Aantekeningen colleges Emotion and Cognition

Week 1

- Why study emotions?
o Emotions have a huge impact on life
o Memory/attention/feelings
o Not a day without an emotion
o Entertainment: want to be happy/thrilled
o Important for survival and social skills
o Reactions
o Some mental disorders ar extremes of emotions states
o Well being depends on emotion
- What are emotions
o Phenomenal experience, physiological pattern. Verbal+nonverbal expression
- Emotion schema
- Expressions are distinct states of the mind, displayed early in life
- 6 basic emotional expressions: fear, anger, disgust, joy, neutral , sadness, surprise
- Emotion properties:
o Relatively distinct, but mixed-emotions possible
o Subtle differences across subjects
o Emotion recogntition across cultures
- Paul Ekman: emotions are universal across cultures
- New Guinea study (1971)
- Pick pictures fitting a story
- Pictures & stories representing happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear
- 6 basic emotions
- Validity of Ekman’s study
- Russell (1994): there is low agreement about the classification of expressions
- Lacking cross-cultural overlap
- Elkfenbein & Ambady (2002): emotions are universal to a limited degree
- Noise can occur at all stages, this is why emotions can be mixed
- Display rules shape emotions
- Friesen (1972) & Matsumoto (1990):
- Japanese adapted their expressions to HIDE negative emotions
- Emotions are flexible and they may not necessarily reflect the true feelings
- Japanese are more likely to display surprise than americans
- Culture
o Positive emotions are important for americans, and the more positive and the less
negative, the better
o In Japan, the amount of negative and positive emotions was correlated. Thus, when
a Japanese had more positive emotions, he/she also has more negative
o In Japan, some positive emotions are felt more and considered more important,
these are socially enganing emotions
o Japanese amde more statements about cntextual information and relationships that
americans
o Americans tend to ignore contextual information when making judgements
o The surrouding people’s emotions influences Japanese but not Americans’
perceptions of the central person

,- Why emotions?
o Adaptive functions, universal (Darwin)
o Principle of serviceable associated habits
o Purpose during evolution
o Principle of antithesis
o Most emotions have a counterpart
o Principle of expressive habits through the nervous system
o Distinct reaction by the brain
o Bodily responses (James)
o Response before emotional experience
- Lange’s idea:
o Lange developed similar ideas independetly of james
o Both theorist defined emotion as a feeling of physiological changes due to a stimulus
o They focused on different aspects of emotion
o James focused on the conscious experience of emotion
o Lange made james’s theory testable and applicable to real life examples
o Both agreed that if physiological sensations could be removed, there would be no
emotional experiences
o Physiological arusal causes emotion
- Testing James-Lange theory
o 1. Change in body alters your emotions
o 2. Cognitive inhibition of your body lakens emotions
o 3. Substance-induced bodily changes alter emotions and related neural activity
- Cannon's criticism
o Visceral changes too slow to be source of emotion (FALSE)
o Seperating body from CNS does not alter emotional behavior in animals (FALSE)
o Artificial induction of visceral changes typical for emotions do not produce them
(adrenalin) (FALSE)
o Relation bodily states – emotional states not 1:1 (TRUE)
- Cannon-bard criticism led scoentists to adapt james-lamge theory because:
o Not all physiological changes showed the same pattern per emotion and congtion is
sometimes necesary to know which emotion is experienced
o Adrenal injection induced APPRAISAL dependent emotions
- Quick decisions (Damasio, ledoux)
- Based on appraisal (Arnold)
- Social constructs (Averill)
- Why measure emotions?
o To diagnose mental disorders
o To infer well-being
o Advertisements: good vs. Bad impacts
- Emotional stroop task
- Physiology
- Measuring emotions
o Infants: emotions are pure and simple
o Disorders: emotions are uncontrolled or extreme
- Reactions to emotional stimuli

, o Record and study expressions
o Cross-cultural research
o Cross-species
- Schachter’s two factor theory
o Context and expectations can alter emotions/feelings
o Acknowledge that emotional experience largely depends on bodily changes
o Thus, physiological changes precede emotional experience
o Also, some cognition/appraisal precede emotional experience
o But, bodily canges are not solely responsible for emotions
o Arousal must be interpreted
o Emotion = arousal + cognitive component
- Models of emotions
o Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory
 Few (8) basic emotions
 Polar opposites
 Vary in intensity
 Remaining emotions derived/mixed
 Mapped onto adaptive behaviors
o Ortony & turner (1990)
 There is no objective way to investigate which emotions are basic
 Neuroscience cannot fully dissociate emotion categories
 Disagreement which are basic due to vagueness of language
 Disagreement which are basic due to hierarchies
 Disagreement whether emotions have to have a valence
- Subjective emotions
o The term basic is a subjective label
o Emotion is a slightly vague term
- Words may not represent nature (Russell)
o Dimensions rather than categories to investigate emotions
o Similarity ratings
o Ask participants to group together images of people who feel alike
- Subjective vs. Objective dimensions
o Ratings are subjective but calculating the dimensions is an objective method
o With help of the mean difference score one can find underlying
constructs/dimesions
- Feldmann barrett: emotions are learned or socially constructed and not given to us by
nature
- Emotions dimensions
o Arousal
o Valence
o Goals
o Active vs passive
o Probability of the goal



Week 2