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
What is Emotion?
• Emotions are a mix of:
▫ Physiological activation (bodily response)
▫ Conscious experience (thoughts and feelings)
▫ Expressive actions (behaviors)
Arousal Cognition
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?
How Do We Experience Emotion?

• Questions: If your pulse raced, were you feeling

afraid because your pulse is racing? Was your pulse
racing because you were afraid?
Historical Theories
• James-Lange theory
▫ William James & Carl Lange

• Cannon-Bard Theory
▫ Walter Cannon & Philip Bard

• Schachter-Singer Two Factor Theory

▫ Stanley Schacter Jerome Singer
How Do We Experience Emotion?

• Questions: If your pulse raced, were you feeling afraid

because your pulse is racing? Was your pulse racing
because you were afraid?

• James-Lange
 Feelings follow your body’s response
• Cannon-Bard
 Awareness occurs at the same time as arousal
• Schachter-Singer
 Our experience of emotion depends on physiological arousal
AND cognitive labelling
In a nutshell
• James-Lange Theory - our experience of emotion
comes from 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 & Philip Bard - both physiologists
• Disagreed with James-Lange theory because heart
rate, perspiration and body temperature are not
different enough/change too slowly to be the cause of
emotion

• 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
In a nutshell
• Cannon-Bard: stimuli simultaneously prompt
physiological responses and subjective experience --
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)
Challenge to CB
• Lower spinal cord
injury: little change in
intensity

But

• High spinal cord

injuries: lost and
gained intensity
▫ Heatless anger
▫ Increase in weeping
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
• Stanley Schachter and Jerome singer believed 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
Challenge: 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
• Some emotional responses involve no conscious
thinking
• Ex. Automatically liking or disliking someone,
automatically fearing something

• But how do we know what we’re reacting to if

there isn’t any appraisal? It may be effortless and
unconsciously occurring, but it still happens
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
 the movement of the facial muscles producing the expression
lead to emotion
▫ “Going through the motions, awakens the emotions”
Find a
graphic
way for
showing
the
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 (feed off each other)
▫ Friends resonate to each other’s moods
Emotional Contagion
• 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 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
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)
 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
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
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