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Emotion & Cognition lecture summary
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Really detailed summary of the lectures for the "emotion & cognition" course
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Emotion and Cognition – Lecture 1Why Study Emotions?
Emotions have a huge impact on life
Memory/Attention/Feelings (influence things that we remember, attend to…)
Not a day without an emotion
Entertainment: want to be happy/thrilled (entertainment industries make use of it)
Important for survival and social skills
Actions and reactions (evolutionary benefits of emotion social skills…)
Some mental disorders are extremes of emotional states
E.g., fear: anxiety disorder
Well-being depends on emotions
Mood
Lecture 1 part overview
The Concept of Emotions
• What are emotions?
• Properties of emotions
• Why do we have emotions?
Emotion & Science
• Eliciting emotions
• Measuring emotions
• Theories & models of emotions
What are emotions?
Physiologi
cal
Pattern
Phenomena
l
Experience
Patt
11
ern
Verbal and
nonverbal
Expression
Phenomenal experience: Interpretations, cognitive reflexion
Physiological pattern: heartbeat, hands sweating
Verbal & nonverbal expression: things that people say, facial expression, body language
Emotional expressions: Children don’t have filter more expressive (seen very early in life)
Distinct state of the mind, displayed early in life
6 basic emotional expressions:
Fear, anger, disgust, joy, neutral, sadness, surprise
,Emotion Properties
1. Relatively distinct, but mixed-emotions possible
2. Subtle differences across subjects
3. Relatively universal across cultures/species, but different expressions
4. Evolutionary (survival purpose) purpose may have been lost
5. Emotions come in pairs
Emotion Recognition across Cultures
Paul Ekman: “Emotions are universal across cultures” (invented basic emotions)
New Guinea study (1971)
Pick pictures fitting a story (asked people to pick pictures that tell certain story)
Pictures & stories representing Happiness, Sadness, Anger, Surprise, Disgust & Fear (6 basic
emotions)
Validity of Ekmans study:
Russell: There is low agreement about the classification of expressions
Low ecological validity (doesn’t represent how things are in real life)
Low overlap between phenomenal experience and facial pattern
Arbitrary choices in categorization
Dimensions are better
Compared western literate, non-western literate and isolated illiterate (small sample size)
Showed these participants just facial expressions of western industrialized people
Elfenbein & Ambady (critiques): Emotions are universal to a limited degree (different cultures have
their own emotional dialect Easier to recognize emotional expressions from their own groups
Called ingroup advantage)
The in-group advantage is moderated by cross-cultural exposure suggesting that such contact can
help to erase these differences and can lead to greater understanding.
Why differences across cultures?
Elfenbein & Ambady (2002): “Noise can occur at all these stages so that’s why emotions can be
mixed.”
Emotional expression can occur at different stages
Emotion experienced Display rules (differ a lot in different cultures) Decoding rules
(emotion expression is read through glasses of certain culture)
,Display Rules Shape Emotion
Compares emotions across different cultural groups
Japan vs. US
Participants watch stressful film alone vs. with someone else
With Japanese adapted their expressions to HIDE their negative emotion
Emotions are flexible and they may not necessarily reflect the true feelings (important to
differentiate between signals and cues)
Japanese are more likely to display surprise than Americans
Culture
Positive emotions are important for Americans, and the more positive and the less negative,
the better
In Japan, the amount of negative and positive emotions was correlated. Thus, when a
Japanese person had more positive emotions, he/she also has more negative
In Japan, some positive emotions are felt more and considered more important, these are
socially engaging emotions, e.g., friendly feeling (not pride)
Experiment: Put emotional figures of foreground of picture but in the background an emotional
crowd was visible emotional crowd either had same emotional expression as picture in front or a
different one
Individualistic vs. collectivist cultures were compared and found that:
Japanese made more statements about contextual information and relationships than
Americans
Americans tend to ignore contextual information when making judgments (focused on
individual)
Masuda et al., 2008: The surrounding people’s emotions influenced Japanese but not Americans’
perceptions of the central person
Why emotions
1. Adaptive functions, universal (Darwin)
Evolutionary perspective
3 different principles in book:
Principle of serviceable associated habits (at some point over course of evolution, certain
behavior emerged because it had a clear function but now a day’s function is lost but
emotional expression is still there)
Purpose during evolution (but not anymore necessarily)
, Principle of antithesis
Most emotions have a counterpart I express emotion in a certain way and then I am
expressing the opposite emotion in a completely opposite way)
Principle of expressive habits through the nervous system (NOT accurate anymore)
Distinct reaction by the brain
Study: experimentally tested darwins idea
Measured width of nose during different emotional expression
During fear nose opens (so you can take in more information)
During disgust opposite (nose closes)
Different emotions have different evolutionary benefits
1. Bodily responses (James)
Mechanistic point of view -> we have emotional expression bc heart rate goes up blabla
James-Lange theory:
Snake bites you body reacts ANS goes on fire expression of emotion phenomenal
experience (becoming aware of whats happening)
Traditional view: First experience emotional expression and after bodily reaction and expression
Lange developed similar ideas independently of James
Both theorists defined emotion as a feeling of physiological changes due to a stimulus
They focused on different aspects of emotion.
James focused on conscious emotion and the conscious experience of emotion.
Lange made James's theory more testable and applicable to real life examples.
Both agreed that if physiological sensations could be removed, there would be no emotional
experience.
Physiological arousal causes emotion
Facial feedback theory: Activity in face Makes you experience certain emotion
Pen in mouth study
Botox study: People had Botox in face researchers compared emotion recognition skills of those
with and without Botox found that those with Botox were less likely to mimic expression and were
worse in recognizing emotions
Testing James Lange theory
1. Change in body alters your emotions (measure that)
2. Cognitive inhibition of your body weakens emotions
3. Substance-induced bodily changes alter emotions and related neural activity
Experiment: 2 groups of participants: 1 where the participants could express the emotion and one
where they were instructed to conceal emotions
Found that in the group where people should express emotion, they had strong skin
conductance responses and high subjective pain
IN other group they had less pain and weaker skin conductance responses
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