Chapter 6 - Emotion and Affect

1. Chapter 6 - Emotion and Affect • What is Emotion? • Emotional Arousal • Some Important Emotions • Why Do We Have Emotions? • Individual Differences in Emotions • Arousal, Attention, and Performance • Emotional Intelligence (EQ) • Affect Regulation

2. Emotion and Affect • “Spam” • People cope very differently to this problem • How do emotions guide your behavior? • How do emotions provide you with feedback?

3. What is Emotion? • Emotion – conscious evaluative reaction to some event • Mood – feeling state not clearly linked to some event • Affect – automatic response that something is good or bad

4. What is Emotion? • Conscious Emotion • Powerful and unified feeling state • Automatic Affect • Quick response of liking or disliking; good or bad feelings

5. Is Bad Stronger Than Good?Names for Emotions • Bad emotions have more influence and importance than good emotions • Anthropolinguistic study of emotional language • 62% of emotion words refer to bad • 74% emotional traits were negative • Of 12 most common emotions listed 11 are negative

6. Emotional Arousal • James-Lange theory of emotion • Physiological arousal precedes emotional experience • Weakness: Physiological expression does not always constitute the same emotion • Facial Feedback Hypothesis • Feedback from face muscles evokes or magnifies emotions

8. Emotional Arousal • Canon-Bard theory of emotion • Thalamus sends two simultaneous messages to produces the emotional experience and the physiological arousal

10. Emotional Arousal • Schacter-Singer theory of emotion • Emotion has two components • Bodily state of arousal • Cognitive label specifying the emotion

12. Misattribution of Arousal • Excitation transfer • Mislabeling and relabeling arousal • Schachter & Singer (1962) • Dutton & Aron (1974)

13. Social Side of Sex - Can People Be Wrong About Whether They Are Sexually Aroused? • Ambiguities of sexual arousal • Sexual stimulation may effect the brain, or the genitals, neither, or both • Attitudes may prescribe reactions different than physiological response

14. Happiness • Affect balance • Frequency of positive minus frequency of negative emotions • Life satisfaction • General evaluation of one’s life and how it compares to some standard

15. Objective Roots of Happiness • Objective predictors – little effect, except • Couples with children are less happy than those without children • People with strong social connections are happier than those alone • Hedonistic treadmill

16. Subjective Roots of Happiness • Happiness is rooted in one’s outlook and genes • Subjective roots are more significant than objective roots of happiness

17. Increasing Happiness • Focused attention on positive things • Forgiving others • Gratitude for blessings • Practicing religious beliefs • Optimism • Happiness is linked to good health

18. Tradeoffs - Affect Intensity, or the Joys of Feeling Nothing • Some people have many intense experiences while others have relatively few • Affect Intensity Measure (AIM) • Positive life circumstances; more enjoyment from high affective intensity • May intentionally lower affect to prevent hurt

19. Anger • Emotional response to real or imagined threat or provocation • Angry people • Downplay risks and overlook dangers • Are impulsive and fail to consider consequences of actions

20. Causes of Anger • Perceived reaction to someone else’s wrongdoing • Greater anger accompanies • More harm the other person does • Other’s behavior viewed as random or arbitrary • Other’s behavior viewed as cruel

21. Why Does Anger Persist? • Motivates person to act aggressively and assertively • Anger may help reduce aggression • Act as a warning and allows resolution prior to the aggression • In the past, anger may have provided needed arousal

22. Expression of Anger • Never show anger • Vent one’s anger • Catharsis theory • Intense physical exercise • Get rid of anger • Decrease arousal

23. Soothing the Savage Beast PLAYVIDEO

24. Guilt and Shame • Moral emotion, involves feeling bad • Guilt focuses on action that is bad or wrong • Shame spreads to whole person • Guilt is constructive • Shame is destructive

25. Effects of Guilt • Apology can be motivated by guilt • Conveys implicit agreement that action was wrong • Suggests person will try not to do it again • Counteract implication that person doesn’t care about the relationship

26. Effects of Guilt • Amends can be motivated by guilt • Try harder to perform positive actions • Likely learned a lesson • Try to behave better in the future

27. Guilt and Relationships • Survivor guilt • Guilt is an interpersonal emotion • People try to make others feel guilt

28. Why Do We Have Emotions? • Comprise powerful and important feedback • Promote belongingness • Rarely causes behavior directly • Guide thinking and learning • Without emotion, difficulty adjusting to life and making decisions

29. Food for Thought - Mood and Food • People who feel bad – often eat badly • Both in terms of type and amount of food • May lead to binge eating • Mood (emotion) doesn’t cause eating (behavior) • You want to feel better and eating is a strategy for feeling better

30. Why Do We Have Emotions? • Comprise powerful and important feedback • Promote belongingness • Rarely causes behavior directly • Guide thinking and learning • Without emotion, difficulty adjusting to life and making decisions • Affect-as-information hypothesis

31. Why Do We Have Emotions? • Anticipated emotion guides decisions and choices • Affective forecasting • Help and Hurt Decision Making • Risk-as-feelings hypothesis • Strong conscious emotions influence risky behavior • Make people disregard probabilities

32. Positive Emotions • There are fewer positive emotions and they are studied less • Appear to solve problems of personal growth and development • Broaden-and-build theory

34. Positive Emotions • Good mood helps flexibility, creativity, and problem-solving • People in a good mood perform better, are more persistent, more motivated • Being in a good mood, avoid risks

35. Are Emotions Different Across Cultures? • Six basic emotions • Happiness, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and disgust • People in many different cultures can identify facial expression of these emotions

36. Cultural Differences in Emotion • Asian Americans place greater emphasis on emotional moderation than European Americans • Presence of Duchenne smiles • Collectivist cultural emotion based more on assessment of social worth, outer world, self-other relationships • Cultural difference in amount of concealment of emotion

37. Culture and Emotion PLAYVIDEO

38. Men and Women and Emotion • Contrary to stereotype, no gender differences exist • In young children, greater emotionality in boys • Men may be slightly more emotional, but women are more willing to report emotions

39. Men and Women and Love • Men fall in love faster • Women fall out of love faster • Men have more experiences of loving someone who does not reciprocate their love • Women have more experiences of receiving love but not reciprocating it • Men suffer more intense emotional distress after a break up

40. Arousal, Attention, and Performance • Yerkes-Dodson Law • Some arousal is good for performance • Too much arousal can hurt performance • Arousal helps narrow and focus attention • Easterbrook (1959)

42. Emotional Intelligence (EQ) • Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) • Perceiving Emotion • Facilitating Thought • Understanding Emotion • Managing Emotions

43. Affect Regulation Strategies • Altering your mood • Do things that produce good feelings • Do something to take your mind off the problem • Raise or lower your arousal level • Seek social support

44. Affect Regulation Strategies • Dealing with the problem • Reframe the problem • Use humor • Vent your feelings • Religious activities (i.e. prayer)

45. Goals of Affect Regulation • For both positive and negative emotions • Get into the mood • Get out of the mood • Prolong the mood • Prior to social interactions, tend to neutralize mood

46. Gender Differences in Affect Regulation • When distressed, women tend to ruminate; men to distract themselves • When feeling bad, women tend to eat; men turn to alcohol and drugs • Men use more humor to regulate affect; women more likely to shop of turn to friends

47. What Makes Us Human? • Human emotion is tied to meaning • Can respond emotionally to ideas and concepts • Larger range of emotion • Emotion aids in social acceptance • Provides feedback • Reliance on anticipated emotion • Regulation of emotions