1. Unit 4: Emotions

2. Let’s think about this:
Take out notes/sheet of paper
Make a list of all of the emotions you can think of in 2 minutes
Ready… Set… GO!
Now group similar emotions into categories

3. Basic Emotions

4. 8 Basic Emotions Theory (Tomkins,1962)
Eight basic fundamental and universal affects: 1. Excitement 2. Joy 3. Surprise 4. Distress 5. Disgust 6. Anger 7. Shame 8. Fear

5. Emotion
Emotions are our body’s adaptive response. They involve the whole organism.
physiological arousal
expressive behaviors
conscious experience
Read slide.
Use the example of my house break-in…I experienced all of the three components of emotion, what do you think they were?
People have different takes on emotion—some are not afraid to show it and rather like it, while others don’t…what are you?
Handout 13-2 “The Need for Affect Scale”—goes with page 3 (Only if time permits)

6. Function of Emotions Increase, decrease, or regulate arousal
Direct perception and attention
Influence learning and memory
Organize and motivate
Communicate with others

7. Controversy
Does physiological arousal precede or follow your emotional experience?
Does cognition (thinking) precede emotion (feeling)?
Does your heart pound because you are afraid or do you feel afraid because your heart is pounding?
What do you think is right?

8. Commonsense View
When you become happy, your heart starts beating faster. First comes conscious awareness, then comes physiological activity.
Common sense tells most of us that we cry because we are sad, lash out because we are angry, tremble because we are afraid.
Read second line of slide.
Well, let’s do a little activity to find out more about this controversy.
Do “Facial Feedback & the James Lange Theory of Emotion” on page 4 and Handout 13-3.
Distribute the response sheets to all students.
Tell half the class to put a pencil in between their teeth without their lips touching it; tell the other half of the class to put the pencil in between their lips and their nose.
Tell them to evaluate how funny each comic/mem is, based on the rating scale, as you show them on the PowerPoint.
When they are finished tell them to compute their mean rating (round to a whole number) and circle it on their response sheet.
Go through each number and see where students rank.

9. 1

10. 2

11. 3

12. 4

13. 5

14. 6

15. 7

16. 8

17. 9

18. 10
So there are many people who believe that when we become consciously aware of an emotion, we will then experience the physiological response…basically, we cry because we feel sad.
What do you think? Do we smile because we are happy or are we happy because we smile?
The results of experiments, such as the one we just did, suggest that facial expressions help determine emotional reactions.
Think about it…why do you think that I told you to hold the pencil the way I did? What does that do to your facial expressions?
This finding is consistent with the James-Lange theory of emotion.

19. James-Lange Theory
The James-Lange Theory proposes that physiological activity precedes the emotional experience.
James suggested that “we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.”
Research confirms this by showing that when people have been instructed to mold their faces in ways that mimic expressions of the basic emotions, including happiness, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness, they also experience those emotions.
Just activating the smiling muscles by holding a pen in the teeth (rather than with the lips which activates frowning muscles) is enough to make cartoons seem more amusing.
Think about a time that either you were driving or you were a passenger in a car that swerved at something or had another car swerve towards you. Just after the event happened you might have noticed your heart racing and then, shaking with fright, you felt the whoosh of emotion.
So the picture on the slide shows that the sight of the oncoming car leads the heart to begin to pound, which then causes us to feel fear.
Therefore, your feeling of fear followed your body’s response.
This is the idea that James proposed along with Danish physiologist Carl Lange, but there is a second theory of emotion, the Cannon-Bard theory; who remembers what this theory states?

