EMOTION, THIRD EDITION February – March 2021
BY MICHELLE SHIOTA AND JAMES KALAT
Utrecht University
PART 1: WHAT ARE EMOTIONS AND WHY DO WE HAVE THEM?
Chapter 1: The nature of emotion
Learning about emotion is important, because we care about other people’s emotions, we want to
understand our own, we seek to experience them through stories and we explain behavior in terms
of emotion. Emotions are woven into our understanding of the world, for example our idea of good
and evil. But emotion is also a difficult subject for scientific research. We hope you are starting this
book with healthy skepticism about whether the scientific study of emotion is possible.
We sometimes conclude an organism has emotions when it behaves the same we do under
circumstances in which we would feel certain emotions. Still there is discussion, for example whether
cats can feel love. We can never directly observe emotions. We can only infer them. How do we learn
words for emotion? When you cry as a child, your parents say ‘oh, are you sad?’.
An attempt to define emotion: emotion is an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus.
Emotions are functional in the sense that they are geared toward having an effect on the world. They
give us a quick and effective reaction, like escaping when feeling fear. Emotions have a direction
(angry at, happy about), in contrast to purely internal drives like hunger and thirst. Emotion includes
four aspects: cognitive evaluation (what does it mean for us, like ‘ah, that is good news!’), feelings
(subjective changes, like feeling happy), physiological changes (autonomic and neural arousal, for
example heart pounding) and behavior.
A problem with this attempt: The implication is that a feeling with three of those aspects isn’t an
emotion. And that is not necessarily true. Sometimes you do not act after a certain emotion.
A different type of definition: the prototype approach: giving examples because giving a precise
definition is not possible. So we can say: emotion is fear, anger, and things like that, so other
psychological states that are more or less like the prototype. Maybe we do not have to say that
disgust is or isn’t an emotion, because saying that it is sort of an emotion is enough.
Some of the most fundamental questions about emotion concern the relationships among the four
aspects and how they relate to events in the
environment. Three classic theories: Common sense view:
Event feeling behavior
1. James-Lange theory:
Event cognition/appraisal physiological changes &
behavior feeling
Emotional feelings are based directly on the way the body reacts to a situation. Sensation from the
muscles and/or the internal organs is necessary for the full experience of emotion.
Example: You see a bear, you perceive the situation as dangerous, you notice yourself running and
then you feel fear. Your fear is your perception of the physiological changes and behavior.
2. Cannon-Bard theory
cognition/appraisal
Event feelings
physiological changes & behavior
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,All aspects happen at the same time and are causally independent of each other.
Example: the sight of a mad killer chasing you would cause you to decide that you were in danger
and independently cause feelings of fear and the action of running away.
3. Schachter-Singer theory feeling
Physiological change ID likely event cognition/appraisal behavior
The physiological arousal that often accompanies emotion is essential for determining how strong
the emotional feeling will be, but it does not distinguish among different emotions. You identify
which emotion you feel on the basis of all the information you have about your situation, so with the
cognitive appraisal. Physiological changes are not, however, irrelevant. They determine the strength
of your feelings.
Example: There is a snake in front of you. You feel your heart pounding and ask yourself why. You are
conscious of the snake. You think ‘I must be scared’.
Three modern theories:
1. Emotions as categories: Basic emotions model
Darwin implied that we should think of emotions in terms of a few distinct categories; anger, fear,
disgust, joy and sadness (as illustrated in the movie Inside Out). Psychologists have proposed lists of
basic/discrete emotions. These differ, for example sometimes surprise is on the list and sometimes
not. The basic emotions evolved to handle prototypical threats and challenges in the human
ancestral environment. This model entails these propositions:
- Each basic emotion serves a distinct adaptive function (disgust warns us for rotten food)
- Basic emotions serve to coordinate the four aspects of emotion, producing a coherent package
of responses that should help you respond effectively to a situation. Instead of the individual
aspects occurring separately, they are pulled together so you have the best chance of surviving
- The categories of emotions people use reflect distinctions among naturally occurring categories
of human psychological experience, at least in some extent. Some categories are culture-specific
but some are inherent in human nature.
