1. Unit 8: Motivation, Emotion and Stress
WHS AP Psychology
Unit 8: Motivation, Emotion and Stress
Essential Task 8-7: Compare and contrast the major theories of emotion James–Lange Theory, Cognitive Appraisal Theory, Schachter two-factor theory, Cannon–Bard Theory and Opponent Process Theory.
Logo Green is R=8 G=138 B= Blue is R= 0 G=110 B=184
Border Grey is R=74 G=69 B=64

2. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Drive Reduction Theory
Motivation & Emotion
Stress
Sources
Measures
Theories
Effects
Coping
Motivation
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Drive Reduction Theory
Arousal Theory
Intrinsic/
Extrinsic Motivation
Human Drives
Theories of Emotion
James-Lange
Cognitive Appraisal
Schachter two-factor
Cannon-Bard
Opponent Process
Explain complex motives (eating, aggression, achievement and sex)
We are here

3. Essential Task 8-7: What are emotions? Theories of Emotion
Outline
What are emotions?
Theories of Emotion
James–Lange Theory
Cannon–Bard Theory
Cognitive Appraisal Theory
Schachter Two-factor theory
Opponent Process Theory

4. Emotion The experience of feelings
Can activate and affect behavior but it is more difficult to predict the behavior prompted by a motivation
Where do emotions come from? Why do we have them? What are they made of?

5. Basic Emotions Plutchik proposed that there are eight basic emotions
Fear
Surprise
Sadness
Disgust
Anger
Anticipation
Joy
Acceptance

6. Plutchik’s Basic Emotions

8. Basic Emotions
Some have criticized Plutchik’s model as applying only to English-speakers
Primary vs. Secondary Emotions
Be evident in all cultures
Contribute to survival
Distinct facial expression
Evident in Nonhuman primates
Revised model of basic emotions includes:
Happiness
Surprise
Sadness
Fear
Disgust
Anger

10. Theories James-Lange Theory Cannon-Bard Theory Schachter-Singer Theory
Opponent Process Theory
Cognitive-Appraisal Theory

11. James-Lange Theory
William James and Carl Lange proposed an idea that was diametrically opposed to the common-sense view. The James-Lange Theory proposes that physiological activity precedes the emotional experience.

12. James-Lange theory Body = emotion
“Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form; pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run... But we should not actually feel afraid.” (William James, 1890)
If there’s no body, no emotion. “Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form; pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry.”
Now what James is saying is, the experience of an emotion is the experience of the body. If you don’t have a body, you can’t really have an emotion.
Think about it. Let’s say you have a crush on one of your classmates. Let’s say that Bob here has a crush on Jane [picking out two students who sit very far away from each other]. Now, when Jane walks by Bob, Bob maybe feels a little nervous. His heart starts beating a little faster, he sweats a little, he maybe even blushes, and he looks down at his books because he doesn’t want her SEEING him sweating and blushing and “OMG is she looking over here or not and WHEW I’m nervous...” Now, what if Bob didn’t have this bodily reaction? Can you have a crush on someone without having a bodily reaction when the come near? Would you say that it’s a real crush, if your heart doesn’t start beating a little faster?
James, 1890, v. 2, p. 449 (Gleitman)

13. James-Lange theory
Or to take another example. Imagine you are on a roller coaster. A really exciting one, one that shoots off at race-car speed, zooms up three hundred meters, and then zooms straight down again! But now imagine that you’re in the roller coaster, but you don’t have a body. You’re just a brain in a jar. You can’t feel your heart beating, there’s no adrenaline rush, etc. Now, do you think the brain-in-a-jar you is as excited as the full-body you? Probably not. Do you think so? What would be the experience of a brain-in-a-jar?

14. 2. James-Lange theory Testing the theory:
Hypothesis 1: You need the body in order to feel emotions.
Test: Interview people with high vs. low spinal cord injuries
High spinal cord injury:
“Sometimes I act angry... But it doesn’t have the heat to it that it used to. It’s a mental kind of anger.”
The important aspect of their theory is that it has a testable prediction: the body matters! If you don’t have your body, you can’t have the emotion. Now, is that true?
Well, James and Lange didn’t actually do any experiments to see if their theory was true. It’s a little bit hard to do those experiments, actually. We haven’t really gotten to the point where we can keep live brains in a jar. But there’s some evidence that part of their argument– that the body is essential for experiencing an emotion– is true. In a study done to test their theory, people with spinal cord injuries were interviewed about their emotional experiences. It was found that, basically, the more of your body that was paralyzed, the less intense you said your emotions were. So people with very high spinal cord injuries, meaning that most of their body had no feeling, would say things like this: “Sometimes I act angry... But it doesn’t have the heat to it that it used to. It’s a mental kind of anger.”
This kind of evidence suggests that some feedback from the body is needed for the full experience of an emotion.
Hohman, 1966, pp (Carlson)

15. James-Lange theory Testing the theory:
Hypothesis 1: You need the body in order to feel emotions.
Results 1: The body may be necessary to have a full emotional experience.
So the answer seems to be a partial “yes.” It seems that the less feedback you have from the body, the less extreme your emotions are.
But the people who could feel almost none of their body did still seem to have emotions of some sort, though
This kind of evidence suggests that some feedback from the body is needed for the full experience of an emotion.

