Emotions

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Basic Emotions
• Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard
▫ Insist that there are a limited number of basic emotions

• Basic emotions
▫ Emotions that are found in all cultures, that are
reflected in the same facial expressions across cultures,
and that emerge in children according to their
biological timetable

• Ekman
▫ Suggested considering emotions as families
▫ The anger family might range from annoyed to
irritated, angry, livid, and, finally, enraged
 Expression of Emotion
• Range of emotion
▫ Ekman and Friesen
 Claim there are subtle distinctions in the facial
expression of a single emotion that convey its intensity

• Development of facial expressions

▫ Like the motor skills of crawling and walking, facial
expressions of emotions develop according to a biological
timetable of maturation
▫ Consistency of emotional development across individual
infants and across cultures supports the idea that
emotional expression is inborn
 Expression of Emotion
• Universality of facial expressions -Darwin
 First to study the relationship between emotions and
facial expressions

 Believed that the facial expression of emotion was an

aid to survival because it enabled people to
communicate their internal states and react to
emergencies before they developed language

 Maintained that most emotions, and the facial

expressions that convey them, are genetically inherited
and characteristic of the entire human species
Expression of Emotion
• Universality of facial expressions -Scherer and
Wallbott
 Found very extensive overlap in the patterns of
emotional experiences reported across cultures in
37 different counties on 5 continents
 Also found important cultural differences in the
ways emotions are elicited and regulated and in
how they are shared socially
Ekman’s 6 Basic Emotions

I’m surprised

I’m disgusted
Experienced Emotion

 Infants’
naturally
occurring
emotions
What is Emotion?
• Emotions are a mix of:
▫ Physiological activation (bodily response)
▫ Expressive actions (behaviors)
▫ Conscious experience (thoughts and feelings)
How Do We Experience Emotion?

• Question: Do our bodily responses come before or

after an emotional experience?
▫ Do we feel sad because we are crying, or do we cry because
we’re feeling sad?
▫ When you see a snake, your pulse races
 Are you feeling afraid because your pulse is racing, or is your
pulse racing because you feel afraid?

• William James & Carl Lange

▫ “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike,
afraid because we tremble.”
▫ Feelings follow your body’s response
In a nutshell
• James-Lange Theory - our experience of emotion is
our awareness of our physiological responses to
emotion-arousing stimuli
James-Lange Theory
 Your feeling of fear is experienced ________ you
are aware of a physiological response

Sight of Pounding Fear

oncoming heart (emotion)
car (arousal)
(perception of
stimulus)
James-Lange Theory
 Your feeling of fear is experienced after
you are aware of a physiological response

Sight of Pounding Fear

oncoming heart (emotion)
car (arousal)
(perception of
stimulus)
Cannon-Bard Theory
• Walter Cannon – physiologist
& Philip Bard - physiologist

• Physiological arousal and our emotional experience

occur simultaneously
▫ You see a snake, the information is sent to the thalamus,
which relays the signals simultaneously to the cortex and
to the autonomic nervous system

• Your heart begins pounding as you experience fear

- one does not cause the other
 Cannon-Bard Theory
Pounding
heart  Emotion-arousing stimuli
(arousal)
Sight of ______________ trigger:
oncoming
car  physiological responses
(perception of (autonomic nervous
stimulus)
system)
 subjective experience of
Fear emotion (information
(emotion)
sent to the brain’s
cortex)
 Cannon-Bard Theory
Pounding
heart  Emotion-arousing stimuli
(arousal)
Sight of simultaneously trigger:
oncoming
car  physiological responses
(perception of (autonomic nervous
stimulus)
system)
 subjective experience of
Fear emotion (information
(emotion)
sent to the brain’s
cortex)
Schachter’s Two-Factor Theory
• Stanley Schachter said that emotions have 2
ingredients:
 physical arousal
 a cognitive label

• Our experience of emotion grows from our

awareness of our body’s response to stimuli
(like James-Lange)

• Emotions are physiologically similar (like

Cannon-Bard)
Schachter-Singer Two factor theory
• A conscious interpretation of the arousal is needed
to experience emotion
▫ A physiological arousal can be experienced as one
emotion or another depending on how we interpret
and label it
The Schacter-Singer Expt
Schachter’s Theory
Stimulus Perception Bodily
(Tiger) (Interpretation arousal
of stimulus-- (Pounding
danger) heart)

Emotion
(Fear)

Type Intensity

• Perception and thought about a stimulus

influence the type of emotion felt
• Degree of bodily arousal influences the intensity
of emotion felt
 Schachter’s Two-Factor Theory
 To experience emotion one
must:
 be ________________
Pounding
heart
 ___________________
(arousal)
Sight of Fear
oncoming (emotion)
car
(perception of
stimulus)

Cognitive
label

“I’m afraid”
 Schachter’s Two-Factor Theory
 To experience emotion one
must:
 be physically aroused
Pounding
heart
 cognitively label the arousal
(arousal)
Sight of Fear
oncoming (emotion)
car
(perception of
stimulus)

Cognitive
label

“I’m afraid”
More Recent Theories of Emotion
Controversy: Do emotions always follow
thought, or can emotion precede thinking? What
comes first, thinking or feeling?

