EMOTION

 Responses that involve:  psychological arousal  Expressive behaviors  Conscious experience  Example:  Did you make the team? Posting of the names that did by the locker rooms. You and your friend both tried out for the football team.  Psychological – increased heart rate as you read the good news, decreased heart rate as you console your disappointed friend  Expressive – Smiling and pumping your first after seeing your name, looking the smile and putting your arm around your friend’s shoulder when you notice her name is missing  Conscious – interpreting what it means to be a member, and what it means to your friend to be left out. WHAT IS EMOTION?

 Humans are the most emotional among different species  Has sparked many debates  2 main debates  What comes first, psychological arousal or the subjective experience of an emotion? Do you feel happy because your heart is pounding or is your heart pounding because you feel happy?  Can we react emotionally before appraising a situation, or does thinking always precede emotion? Did you feel joy at seeing your name on the list before you thought about what that meant, or did you interpret the situation and then feel joy? WHO IS EMOTIONAL?

 James-Lange Theory  William James and Carl Lange  Our experience of emotion is our awareness of our psychological responses to an emotion-arousing stimulus  Ex: Fire alarm sounds, you start shaking, you become aware of the shaking and you label this reaction as fear THEORIES OF EMOTION

 Cannon-Bard Theory  Walter Cannon (James son in law)  Emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers  Psychological responses  Subjective experience of emotion  The heart races whether we’re frightened, angry or exhilarated. So how can we label that as fear if it is because we are excited?  How can the same psychological reaction trigger different emotional interpretations?  Peeling an onion THEORIES OF EMOTION

 2 Factor Theory  Stanley Schachter and Jermone Singer  To experience emotion, one must  Be physically aroused  Cognitively label the arousal  Bottom line: only distinguishing characteristic among emotions is how we label the arousal we are feeling.  If your aroused and you believe that appropriate emption is fear, you’ll feel afraid.  If you think anger is the app. Emotion, you’ll instead explain your arousal as anger. Our physical experiences of emotion are so similar that we must label the emotion in order to experience it. THEORIES OF EMOTION

Sight of oncoming car (Stimulus) Cannon-Bard Theory Pounding Heart (arousal) Two-Factor Theory Pounding Heart (stimulus) Fear (Emotion) Cognitive Label “I’m afraid” Fear (emotion James-Lange Theory Pounding heart (arousal) Fear (emotion) THREE THEORIES

 Non verbal communication  Body language  Not saying verbally your thoughts, but using “nonverbal” ways to communicate it.  Facial expressions Gender and culture on Emotion  Research shows that women are better than men at reading nonverbal emotional cues.  Harder to read the cues of those of the opposite sex than your own  American women are known to smile more, gesture and have more expressive faces, talk about emotions more  Men express ANGER more openly than women EXPRESSIONS OF EMOTION