16. James-Lange theory Testing the theory:
Hypothesis 1: You need the body in order to feel emotions
Results 1: The body may be necessary to have a full emotional experience.
Hypothesis 2: All you need is your body to know what emotion to feel.
But the James-Lange theory goes further than just saying that we need a body to feel an emotion. It says that in fact the body is the CAUSE of the emotion, as if the body is ALL that is needed. It says that the body reacts first, and THEN we feel the emotion. The evidence from paralyzed people can’t prove that one bodily reaction creates each emotion.

17. James-Lange theory Situation  bodily reaction  emotion   FEAR
 
FEAR or
So remember that the James-Lange theory proposes that we SEE something [bug], our body REACTS in a certain way [beating heart], and THAT is what causes the emotion of fear [“fear”]. So not only do we NEED the body, but, basically, ALL we need is the body.
But how can we be sure, if our heart is beating fast, that it’s fear? [“love”]
Or... could it be LOVE?
Ok. I’d like you to think a moment. Could your body fool you into thinking that you feel love for this bug? Why not?
[looking for two answers: 1. “I just know; I wouldn’t look at an insect and think “love”” [mind] or 2. it’s not just a heart beating that makes me feel fear or love, there are other things going on too, different hormones or something [specific body symptoms]
Good; so there’s something going on in the mind... But let’s look at the body hypothesis again. There may be subtle differences in the body that let us know the difference between “fear” and “love.”
LOVE?

18. James-Lange theory Testing the theory:
Hypothesis 1: You need the body in order to feel emotions
Results 1: The body may be necessary to have a full emotional experience.
Hypothesis 2: The body can tell you precisely which emotion to feel.
Test: Gave people a dose of adrenaline:
“I feel as if I’m angry or afraid”
To see if you could use bodily signals alone to feel an emotion, some researchers simply gave participants a shot of adrenaline. Adrenaline is a neurotransmitter that you’ve probably heard of before; it is released in your body when you get scared, excited, or angry, and makes you ready for that “flight or fight” response that we learned about before. As you might expect, participants had an odd reaction to the adrenaline. Their body was ready for something, but they couldn’t figure out what. They would say things like “I feel as if I’m angry, or afraid, but I’m not, somehow...!”
Similarly to the study interviewing people who were paralyzed, the participants didn’t quite have the FULL feeling of an emotion. It was “as if” they were angry; but not fully.

19. James-Lange theory Testing the theory:
Hypothesis 1: You need the body in order to feel emotions
Results 1: The body may be necessary to have a full emotional experience.
Hypothesis 2: The body can tell you precisely which emotion to feel.
Results 2: The body is not ALL that is necessary to have a fully emotional experience.
So basically, we’ve now shown that we need the body to have a fully emotional experience– it doesn’t just happen in the brain. But we’ve also shown that the body by itself can’t create an emotion.
What’s missing? Well, our mind, of course; our ability to interpret.

20. Facial-Feedback
Stimuls invokes physiological arousal including movement of facial muscles
Brain interprets facial expression which gives rise to your emotion
Sequence
Stimulus (See snake)
Make a face (fearful)
Brain reads face
Emotion (fear)

21. Spill over effect
An arousal response to one event spills over into our response to the next event. Spill over effect
OBJECTIVE 6| Explain how spillover effect influences our experience of emotion.
Arousal from a soccer match can fuel anger, which may lead to rioting.
Arousal fuels emotion, cognition channels it.

22. Cannon-Bard Theory
Walter Cannon and Phillip Bard questioned the James-Lange Theory and proposed that an emotion-triggering stimulus and the body's arousal take place simultaneously.
1) Cannon suggested that body’s responses were not distinct enough to evoke different emotions. 2) Physiological responses seemed too slow to trigger sudden emotions.