Thinking comes first:

Richard Lazarus, Phoebe Ellsworth.

Emotions can come first:

Robert Zajonc, Joseph LeDoux
 Lazarus 1977
• 1. Cognitive processes determine the quality and
intensity of an emotional reaction.

• 2. Cognitive processes underlie coping activities,

which, in turn, continually shape the emotional
reaction by altering the on-going relationship
between the person and the environment.
Zajonc (1980) & Le Doux (1999)
Zajonc’s blood-flow theory:
a. Changing bodily state  change in emotion

b. Face is primary source of emotional change

LeDoux:
there exist specialized brain circuits (neural maps)
for each emotion, each one a short-cut for a kind of
decision making
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• Can smiling make you feel happy?
▫ Yes!
▫ James Laird and others (1989)
▫ Facial Feedback Hypothesis: The
idea that the muscular movements
involved in certain facial
expressions trigger the
corresponding emotions
Facial Feedback Hypothesis
▫ Sylvan Tomkins
 Claimed that the facial expression itself triggers both
the physiological arousal and the conscious feeling
associated with the emotion
 so the movement of the facial muscles producing the
expression lead to emotion
Facial Feedback - adding a layer
• Ekman and colleagues documented the effects of
facial expressions on physiological indicators of
emotion using 16 participants
▫ Reported that a distinctive physiological response
pattern emerged for the emotions of fear, sadness,
anger and disgust, whether the participants
relived one of their emotional experiences or
simply made the corresponding facial expression
▫ Researchers found that both anger and fear
accelerate heart rate, but fear produces colder
fingers than does anger
Theories
Spillover Effect
• Spillover Effect - sometimes our arousal
response to one event spills over into our
response to the next event

▫ You may meet someone at the gym after a work out

and while you are talking to the person you recognize
that your heart rate is up, you’re flushed, you may
misinterpret this as having feelings for the person,
when in fact you may just still be worked up from your
workout.
• You go to a scary movie with your date and you are
physiologically aroused from the movie; some of this
arousal may linger and you may misinterpret it after the
movie as admiration for your date
Emotional Contagion
• Emotional Contagion
▫ Therapists “catch” clients’ feelings
▫ Parents communicate their feelings to their children &
vice versa
▫ Friends resonate to each other’s moods

• Hatfield et al. (1993)

▫ Some forms of emotional contagion are far more subtle
and automatic
▫ We catch emotions by unconsciously engaging in motor
mimicry
 Automatically imitate other people’s facial
expressions, gestures, and postures
 We then come to feel as well as look as others do
 Example: smiling faces of others at a party,
expressions of grief during mourning
Emotional Contagion
• Evidence that motor mimicry occurs almost
instantaneously

▫ College students able to synchronize their

movements within 21 milliseconds
▫ Adults opening their mouths when babies do

• May prove useful in understanding and

advancing communication between romantic
partners, teachers and students, parents and
children, therapists and clients
 Two Dimensions of Emotion
• People in various cultures place emotions on two
dimensions:
 Valence - Pleasant versus Unpleasant
 an object’s quality of attractiveness to the individual - Positive
emotions are attractive and negative ones are not.

▫ Arousal - Low versus high Positive

valence

pleasant joy
Low relaxation High
arousal arousal
sadness fear
anger

Negative
valence
Do you remember what the
three Elements of
Emotional Experience are?

• 1. Cognitive Component
• 2. Physiological Component
• 3. Behavioral Component
 Cognitive Component

• Richard Lazarus
▫ First step in an emotional sequence is
cognitive appraisal of the situation
• Appraisal determines which emotion you feel.
i.e. “What should I be feeling in this situation?”
 Physiological Component
Occurs through the actions of the autonomic nervous
system

▫ Sympathetic division
 directs the adrenal glands to release stress hormones
 Epinephrine (adrenaline)
 Norepinephrine (noradrenaline)
 Increased heart rate, blood pressure, blood sugar

▫ Parasympathetic
 Active once crisis has passed
 Calms the body
Arousal and Performance

 Performance
peaks at
lower levels
of arousal for
difficult tasks,
and at higher
levels for
easy or well-
learned tasks
Keep in mind…