20. Cannon-Bard
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.
The James-Lange theory struck U.S. physiologist Walter Cannon as implausible because he suggested that the body’s responses were not distinct enough to evoke different emotions and physiological responses seemed too slow to trigger sudden emotions.
Cannon and Bard concluded that physiological arousal and our emotional experience occur simultaneously.
Basically, the emotion-triggering stimulus is routed simultaneously to the brain’s cortex, causing the subjective awareness of emotion, and to the sympathetic nervous system, causing the body’s arousal. (see picture on slide)
So think about this scenario—imagine that your brain could not sense your heart pounding or your stomach churning which might happen if you were nervous, scared, or excited…according to the two theories, how would this affect your experienced emotion?
Cannon and Bard would have expected you to experience emotions normally, because they believed emotions occur separately from (though simultaneously with) the body’s arousal.
James and Lange would have expected greatly diminished emotions because they believed that to experience emotion you must first perceive your body’s arousal, which you wouldn’t in this particular example.

21. Two-Factor Theory
Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed a theory which suggests our physiology and cognitions create emotions. Emotions have two factors–physical arousal and cognitive label.
Following James, Lange, Cannon and Bard, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed a third theory, which stated that our physiology and our cognitions (perceptions, memories, and interpretations) together create emotion.
In their two-factor theory, emotions therefore have two ingredients: physical arousal and a cognitive label.
Like James and Lange, they presumed that our experience of emotion grows from our awareness of our body’s arousal, yet like Cannon and Bard, they also believed that emotions are physiologically similar, so an emotional experience requires a conscious interpretation of the arousal. (see picture on slide)

22. Theories of emotions

23. Which one? – Cannon-Bard
Cannon Bard theory

24. Which one? – Two-Factor
Two factor theory

25. Which one? – James-Lange
James Lange theory

26. Arousal and Performance
Arousal in short spurts is adaptive. We perform better under moderate arousal, but optimal performance varies with task difficulty – lower levels of arousal for difficult tasks, higher levels of arousal for easy tasks.
OBJECTIVE 3| Discuss the relationship between arousal and performance.
prolonged physical arousal, produced by sustained stress, taxes the body.
Yet in many situations arousal is adaptive.
Too little arousal (say sleepiness) can be as disruptive as extremely high levels—for example, when taking an exam, you want to be moderately aroused, but not trembling with nervousness.

27. Physiological Similarities
Physiological responses related to the emotions of fear, anger, love, and boredom are very similar.
OBJECTIVE 4| Name three emotions that involve similar physiological arousal.
So, let’s take a look at the physiological similarities of different emotions.
Imagine if you were conducting an experiment where four different people, in four different rooms, were watching four different types of films (horror, anger-provoking, sexually arousing, and a boring film).
Do you think that if you sat in a control room monitoring the people’s physiological responses (measuring things like perspiration, breathing and heart rates) that you could tell who was frightened, angry, sexually aroused, or bored?
With training, you could probably pick out the bored viewer, but discerning physiological differences among fear, anger, and sexual arousal would be much more difficult.
So how do we tell the difference?
Well, although fear and joy can prompt a similar increased heart rate, they stimulate different facial muscles—during fear, brow muscles tense; during joy, the muscles in the cheek and under the eye pull into a smile.
Excitement and fear involve a similar
physiological arousal.

28. Physiological Similarities
Polygraph test
Ok, lie detector tests…what do you think…do they work?
First off, does anyone know how they work?
They use a machine to measure several physical responses that accompany emotion, such as changes in breathing, cardiovascular activity, and perspiration.
Are they accurate? Not always.
There are two main problems:
First, as you have seen, our physiological arousal is much the same from one emotion to another—anxiety, irritation, and guilt all prompt similar physiological reactivity.
Second, these tests err about one-third of the time, especially when innocent people respond with heightened tension to the accusations implied by the relevant questions.
How can you fool a polygraph test? Savvy criminals and spies have been able to beat the test by augmenting their arousal to control questions, such as by biting their tongues.
Serial rapist and killer Gary Ridgway, who admitted to 48 Seattle-area murders (“I killed so many women I have a hard time keeping them straight”), was an early suspect but had been cleared after passing a polygraph test.

