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Emotional Influence: summary of all literature
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Complete summary of all literature articles listed for the Emotional Influence (EI) course. NOTE: does not include book summary. Book summary listed separately.
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EMOTIONAL INFLUENCELiterature summary
LECTURE 1
Parkinson (1996)
Emotions are social
The prevalent conception of emotions in psychology assumes that they are essentially internal and
personal reactions.
Two consequences of this idea:
1. They are best analysed from either physiological or a cognitive perspective.
2. Emotion communication is seen as a derivative topic that depends on a prior account of individual
emotion.
Parkinson takes these conclusions into question by proposing that social psychology provides the best
angle of attack for many emotions.
His points:
Attention to the interpersonal, institutional, and cultural factors surrounding emotion clarifies its
causes, consequences and functions in everyday life.
Emotions may be profitably viewed as forms of communication in which evaluative representations
are made to other people.
Note: social approach of emotions a denial of cognitive and physiological processes. Parkinson does
claim that for cognitive and physiological processes to lead to emotional experience, social considerations
are a criterium.
Social causes of emotion
Shaver, Wu, & Schwartz (1992): for more than 75% of expressed emotions a person’s relation to others is a
central concern.
Kemper (1978): majority of human emotions results from (real or imagined) outcomes of social
relationships.
Emotional significance defined interpersonally
Lazarus’ appraisal theory (1991) emphasizes individual cognitive appraisals of personal significance in
mediating emotions: an event has to matter to the person experiencing it to cause emotion. What makes
events personally important?
Events often achieve personal significance in ongoing social encounters and development of
relationships. Most important objects in one’s life are often other people and the relationships with
them.
Appraisals associated with particular emotions are often interpersonal in content: jealousy, love,
embarrassment.
According to appraisal theory, emotional significance of such objects and events depends on a private
cognitive-interpretative process. Appraisal itself might be mediated by social interaction.
Emotional significance defined culturally
Many objects and causes of emotion are defined by cultural value systems and socialized practices of
interaction. Many theories of emotion assume that emotions depend on events that impact the progress of
personal goals. Perception of ultimate life goals and values are influenced by culture (wealth, reputation,
freedom, self-esteem, etc).
- Individualistic vs. collectivistic > difference in values, goals, perceptions of success.
Display rules and feeling rules
Cultures and institutions also promote expectations about interactions > norms of emotional expression,
norms of appropriateness of emotions.
- Physiological theorists of emotion consider emotions to be pre-wired, and their expression to be
culturally dependent following display rules and norms.
Three ways in which society might feed directly into the process of determining emotion:
1. People are trained to appraise emotional situations in culturally appropriate ways. The way in which
organizations define emotional reality may directly shape emotional responses to it.
2. Institutional and cultural rules about appropriate conduct guide the behavior of its people and directly
constrain or facilitate certain forms of emotion.
3. The physical organization of institutions and cultures places concrete boundaries on what we can or
cannot do emotionally, since emotion can only be communicated directly to someone who is present.
Social emotions as causes of emotions
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,Common conceptualization of emotion: emotional interactions involve interchanges of individual cognitive-
interpretative processes. Emotion is thought to be experienced in one person, expressed using available
channels, transmitted to another person, who must decode the message and react to its informational
content by encoding a new message.
Parkinson: emotion as part of a dynamic social process; emotions mediate transactions
between people.
Emotional contagion and reciprocity
We automatically attain synchronized rhythms in our conversations with others. The emotional information
may be directly read off the dynamic. Emotion might thus be communicated without specific interpretation
of those transmitted signals (through for instance mimicry), but by an automatic tendency to interpret the
mood of the interaction.
Non-verbal behaviors may directly (not through verbal expression) lead to corresponding non-
verbal behavior and hence emotions (emotional contagion).
Another person’s emotional communication may have indirect effects on one’s own emotional
reactions to the interpersonal situation. The way we believe other people feel about the situation or
us has emotional implications for ourselves.
Emotional reciprocity: tit-for-tat policy in emotional interactions
Effects of other people’s emotions on interpretation of the emotional situation
Schachter (1959): unfamiliar situations evoke evaluative needs concerning one’s own emotional state, and
social comparison with others sharing a similar fate helps us to clarify the nature of the feelings in
question.
Another’s emotional reactions may encourage complementary as well as similar evaluations of the social
situation. For example, the experiment where men and women watch a scary movie together. Women
were more attractive when they exhibited distress, men where more attractive when they showed
mastery.
Social effects of emotion
Emotions can also have interpersonal effects, for example, in that they may influence other people’s
emotions.
Appraisal theory emotional reactions imply that the objects of the emotion is of personal significance, and
if something is significant to someone else then there is a chance that it will also be significant for us.
But emotions of the one person can also elicit another emotion in the other. So: emotions have particular
social meanings which contain evaluative attitudes towards intentional objects, and these evaluative
attitudes may be accepted or rejected by the other people involved.
Social functions of emotion
Interpersonal functions of emotion
It might be that one of the purposes of expressing emotion is to make claims or to achieve the indirect
interpersonal effects that making these claims produces. These processes can also happen more
unconsciously. The example with emotional communication in couples with depressed wife. Depressives
behave in a manner which tends to produce interpersonal reactions which sustain and intensify their
depression.
Interpersonal functions of emotional expression
Several studies have shown that expressive behaviour in emotional situations is often specifically attuned
to other people. It is important to remember that other people serve not only as passive audiences for
emotion but also send out communications of their own which may in turn lead to emotional responses.
Even private outbursts of emotions may be addressed to imagined audiences, and therefore be
developmentally secondary to the primary phenomenon of communicative process.