• Physiological Component
 Difficult to distinguish between the physiological
responses of fear, anger, sexual arousal, and joy
 The Limbic system (hypothalamus, hippocampus,
pituitary gland, and amygdala)

• Emotion and cognition appear to be separate but

interacting mental functions
▫ Mediated by separate but interacting brain systems
 The Amygdala and Fear
• A visual stimulus can travel to the amygdala and trigger a
physiological response
▫ The “emotion” of fear

▫ “Feelings”
▫ Arise from a second, slower pathway that travels through the amygdala to
the higher cortex
 Using information from different parts of the brain, the cortex analyzes
frightening stimuli in detail and sends a message back down to the
amygdala

• Double wiring can cause problems

▫ Neural connections from the cortex down to the amygdala are less well
developed than are connections from the amygdala back to the cortex
▫ Amygdala can exert a greater influence on the cortex than vice versa
▫ Once an emotion is turned on, its difficult to turn off
Cognition and Emotion

 The brain’s
shortcut for
emotions
Measures of Physiological
Responses: GSR
 Measures of Physiological
Responses: GSR
• Galvanic skin response (GSR)
▫ Measures autonomic activation
▫ Assesses the skin’s electrical conductivity when
sweat gland activity increases
▫ High conductance (sweating) indicates
sympathetic nervous system arousal
▫ Low conductance indicates parasympathetic
activity
Emotion and Physiology
Autonomic nervous system controls
physiological arousal
Sympathetic Parasympathetic
(arousing) (calming)
Pupils dilate EYES Pupils contract
Decreases SALIVATION Increases
Perspires SKIN Dries
Increases RESPIRATION Decreases
Accelerates HEART Slows
Inhibits DIGESTION Activates
Secrete stress ADRENAL Decreases
hormones GLANDS secretion of
stress
hormones
Polygraph (lie detector)
– Device that measures
autonomic fluctuations
that accompany emotion
(respiration, heart rate,
perspiration changes,
GSR) while a person is
questioned.
– An emotion detector or
“fear detection test”, in
actuality.
Measuring Physiological
Responses: The Polygraph
 How the polygraph works:
 Control Question
 Example- Up to age 18, did you ever physically
harm anyone?
 Relevant Question
 Example- Did [the deceased] threaten to harm you
in any way?
 Relevant > Control --> Lie
 If physiological arousal to the critical questions are
weaker than to control questions, the examiner
infers you are telling the truth
 Assumes that only a thief becomes agitated when
denying a theft
The Polygraph – in which case
is the subject lying?
Respiration

Perspiration

Heart rate

Control Relevant Control Relevant

question question (a) question question (b)
Polygraph Tests

• Polygraph tests measure emotion, which may or

may not be due to deceit
• Inaccurate often enough that they are deemed
too unreliable to be submitted as evidence in
most types of courtrooms
• 9 out 10 psychologist believe the polygraph can
be beaten
• Cannot distinguish between guilty lying and
fearful honesty
• “Never take a lie detector test if you are
innocent.”
Emotion: The Polygraph