29. Physiological Similarities
An arousal response to one event spills over into our response to the next event. Arousal from a soccer match can fuel anger, which may lead to rioting.
OBJECTIVE 6| Explain how spillover effect influences our experience of emotion.
Sometimes our arousal response to one event can spill over into our response to the next event.
Imagine arriving home after an invigorating run and finding a message that you got a longed-for job.
With arousal lingering from the run, would you feel more elated than if you received this news after awakening from a nap?
To find out whether this spillover effect exists, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer aroused college men with injections of the hormone epinephrine (adrenaline). They then put the men into a room with the experimenter’s accomplice who either acted euphoric or irritated. How do you think the men reacted…what would it depend on?
If the men were told to expect a physical response, such as heart racing, the body flushing, and breathing to become more rapid, the men blamed this reaction on the injection and felt little emotion.
For those who were told that the injection would not have any effect, but yet still felt those same effects, they apparently “caught” the emotion that was being displayed by the other person in the room.
Therefore, just as the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory predicts, arousal + a label = emotion.
The point to remember: Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it.
Arousal fuels emotions, cognition channels it.

30. 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?
Must cognition precede emotion?
Can we have emotional reaction without conscious thinking?

31. Think about it…whether we fear something or not can all depend on our perception of the situation.
If any of the people in the above slide were walking down a dark alley, which ones would you be most afraid of?
Most people would say the two men on the right because people perceive them to look scarier…well, here is who they all are:
Top left – Aileen Wuornos was the subject of the popular motion picture, called 'Monster‘ (with Charlize Theron), for her string of seven killings in Florida while working as a prostitute. She was given the death penalty and died by lethal injection in 2002.
Top right – Charles Manson is a convicted serial killer who has become an icon of evil. In the late 1960s, Manson founded a hippie cult group known as "the Family" whom he manipulated into brutally killing others on his behalf.
Bottom left – Ted Bundy, one of America’s most infamous serial killers, admitting to raping, murdering, and mutilating the bodies of over 40 women (he even engaged in necrophilia, which is having sex with a corpse).
Bottom right – Dennis Rader terrorized the city of Wichita, Kansas, when he callously murdered 10 people over the span of 30 years, despite being president of his church and a Cub Scout leader in his son's troop. He dubbed himself the BTK killer which stands for “blind, torture, and kill”.

32. Cognition does not always precede emotion.
Two Routes to Emotion
Because our brains process and react to vast amounts of information without our conscious awareness, some emotional responses do not require conscious thinking,
Yet emotion researcher Richard Lazarus does note that even instantaneously felt emotions require some sort of cognitive appraisal of the situation; otherwise, how would we know what we are reacting to?
This appraisal may be effortless and we may not be conscious of it, but it is still a mental function.
Click and read slide.
Complex emotions such as guilt, happiness, and love most clearly arise from our interpretations and expectations.
Cognition does not always precede emotion.

33. Highly emotional people are intense partly because of their interpretations—they may personalize events as being somehow directed at them, and they may generalize their experiences by blowing single incidents out of proportion. (click slide)
We may attribute a bad exam grade to an unfair exam and feel angry, to our own inability and feel depressed, or to a lack of preparation and feel accepting.
Zajonc and LeDoux have demonstrated that some emotional responses, such as simple likes, dislikes, and fears, involve no conscious thinking.
For example, we may fear the spider, even if we “know” it is harmless, but these responses are difficult to alter by changing our thinking. (picture is on next slide)

34. Reading Emotions Activity Instructions
Take out notes & a phone or tablet
Go to kjorlien.weebly.com > BLOG > open the link titled “Can you Read People’s emotions?”
Complete quiz
Write down your score
Answer the following questions:
How did you decide what feeling was displayed?
Do you think that you are good at understanding facial cues?
Give an example of a time when you misread a facial cue in real life.