An emotion is basic if it is (a) found in every human, apart from people with an abnormality like brain
damage, independent of culture (b) people have a distinct way of expressing it, including facial
expression, tone of voice and other behaviors, (c) the emotion is evident in early life (how early is a
matter of discussion) and the emotion should be physiological distinct.
This is most closely aligned with the James-Lange theory, because it describes emotions primarily as
instinctive, adaptive physiological and behavioral responses to stimuli, placing less emphasis on
subjective feelings. However, James was skeptical about dividing emotions in categories.
2. Emotions as dimensions: Core affect and psychological construction
The four aspects of emotion do not always hang tightly together (as the previous theory says). The
feeling aspect of emotion is primary. We can arrange our feelings along dimensions, which
researchers have determined by asking people how similar certain words were. For example ‘sleep’
was in between ‘tired’ and ‘relaxed’. Russell composed the circumplex model, a circular model with
these terms arranged in it. ‘Fear’ and ‘anger’ are close to each other because they feel similar, so we
do not look at behavior or cognition here. According to this model an emotional feeling is good or
bad or something in between. There is also another one: the evaluative space model, in which
something can be good and bad at the same time. In this model ‘relaxed’ is distant from ‘sleepy’.
Psychological construction is the formation of mental concepts that people use to organize their
experience of the world. Categories of emotional experience like in the previous theory, are created
not by nature but constructed, among other things by upbringing and culture. This theory is a
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, descendant of the Schachter-Singer theory, because both say that physiological arousal is too general
to distinguish among emotions and that emotions are categorized by language-specific knowledge.
However, this theory does not assume that physical arousal is necessary to label your emotions.
3. The component process model
Like the basic emotions model this theory says that emotions are real responses to events in the
environment and that they include multiple aspects that hang together in similar ways across
cultures. Like the core affect/psychological construction model it says that emotion should be
described in dimensions.
This theory says that the cognitive appraisal aspect is particularly important. Appraisals are
dimensional. An expression, like the one we call ‘anger’, is not one expression, but a compound of
muscle movements reflecting our different appraisal elements: ‘huh, what is that?’ (eyes widen), ‘oh
I don’t like that’ (corners of mouth turn down), ‘I want to change this situation’ (frowning). Each
person has his own appraisal dimension. Some may find a cockroach in their kitchen controllable, so
they just get a bug spray and broom, and other may think it is uncontrollable, so they start to scream.
Still researchers don’t know which of these theories is right. Perhaps each is right in a way.
How do we study emotions scientifically? This is difficult, because:
a) You must get participants into an emotional state, or catch one in real life.
b) You need to measure emotions and that is complex because they involve so many aspects.
c) You need to separate involving aspects, like when you study happiness you should not actually be
measuring the consequences of health, because happy people are often more healthy.
One way of studying emotion is inducing emotions, for example by asking participants to think of a
time in their life when they experiences an emotion very strongly. Or by asking them to read a story,
watch a film or look at pictures. Advantages are that (1) it tests what you want to test, because you
can use stories/pictures with an emotional meaning on which most people agree and (2) the
methods target specific emotional states. A limitation is that they don’t use a real event (however,
when you do use that, people may respond to the events very differently). Some methods are
controversial, for example asking participants to pose a specific facial expression (how do we know
what the exact cause of an emotion is) or playing music (does not always elicit emotion).
A big problem is that we are rarely able to elicit emotions in the lab that are as strong as those that
people experience in real life. That is why some researchers use experience sampling: the participant
receives a smartphone and that buzzes on unpredictable times throughout the day. When it buzzes
the person has to answer questions about his situation, feelings, activities et cetera. An advantage is
that this catches people in real-life emotional experiences, but limitations are that people are not
often having intense emotional experiences and that a self-report as measurement is limited.
We need some kind of measurement to measure emotion. Psychologists today mainly rely on self-
reports, physiological measurements (like blood pressure) and behaviors (speech, facial expression,
hurting someone).
The reliability of a measure reflects the consistency or repeatability of its scores and is measured
from 0 to 1. If it is 0 it measures nothing, because the results are different every time. Validity is
whether the scores represent what they claim to represent. Different kinds of validity:
- The content of the measure should match the stated purposes, in a reasonably obvious way.
- If a task is supposed to measure some skill, it should be necessary to use that skill to succeed.
- All the subcomponents of the measure (such as separate items on a questionnaire) should correlate
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