also builds one s resources Psychological optimistic resilient open accepting driven by purpose Mental able to consider multiple paths Social builds and strengthens social ties Physical lower levels of stress and healthier o Ratio of positive to negative necessary to get the benefits 3 to 1 Specific emotions o Happiness Measures of happiness Simply feeling good right now form of happiness that human beings and many animals share Affect balance o Frequency of positive minus frequency of negative emotions Life satisfaction most complex form o General evaluation of one s life and how it compares to some standard Objective predictors of happiness Not many some exceptions o Couples with children are less happy than those without o People with strong social connections are happier than Hedonic treadmill those who are alone People return to baseline level of happiness regardless of what happens to them o Ex Someone on a treadmill You may take big steps forward but end up in the same place Subjective roots of
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