35. Expressed Emotion
Emotions are expressed on the face, by the body, and by the intonation of voice. Is this non-verbal language of emotion universal?
So we’ve talked about embodied emotion, meaning how our bodies feel different emotions, but we also need to acknowledge that emotions are expressed on the face, by the body, and by the intonation of our voice.
All of us communicate nonverbally, as well as verbally, and there are certain actions that you perceive in certain ways.
For example:
1. A firm handshake = outgoing
2. An expressive personality, averted glance or a stare = convey intimacy, submission or dominance.
Even in an experiment, gazing in the eyes of another person of the opposite sex can cause that person to feel somewhat more attracted to the other person.
So even though we know that there is a non-verbal language of emotion, is it universal across cultures?

36. Nonverbal Communication
Most of us are good at deciphering emotions through non-verbal communication. In a crowd of faces a single angry face will “pop out” faster than a single happy face (Fox et al. 2000).
Most of us are good enough to read nonverbal cues, which makes us adept at understanding emotions in silent films—we are also good at detecting nonverbal threats.
Even in other languages, people most readily detect anger—when viewing subliminally flashed words, we more often sense the presence of a negative word, such as snake or bomb and angry faces may pop out of a crowd of faces. (click slide to show the faces)
By exposing different parts of emotion-laden faces, Robert Kestenbaum discovered that we read fear and anger mostly from the eyes, and happiness from the mouth.
Fleeting changes in expression also help us read a face—and some are more sensitive to this than others.
Introverts tend to do better at reading others’ emotions, although extraverts are themselves easier to read—why do you think this is?

37. Experience also has a major impact on our ability to read particular emotions
Read slide.
For example—shown a series of faces that morphed from sadness or fear to anger, physically abused children are much quicker than other children to see anger; in fact, if you show them a face that is 60% fear and 40% anger, they are as likely to perceive anger as fear.
Their perceptions become sensitively attuned to glimmers of danger signals that non-abused children miss.

38. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior
Women are much better at discerning nonverbal emotions than men. When shown sad, happy, and scary film clips women expressed more emotions than men.
OBJECTIVE 9| Describe some gender differences in perceiving and communicating emotions.
So, how many of you believe in women’s intuition?
In her analysis of 125 studies of sensitivity to nonverbal cues, Judith Hall discerned that women generally surpass men at reading people’s emotional cues.
This ability also gives women an edge in spotting lies.
Women have also surpassed men in discerning whether a male-female couple is a genuine romantic couple or a posed phony couple.

39. Gender Differences in Emotion
Women’s nonverbal sensitivity helps explain their greater emotional literacy
Women tend to be more open to their feelings
Women’s nonverbal sensitivity helps explain their greater emotional literacy.
Pick a female student and ask them how they will feel when they say goodbye to their friends after graduation? Now pick a male student.
When you ask girls this question, you are more likely to see girls express more complex emotions than if you asked a guy the same question.
Women might say, “It will be bittersweet; I’ll feel both happy and sad”; while men may simply say, “I’ll feel bad.”
Click for comic.
Women’s skill at decoding others’ emotions may also contribute to their greater emotional responsiveness in both positive and negative situations—women tend to be more open to their feelings.

40. Empathy and Gender
Women are more likely to describe themselves as empathetic then men
Small gender gap in feeling empathy but females are more likely to express empathy
That helps explain the extremely strong perception that emotionality is “more true of women”—a perception expressed by nearly 100 % of 18- to 29-year-old Americans.
When surveyed, women are also far more likely than men to describe themselves as empathetic. (explain empathy and click slide for the comic)
Physiological measures of empathy, such as one’s heart rate while seeing another’s distress, actually reveals that there is a relatively small gender gap in feeling empathy, but females are more likely to express empathy. (such as crying or reporting distress if observing someone in the same state.)
Women also tend to experience emotional events more deeply—with more brain activation in areas sensitive to emotion.
Lastly, people are able to spot, more often than with men, a women’s recall of being happy (when they watch the woman recounting a time when she was happy, but they are unable to actually hear her say anything); but men surpassed women in conveying anger.