 50 Innocents
 50 Thieves
 1/3 of innocent
declared guilty
 1/4 of guilty
declared
innocent (from
Kleinmuntz &
Szucko, 1984)
Three Elements of Emotional
Experience
• Behavioral Component
▫ Emotions are expressed through body language and
facial expressions
▫ Humans reveal their emotions both verbally and
nonverbally
▫ Expressive Behaviors – observable behavioral
indications of emotions
▫ Non-verbal communication (majority of our
communication)
 Body language
 Facial Expression (primary display of emotion)
Non-Verbal Communication
• Can we detect a liar through non-verbal cues?
▫ Paul Ekman and Maureen O’Sullivan (1991)
 With experience and training people can
detect liars (67% - 86% accurate), e.g.,
trained researchers, CIA agents
 Intuition alone – not very accurate (near
chance)
 Expression of Emotion
• Cultural rules for displaying emotion
▫ Display rule
 Cultural rules that dictate how emotions should be
expressed and when and where their expression is
appropriate
▫ Often, a society’s display rules require people to give
evidence of certain emotions that they may not
actually feel or to disguise their true feelings
▫ Cole
 Found that 3-year-old girls, when given an unattractive
gift, smiled nevertheless
 They had already learned a display rule and signaled an
emotion they very likely did not feel
Expression of Emotion
• Cultural rules for displaying emotion
▫ Davis
 Found that among first to third graders, girls were
better able to hide disappointment than boys were
▫ Not only can emotions be displayed but not felt,
they can also be felt but not displayed
▫ Most of us learn display rules very early and
abide by them most of the time
 Experiencing Emotion
• Facial-feedback hypothesis
▫ Izard
 Believes that learning to self-regulate emotional
expression can help in controlling emotions
 Proposes that this approach to the regulation of emotion
might be a useful adjunct to psychotherapy
• Gender differences in experiencing emotion
▫ David Buss
 Has reported that women are far more likely to feel anger
when their partner is sexually aggressive
 Men experience greater anger than women when their
partner withholds sex
Experienced Emotion
• Fear
▫ How is fear adaptive?
 An alarm system that prepares our bodies
▫ How is fear learned?
 Conditioning (e.g., traumatic event) and
observation
▫ Key brain structure?
 Amygdala
 Wired to all parts of the brain that produce
bodily symptoms of extreme fear
Experienced Emotion
• Anger
▫ Causes of anger?
 Most commonly in response to friends’ or loved ones’
perceived misdeeds
 Especially common when another person’s act
seemed willful, unjustified, and avoidable
 Blameless annoyances can also make us angry
▫ Chronic hostility
 Linked to heart disease
 Controlled expressions of anger are more adaptive
than either hostile outbursts or pent-up angry
feelings
Experienced Emotion
• Catharsis Hypothesis? True or False?
Idea that we reduce anger by releasing it through
aggressive action or fantasy
This works provided
-your retaliation is directed against the provoker
-your retaliation is justifiable
-your target is not intimidating
Expressing anger can be temporarily calming if it does
not leave us feeling guilty or anxious
Venting angry feelings often magnifies the underlying
hostility or serves to be habit forming
More often the case that expressing anger leads to more
anger
 Can provoke retaliation
 Can magnify the anger
Experienced Emotion
• How should we handle anger?
▫ Waiting - what goes up must come down
▫ Avoid being chronically angry over every little
annoyance
▫ Do not sulk and continue to think about your reasons
for being angry
 Rumination only increases anger
▫ Don’t keep all your anger in only to explode at a tiny
provocation
• Calm yourself in other ways
▫ Exercising
▫ Hobbies
▫ Confiding feelings to friends
Experienced Emotion: Happiness
• Happiness/unhappiness colors everything
• Increasing interest in ‘positive’ psychology
• Subjective well-being
▫ Usually assessed as either feelings of happiness (a
high ratio of positive to negative feelings) or as a
sense of satisfaction in life
▫ Measures of subjective well-being are often used
along with objective measures of well-being
(physical and economic indicators) to evaluate
quality of life
Does Money Buy Happiness?

• Many people believe they would be happier if

they had more money
• Happiness associated with money may be
temporary
• The need to belong or have close relationships
with others, not money, appears to distinguish
between happy and unhappy individuals
 Why? Because Happiness is
Relative
• Adaptation-Level Principle

▫ Happiness is relative to our prior subjective experiences

 What makes you happy might not make another person happy

▫ Seeking happiness through material achievements

requires an ever-increasing abundance of things

▫ If our current condition increases, we feel temporary

pleasure. Consequently, we adapt to this new level
which than becomes normal and we require more to
make us happy
Happiness is Relative
• Relative Deprivation Principle

▫ We are unhappy if we believe we are worse off than

others with whom we compare ourselves

▫ Middle and upper class individuals feel more

satisfied when they compare themselves to those
who are relatively poor

▫ However, once people reach a certain level of

success, they start to compare themselves to those
at the same level of success or at levels higher than
they have attained
 e.g. entering college
Happiness and Laughter
• A social phenomenon
▫ Often not a reaction to humor or jokes
 Occurs in response to humor only 10-15% of the time
▫ Occurs during natural pauses in speech 99% of the time
▫ Speakers laugh more than listeners
Happiness and Laughter

• Laughter first appears at 2-3 months of age

▫ Playful tickling causes laughter
▫ One cannot tickle oneself
 Might indicate that underlying neural systems are
controlled by social cues and interactions
 Being tickled by another person arouses the brain
more than being “tickled” by oneself
 One can later evoke laughter simply through gestures
that imply threats of tickling
 Similar anticipatory responses have been observed in
rats
Happiness and
Laughter: Rats
• Studying neurobiological underpinnings of
laughter might help identify mental nature of joy
within the brain
▫ Rats also exhibit high-frequency ultrasonic laughter-
type chirping in response to tickling
 Fundamental neural sources of positive social affect
may be studied in animal models
▫ Young rats find tickling rewarding
▫ Rat “laughter” can be increased/decreased with
selective breeding
 Might reflect a heritable emotional trait
 Happiness and Laughter
• A connection between laughter and health?
▫ 10 minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic
effect
▫ Laughter provided hours of relief from chronic pain
▫ Humor and laughter might ameliorate pain, alleviate
stress, promote functioning of the immune system