Cultural functions of emotion
Averill (1982): emotions are transitory social roles supplied by the culture to deal with situations where
norms for action are in conflict. The resolution of this conflict is facilitated by the existence of the short-
term social role of getting angry. Because anger is seen as an involuntary emotion, the angry person can
thereby disown responsibility.
Sarbin: people intentionally adopt emotional roles for rhetorical purposes. The emotion is then seen as
dictated by the situation instead of stemming from the actors’ intentions. But`; in many cases, emotion
arises from the dialogue of an ongoing interaction as a function of what might be called distributed or
socially shared cognition. Thus, although there are occasions in which emotion roles supplied by the
cultures are acted out deliberately, these do not exhaust the full range of possible emotional episodes.
Emotion serves broadly as communicative rather than narrowly cultural functions
Social constitution of emotion
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, Emotions as communications
Many emotions may be seen as communicating evaluations and appraisals.
Parkinson’s argument: emotions themselves are syndromes of action and action readiness that are often
intrinsically directed towards an audience. We get emotional in order to notify some audience that they
should acknowledge one of our concerns, and behave in accordance with the conveyed evaluative position
with respect to this concern. Parkinson does not want to say that emotions are communicated deliberately
in all cases. But, when the concern expressed by the emotion is strong and central to a person’s currently
salient social identity, the reaction will tend to be experienced as completely compelled by the situation.
Internalized audiences
When people are alone, they also experience emotions. These can be seen as a derivative of primary
interpersonal experiences, and as such still in some way attuned to an internalized audience. So the main
difference from the prevalent conception is that experiential aspects are derivative of previous social
experiences, rather than the primary phenomenon itself.
Developmental origins of emotions
There is also developmental evidence for the social aspects of emotions. Many of the varieties of adult
emotional response may derive from interpersonal communication in early life.
Conclusion
The central argument of this paper has been that emotion is not just a private meaning that directly
surfaces in the social world but rather something that emerges directly through the medium of interaction.
LECTURE 2
Parrott (2001)
Implications of dysfunctional emotions for understanding how emotions function
There is a wide spread that emotions are adaptive and useful = functionalism of emotions. Emotions are
viewed as informing people about their cares and concerns, as preparing the body for action, as directing
cognition into modes of operation likely to be optimal for the conditions at hand, and as signalling others in
ways that manipulate their emotions and actions to suit the emotional person’s need.
Addressing the dysfunctionality of emotions:
helps to maintain the scepticism that is essential in healthy science,
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, and highlights the factors that influence whether emotions succeed or fail to be adaptive.
The dysfunctionalist approach has just as much supporters (Plato, Aristotle, Buddha, Stoics) as the
functionalist approach (Hume, Nietszche, Dionysians).
Old data of participants describing their experiences of emotions and explained the benefits and costs of
emotions in these situations, showed lots of examples of dysfunctionality in every day emotions. Yes, there
are a lot of degrees of freedom when it comes to functionality (different types, magnitudes, probabilities,
effects only show later on). But also, the dysfunctionalist approach can help to understand what is
necessary for emotions to be functional.
Determinants of emotional functionality
1. The accuracy of the appraisal of the situation at hand: to be adaptive, emotions depend critically
on realistic beliefs, expectations and perceptions. If the appraisal is perceived not realistic and
accurate, the emotional response can be maladaptive.
2. The appraisal to which things are important, to the degree to which we care: to be adaptive, we
should care about things that are important and neglect things that are not. If we do this wrong,
we waste resources on the wrong things and miss focussing on information that is important.
3. Address attention to the matter/goal that should receive it at that moment: to be adaptive,
emotions must reflect a prioritizing of goals that corresponds to what is actually important, and
that requires taking into account such issues as the relative urgency of goals and the likelihood
that one’s efforts will be of any use in achieving a goal.
4. The suitability of an emotional response for the situation at hand: to be functional, there has to be
some fit between the situation and the emotion’s effects to the situation at hand. Emotions do not
give rise to one and only response, it is up to us to decide what is the appropriate response in this
situation.
5. The importance of processes that are related to emotion:
Self-regulation and coping: to be adaptive, you should use the right coping strategy for the
emotion. E.g. anxiety about school work. Right coping by focusing the anxiety on attention
to the school work, while wrong coping results in anxiety becoming inaction and escape by
going to a bar.
Socialization and the training of the emotions: the skill of maximizing the functionality of
emotions is required (emotional intelligence). Without training, the most adaptive emotions
are less likely to occur.
Conclusions
The realization that the adaptiveness of emotions is perhaps more miraculous than is commonly
appreciated. Functionality of emotions requires selection, modification and regulation.
Whether emotions are functional depends on how broadly emotion is defined. When you have a
narrow (only functional) definition of emotion, you should be aware of the tendency to give credit
to emotions when everything goes right, but blame everything but emotions when things go
wrong.
Salovey & Grewal (2005)
The science of emotional intelligence
Introduction
In 1997 Mayer and Salovey proposed a model of emotional intelligence to address a growing need in
psychology for a framework to organize the study of individual differences in abilities related to emotion,
leading to the creation of the first ability-based tests of emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence (EI) brings together the fields of emotions and intelligence by viewing emotions
as useful sources of information that help one to make sense of and navigate the social environment.
The Four-Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence
Definition of EI by Salovey & Mayer: the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings, to discriminate
among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action. A few years later they broke it
down into 4 proposed distinct yet related abilities - The Four-Branch Model of Emotional Intelligence:
- Perceiving emotions: the ability to detect and decipher emotions, including the ability to identify
one’s own emotions. Perceiving is seen as the foundational ability; without this, the other abilities
are not attainable.
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