41. Nonverbal Communication
There are many classes and guidebooks that offer advice on how to interpret nonverbal signals when negotiating a business deal, selling a product, or flirting:
Fidgeting, for example, may reveal anxiety or boredom.
Touching could be a sign that you like someone.
A cold stare or the avoidance of eye contact can signify hostility.
Even a single gesture can convey very different emotions—for example, folded arms can signify either irritation or relaxation.
The growing awareness that we communicate through the body’s silent language has led to studies of how job applicants and interviewers communicate (or miscommunicate) nonverbally.

42. Detecting Emotions Through Text
It is easy to misread communication through and text message
How do you make emotions known in text or ?
But it is important to take into account that many of these gestures, facial expressions, and tones of voice are all absent in computer-based communication—is this good or bad?
Problem—it is easy to misread ed communications, where the absence of expressive emotion can make for ambiguous emotion.
How do you make your emotions known in text, IM, or ? (click for picture)

43. Culture and Emotional Expression
Many expressions are understood across cultures.
OBJECTIVE 11| Discuss the culture-specific and culturally universal aspects of emotional expression, and explain how emotional expressions can enhance survival.
So now let’s take a look at facial expressions…do they have different meanings in different cultures?
Check it out in the slide above, what are the different emotions?
Regardless of your cultural background, you probably did pretty well figuring out the emotions—there isn’t a culture that frowns when they are happy…many of these emotions are pretty universal.
Despite some differences, cultures and languages share many similarities in the ways they categorize emotions, such as fear, anger, and happiness.
So, do people from different cultures share these similarities because they share experiences, such as American movies, the BBC, and CNN?
No—even people in isolated parts of New Guinea displayed the same emotions when pretending that their child had died.
Facial expressions do contain some nonverbal accents that provide clues to one’s culture—so it isn’t surprising that data from 182 studies show slightly enhanced accuracy when people judge emotions from their own culture.
Children’s facial expressions—even those of blind children who have never seen a face—are also universal.

44. Culture and Emotional Expression
Scientific research on nonverbal communication and behavior began with the 1872 publication of Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
Darwin believed that our ancestors communicated with facial expressions (before language development), which led to survival
The idea that facial muscles speak a fairly universal language would not have surprised Charles Darwin. (click slide)
He speculated that in prehistoric times, before our ancestors communicated in words, their ability to convey threats, greetings, and submission with facial expressions helped them survive.
Smiles, too, are social phenomena as well as emotional reflexes—bowlers don’t smile when they bowl a strike, they do it when they turn to face the crowd—even euphoric Olympic gold medal winners don’t smile when they are awaiting their ceremony, but they do when interacting with officials and facing the crowd and the cameras.
It has also been adaptive for us to interpret faces in particular contexts—people tend to judge an angry face set in a frightening situation as afraid, and vice versa.
Charles Darwin ( )

45. Emotions are Adaptive
Surprise raises the eyebrows and widens the eyes, enabling us to take in more info
Disgust wrinkles the nose, closing it from foul odors
Emotional expressions may enhance our survival in other ways, too:
Surprise raises the eyebrows and widens the eyes, enabling us to take in more information.
(Click slide) Disgust wrinkles the nose, closing it from foul odors.
Although cultures share a universal facial language for basic emotions, they differ in how much emotion they actually express.

46. The Effects of Facial Expression
If facial expressions are manipulated, like furrowing
brows, people feel sad while looking at sad pictures.
OBJECTIVE 12| Discuss the facial feedback and behavior feedback phenomena, and give an example of each.
As William James struggled with feelings of depression and grief, he came to believe that we can control emotions by going “through the outward movements” of any emotion we want to experience.
So, to feel cheerful—smile and act cheerful!
Recent findings also support James’ theory that expressions not only communicate emotion, they also amplify and regulate it.
Basically, if you keep a scowl on your face and then really relax it and turn it into a smile, it will usually lift your mood.
The same can be seen in the above picture…read slide.
Smile warmly on the outside and you feel better on the inside, and vice versa—it is very similar to the cartoon activity done previously.
Attaching two golf tees to the face and making their tips touch causes the brow to furrow.