23. Cannon-Bard Theory See snake, run and fear simultaneous
Stimulus to thalamus -- sends simultaneous messages to:
Lymbic system (arousal)
Cortex (fear)

24. Cognitive-Appraisal Theory
Sequence
Stimulus (object, event, or thought)
Appraisal of how this affects your well-being (consciously or unconsciously)
Emotion (fear, anger, happiness, …)
Physiological responses and behavior
For an emotion to occur, it is necessary to first think about the situation.

25. Can we change our emotions by changing our thinking?
Cognition and Emotion
What is the connection between how we think (cognition) and how we feel (emotion)?
Can we change our emotions by changing our thinking?

26. Schachter-Singer Theory Two-Factor Theory
Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed yet another theory which suggests our physiology and cognitions create emotions. Emotions have two factors–physical arousal and cognitive label.

27. The Schachter theory Situation  bodily reaction  emotion
+ cognitive appraisal 
FEAR 
So now we get to the final theory we’ll discuss today; the Schacter theory. In this theory, your thoughts and the body both are needed in order to create an emotion. In this theory, we SEE something [bug], our body REACTS in a certain way [beating heart] AND we think “ewwww! Bug! Lots of legs! Some kind of awful disease! I hate bugs! And my heart is beating really fast! I think it’s time to get out of here!” and those two things TOGETHER are is what causes the emotion of fear [“fear”]. And... Probably not not love.
Now, that’s a pretty complicated picture. So let’s quickly compare each of the three theories again with all these pictures.
LOVE

28. 3. The Schachter theory Testing the theory:
Hypothesis: The same bodily reaction will cause one emotion in one situation, and another emotion in a different situation.
Give people a dose of adrenaline;
Put them in different situations;
What happens?
Of course, explained like this it might sound like it just “makes sense,” but as always, we would like a little bit of actual proof that this is what happens. To test the theory, we need a strong hypothesis that the theory would predict.
The Schachter theory assumes that the body cannot tell us exactly what we are or should be feeling. Instead, even if we have a fast bodily reaction to something, it is our mind that decides what the emotion will be. In other words, will the same bodily reaction be interpreted in different ways if you are in different situations?
Schachter & Singer did a very fun experiment to test exactly that question. Basically, they gave people a dose of adrenaline, which created a certain bodily reaction [beating heart]; but then they put them in different situations [bug/face]. The idea is that the cognitive appraisal of the situation should influence the emotion you feel. SO if you are with a giant bug, you’d feel fear; if you’re with a gorgeous man, you’d feel love. Or woman. In the pictures we’ve been using so far, we have bodily reaction; two DIFFERENT situations; and then two DIFFERENT emotions.

29. 3. The Schachter theory Testing the theory: Schachter & Singer 1962:
(didn’t take pill)
(know what
pill does)
VERY ANGRY!
Medium angry!
Least angry
Ok, in a moment I’m going to ask you to make some predictions, so be ready.
Now in the real study, to make the situations, they didn’t bring in giant bugs, or even Brad Pitt, sadly. In the real experiment, instead of a giant bug, they trained a “confederate” to act as a co-participant who was really angry and annoyed at everything; and instead of movie stars, there was just a confederate who was super, super excited and happy about everything. So the two situations were a super-angry co-participant, or a super-happy co-participant.
Now, like good scientists, they of course some control groups. They had two control groups: people who didn’t take the adrenaline pill at all; and people who had taken the adrenaline pill but were told what the pill would do to them.
Ok. Take a look at those three groups in blue. Each of the groups had to deal with a very angry co-participant. Which group do you think was the angriest? First, second, or third?
Now what does this show us? It shows that even the very same feelings in the body cannot create the very same emotion; instead, it depends on how we interpret those feelings in the body, in the CONTEXT of the situation. It proves, in other words, that the mind has a great deal of control over how we feel. It also shows, however, that our body matters too. If your body is reacting in a certain way, and you have no reason to ignore it, then you will naturally interpret it as a part of your emotion; you will actually FEEL happier or angrier.
Now, next time you’re really angry at your best friend, or your parents, or your exam... If you don’t want to feel angry, it might do you some good to act like these people who knew what the pill was going to do for their body!
VERY EXCITED!
Medium excited!
Least excited

30. Opponent Process Theory
Opponent process theory suggests that any given emotion also has an opposed emotion. (Fear/Relief or Sadness/Happiness)
Activation of one member of the pair automatically suppresses the opposite emotion
But the opposing emotion can serve to diminish the intensity of the initial emotion.

31. Opponent-Process Theory
Solomon and Corbit (1974)
The opponent-process theory states that when one emotion is experienced, the other is suppressed. For example, if you are frightened by a mean dog, the emotion of fear is expressed and relief is suppressed. If the fear-causing stimulus continues to be present, after a while the fear decreases and the relief intensifies.

32. Opponent Process Theory

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