Summary: Emotion – Michelle Shiota & James Kalat
Chapters: 1 t/m 7, 10, 15.
Chapter One: The Nature of Emotion
What is emotion?
A definition of emotion which includes elements shared with several widely recognized
definitions: “[Emotion is] an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus [including]
cognitive evaluations, subjective changes, autonomic and neural arousal, impulses to action,
and behaviour designed to have an effect upon the stimulus that initiated the complex
sequence.” (- Plutchik)
Key elements of this definition:
1. Emotions are functional: they have an effect on the world around us.
2. Emotions are reactions to stimuli (a specific event that takes place). This aspect of the
definition distinguishes emotions from purely internal drives such as hunger and thirst.
3. Emotion includes four aspects: cognitive evaluation (appraisal), feelings, physiological
changes and behaviour.
Modern theories of emotion
Basic/discrete emotions
= categories of emotional experiences thought to have evolved in response to specific kinds
of threats and opportunities faced by human ancestors.
We should think of emotions in terms of a few distinct categories.
Objective aspects of emotion such as physiological changes and other behaviours are
the most important.
Propositions of basic emotions:
Each basic emotion serves a distinct adaptive function (for example: disgust is
thought to be an evolved emotional response to threats of contamination).
Basic emotions serve to coordinate the individual aspects of emotion
producing a coherent package of responses that should help you respond
effectively to the situation at hand (for example: a fear response includes
increased tension, attention, subjective feeling associated with danger, etc.).
The conceptual categories people have for their emotions reflect distinctions
among naturally occurring categories of human psychological experience.
Criteria of basic emotions:
It should be universal among humans.
People should have a distinct, built-in way of expressing it.
It should be evident early in life.
It should be physiologically distinct.
Core affect and psychological construction
Arranging feelings across dimensions
Circumplex model: a model in which emotional feelings form a circle; emotions
close to each other on the circle are similar or likely to be experienced at the same
time.
, Core affect: a model for describing the feeling aspect of emotion,
emphasizing dimensions of pleasantness and arousal.
Emphasizing the evaluation of external stimuli
Evaluative space model: a model of attitudes proposing that evaluations of some
target’s goodness and badness are independent rather than opposites.
Difference with circumplex model: positive and negative affect should be
independent of each other, rather than opposite ends of a single dimension.
Psychological construction: process by which people develop mental concepts
linking different aspects of emotion to each other and to eliciting situations.
Categories of emotional experience are not created by nature, but by
psychological construction; the formation of mental concepts that people use
to organize their experience of the world.
The component process model
= the idea that emotions reflect the intersection of several appraisal dimensions that can be
combined in different ways.
Agreeing with basic/discrete emotions theory that emotions are real responses to
events in the environment and that they include multiple aspects that do hang
together in similar ways across cultures.
Differences:
1. Appraisal dimensions can combine in a variety of ways, producing
emotional responses that do not fit cleanly into a basic emotion category.
2. Various instances of the same general emotion will look different if the
underlying appraisals are not the same.
Agreeing with core affect/psychological construction theory that emotion space is
better described in terms of dimensions than in terms of categories.
In this model the cognitive appraisal aspect of emotion is the most important.
Our physiological and behavioural responses to emotional events are real and
predictable, but determined by the combined effects of each individual appraisal
dimension, rather than a predetermined package corresponding to a basic emotion
category.
Research methods: how do we study emotion?
Inducing emotion
Experimentally manipulate the variable you think is the cause, while holding other factors
constant, and then see whether the outcome changes in predictable ways.
Experience sampling: research method in which participants are asked to report on their
experience at random intervals throughout the day.
Advantages:
The method is face valid which means that researchers use stories/images with
emotional meaning on which most people can agree.
The method targets specific emotion states.
The method is ecologically valid which means that it resembles the real-life
situations in which people feel emotions.
, Measuring emotion
Self-reports: the participant’s descriptions of his/her emotional feelings.
Physiological measurements: measures of blood pressure, heart rate, sweating and
other variables that fluctuate during emotional arousal.
Sympathetic nervous system: the fight-flight branch of the autonomic
nervous system that readies the body for intense physical activity.
Parasympathetic nervous system: branch of the nervous system that
increases maintenance functions, conserving energy for later use and
facilitating digestion, growth and reproduction.
Hormones: molecules that carry instructions from the brain to other bodily
organs by way of the blood supply.
Measuring brain activity with EEG (method in which a researcher attaches
electrodes to someone’s scalp and measures momentary changes in the
electrical activity under each electrode) and fMRI (research method that
measures brain activity based on changes in oxygen uptake from the blood).
Behaviours: actions we can observe, such as facial and vocal expressions, speech,
running away and hurting someone.
Emotional response coherence: extent to which self-reports of emotion, physiological
changes and simple behaviours are correlated with each other.
Important aspects:
Reliability: the repeatability of the results of some measurement, expressed as a
correlation between one score and another.
Validity: whether a test measures what it claims to measure.
Chapter Two: The Evolution of Emotion
Basic principles of evolutionary theory
Natural selection: the process by which problematic genetic mutations are removed
from the population, whereas beneficial mutations spread through the population,
because of the mutation’s effect on reproduction.
Adaptation: a beneficial, genetically based characteristic that has become species-
typical as a result of natural selection.
Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA): the time and place in the past
when an adaptation spread through the population as a result of natural selection.
Emotions as adaptations
Emotions are adaptations, which means that:
Genes provide our capacity to experience emotions.
The genes needed for emotions began as random mutations long ago.
On average, individuals with emotions had more offspring.
The genes supporting emotions spread through later generations to become typical
of human species.
