Chapter 12 – Nature of Emotion: 6 Perennial Questions

What is an Emotion?

• Emotions exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena.
  • Emotions are felt and experienced at the subjective level. The feeling aspect is rooted in cognitive and mental processes.
  • The bodily arousal component includes our biological and physiological activities.
  • The purposive component gives emotion its goal-directed motivational state to take the action necessary to cope with the circumstances causing the emotion
  • The social-expressive component is the way we nonverbally communicate with others
• Different aspects of experience complement and coordinate with one another.
• Relationship between Emotion and Motivation
  • Emotions are one type of motive.
    • Some researchers argue that emotions constitute the primary motivational system.
• Emotions serve as an ongoing progress report to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going.
  • Positive emotions reflect our successful adaptation to situations we encounter
  • Negative emotions reflect our unsuccessful adaptation

What Causes Emotion?

• Figure 12.4. Encountering a significant life event, activates cognitive and biological processes that collectively activate the critical components of emotion, including feelings, bodily arousal, goal-directed purpose, and expression.

Debate between biology versus cognition

• Biology and Cognition
  • Argue for cognition first – individuals cannot respond emotionally unless they first cognitively appraise the meaning and personal significance of an event
    • If you take away the cognitive processing, the emotion disappears.
    • Lazarus stated that it is the person’s cognitive appraisal of the meaning of an event, rather than the event itself that sets the stage for the emotional experience.
    • Attribution theory.
  • Argue for biology first – emotional reactions do not necessarily require cognitive evaluations. Instead, neural activity and spontaneous facial expressions activate emotions.
    • Infants, because they are biologically sophisticated but cognitively limited, can respond emotionally.
    • Emotional experience can be induced through electrical stimulation of the brain or activity of facial muscles.

What Causes Emotions?

• Two-Systems View
  • Buck stated that people have two synchronous systems that activate and regulate emotion
  • First system is an innate, spontaneous, physiological system that reacts involuntarily to emotional stimuli.
  • Second system is an experience-based cognitive system that reacts interpretatively and socially.
  • Biological and Cognitive emotion systems interact
• Chicken-and-Egg Problem
  • Emotion is a process.
  • Emotions are involved in a feedback loop.
  • Cognition, arousal, preparation for action, feelings, expressive displays, and overt behavioral activity constitute the total experience that causes, influences, and regulates emotion.

How Many Emotions Are There?

• A biological view emphasizes primary emotions and downplays the importance of secondary or acquired emotions
  • Primary emotions – anger, disgust, sadness, surprise, fear, acceptance, joy and anticipation
  • Researchers agree that:
    • A small number of basic emotions exist
    • Basic emotions are universal to all humans and animals
    • Basic emotions are products of biology and evolution
• A cognitive view acknowledges the importance of the primary emotions, but it stresses that a lot of what is interesting about emotional experiences comes from individual, social, and cultural experiences.
  • People experience a limitless number of emotions
  • Different emotions can arise from the same biological reactions
    How Many Emotions Are There?
• Different perspective
  • Each basic emotion is not a single emotion but rather a family of related emotions
  • Each member of the family shares many characteristics of the basic emotion
  • 5 Families of emotion exist – anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment
• Basic Emotions
  • Basic emotions meet the following criteria:
    • Are innate rather than acquired or learned through experience or socialization
    • Arise from the same circumstances for all people
    • Are expressed uniquely and distinctively
    • Evoke a distinctive and highly predictable physiological patterned response

Basic Emotions

• Fear
  • An emotional reaction that arises from a person’s interpretation that the situation one faces is dangerous and a threat to one’s well-being
  • It functions as a warning signal for pending physical or psychological harm by manifesting itself in autonomic nervous system arousal
  • Fear warns us of our vulnerability and also facilitates learning and activates coping
• Anger
  • The most passionate emotion.
  • Usually the assertive, nonviolent expression of anger pays off because it serves as an alerting function.
  • Can be the most dangerous emotion
• Disgust
  • Getting rid of or getting away from a contaminated, deteriorated, or spoiled object.
    • In infancy
    • In adults
  • The function of disgust is rejection.
  • The wish to avoid disgusting objects motivates us to learn the coping behaviors needed to prevent encountering conditions that produce disgust
• Sadness
  • The most negative, aversive emotion
  • Comes from experiences of separation or failure
  • Sadness motivates people to restore the environment to its state before the distressing situation
• Threat and Harm
  • Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness work together to provide the person with an emotional system to deal effectively with all aspects of threat and harm
• Joy
  • Includes desirable outcomes related to personal success and interpersonal relatedness
  • Causes of joy are essentially the opposite of the causes of sadness
  • Joy facilitates our willingness to engage in social activities.
  • Joy has a soothing function, it allows us to preserve psychological well-being
• Interest
  • Most prevalent emotion in day-to-day functioning
  • It motivates our acts of exploration, creativity, desire to learn
• Motive Involvement and Satisfaction
  • The themes that unite the positive emotions of interest and joy

What Good Are The Emotions?

• Darwin argued that emotions help animals adapt to their surroundings
• Coping Functions
  • Functional view – emotions evolved because they helped animals deal with fundamental life tasks
  • Emotion and emotional behavior provides animals with ingrained and automated ways for coping with the major challenges and threats to their welfare
  • Emotions serve 8 purposes:
    • Protection, destruction, reproduction, reunion, affiliation, rejection, exploration, and orientation
  • The function of emotion is to prepare us with automatic, quick and historically successful responses to life’s fundamental tasks.
• All emotions are beneficial because they direct attention and channel behavior to where it is needed, given the situations we all face
• Social Functions – Emotions serve:
  • Communicate our feelings to others
  • Influence how others interact with us
  • Invite and facilitate social interaction
  • Create, maintain, and dissolve relationships
• Why we have emotions?
  • Emotions exist as solutions to life’s challenges, stresses and problems
  • Some researchers state that emotions disrupt ongoing activity, disorganize behavior, and rob us of our rationality and logic
  • For emotions to be adaptive across situations, they need to be regulated and controlled
  • Emotions often serve us well when we are able to self-regulate our emotion systems so that we regulate emotions and not the opposite.

What are the Differences between Emotion and Mood?

• Different Antecedents
  • Emotions and moods come from different causes
  • Emotions come from significant life situations and from appraisals of their significance to our well being
  • Moods come from processes that are not well defined
• Different Action-specificity
  • Emotions mostly influence behavior and direct specific courses of action
  • Moods mostly influence cognition and direct what the person thinks about
• Different time course
  • Emotions come from short-lived events that last seconds to minutes
  • Moods come from mental events that last hours to days
    What are the Differences between Emotion and Mood?
• Everyday mood
  • People generally experience a stream of moods
  • People are always feeling something
  • Mood exists as a positive affect state or as a negative affect state
    • Positive affect reflects pleasurable engagement
      • High – people feel enthusiastic
      • Low – people feel lethargic
    • Negative affect reflects unpleasant engagement
      • High – experience dissatisfaction, irritability
      • Low – feel calm, relaxed
• Negative affect and a bad mood support withdrawal
• Positive Affect
  • The everyday, low-level, general state of feeling good
  • Positive feelings typically remain outside our conscious attention
  • Conditions that make us feel good
    • People remain unaware of the causal source of their good moods
    • We often lose our positive mood by engaging in neutral or aversive events
• Benefits of feeling good
  • Compared to people in a neutral mood, people who feel good are more likely to help others, be more generous to themselves and others, and show greater intrinsic motivation