PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion

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PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion Lecture 4
Professor Gerald Cupchik cupchik_at_utsc.utoronto.ca
S-634 Office Hours Thurs. 10-11, 2-3
T.A. Michelle Hilscher hilscher_at_utsc.utoronto.ca
S-150 Office Hours Thurs. 10-11, 2-3
Course Website www.utsc.utoronto.ca/cupchik
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FIRST HALF TVO FINALS LECTURE 2008 Two Faces
of Emotion Actions and Reactions
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I - BASIC QUESTIONS Scholars and people in
everyday life share an interest in the topic of
emotion, but ask different kinds of
questions. People in their everyday lives ask
very practical questions about their own emotions
and those of others. How can I better deal with
my emotions? Can I learn to recognize the
emotions of others more accurately? Why cant I
remember how I felt in such and such a
situationyesterdaylong ago? Psychologists and
philosophers are interested in answering
fundamental questions such as What is an
emotion? What are the relations between
feelings and emotions? How has evolution shaped
emotion? I want to address both of these types
of questions.
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Of course, philosophers and psychologists did not
discover emotions, which are embodied in the
myths and narratives of different cultures. In
the West, religious texts such as the Bible and
Koran are replete with stories about conflict,
fear, envy, and grace events and situations
which can stimulate our reflections upon life
and, where relevant, a persons relationship with
G-d.
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II A FRAMEWORK FOR DISCUSSING
EMOTION Emotion emerges as a unique concept in
the 18th century. Before the mid-18th century,
scholars wrote about the passions rather than
about emotions as such. These passions were tied
to the fate of the soul. In the mid-1700s,
emotion becomes part of secular, in other words,
non-religious discourse. Samuel Johnson (1755)
defined emotion as a disturbance of mind
vehemence of passion, pleasing or
painful. Accordingly, emotions were seen as
e-motions that could put a person off course and
disorient proper judgment. This secularization of
thinking about emotion in Western Europe can be
linked to an increasing interest in the
individual self as a force within society. In the
mid to later 19th century, with Darwins
influence and developments in physiology of the
human body, the idea of having emotions rode to
fame on a bodily horse.
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Some scholars set the brain as a centre that
controls emotion. Others, like William James,
proposed that emotions reflect our bodily gut
reactions and expressive reactions to
events. Some Basic Principles First, emotions
exist on their own as independent phenomena we
feel happy or sad or angry. These emotions are
very real experiences for us. Second, emotions
cannot exist without some kind of thought
processes. So emotion and cognition are not
diametrically opposed. After all, we have
emotions about something and so we have to
interpret situations or reach back into our
memories to reconstruct situations and the
feelings that they engendered. Third, emotions
also pertain to bodily states that we can
feel. Feelings are fundamental. We can say, I
feel pleasure or pain, nervous or excited. We
can feel our bodily states
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Fourth, emotions are more abstract than feelings
and pertain to the self. You can feel states of
pleasure, pain, or excitement. But you cannot
say, I am pleasure, pain, or excitement. You
can only say, I am happy, sad, angry,
frightened, disgusted and so on. These emotions
pertain to me to my self. In a sense, you dont
just feel it, you are it! In summary Emotions
exist as independent phenomena which are related
to the self involving both thought and bodily
responses to social or physical events and
situations.
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III TWO CONTRASTING LIFE THEMES There are two
contrasting life themes which have an important
impact on emotions Adaptation and The Search for
Meaning Adaptation as a Life Theme The theme of
adaptation is very concrete and is linked with
action. It was highlighted in the Darwinian
revolution and applies to all living species
vegetable, animal and human. This theme links us
with our evolutionary past and by this I really
mean our animal past our struggle for
survival. We are always engaged in an attempt to
confront challenges, address needs, and achieve
goals. At a fundamental level, bodily needs are
linked with hunger, thirst, sexual drive, and so
on. At a more complex social level, needs are
associated with affiliation, power, achievement,
and so forth.
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What is the Role of Emotion Here? Originally,
emotions were tied to wired-in instincts in the
animal world so that particular kinds of cues
elicit emotions that facilitate survival and
reproduction through the life cycle. A predator
evokes fear so that the animal can escape and
live another day. In the mating context, what
appears like anger or rage establishes dominance
and thereby maintains a social hierarchy with the
result that the strongest reproduce. In the
reproduction context, acts of caring foster
attachment between parent and newborn. Adaptation
in humans carries these emotions and feelings to
a more sophisticated level reflecting the
increased complexity of social situations that
require interpretation. Adaptation requires
skills of appraisal and an ability to implement
strategies.
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The Search for Meaning as a Life Theme The search
for meaning in life is what separates us from the
animal world it relies on an ability to
reflect. It enables us to come to terms with the
uniqueness of our experiences to understand
these experiences to place them in the context
of critical life situations. We dont really
appraise these situations and events in terms of
their relative benefit for us. Rather, we
interpret them we respond spontaneously and very
rapidly to them we resonate to them with our
whole bodies. In contrast to the process of
adaptation, where strategy addresses needs and
challenges, the effort after meaning is a more
interpretive and constructive process. It can be
shaped by either personal or collective
interpretations of events. Complex emotions, such
as ecstasy or vexation, or blends of emotion,
such as happiness and sadness, reflect responses
to the unique meanings of situations and events
for each of us.
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Our powerful reactions to situations that dont
affect others in the same way are like the tip of
the iceberg that takes us dep into our life
histories. We achieve perspective on our lives
when we can relate emotional experiences to our
personal histories and their original
contexts. This act of contextualizing the roots
of our emotions is central to personal
growth. When we are clear about these contexts,
we gain closure and are no longer bound by our
emotions slaves to our passions. In other words,
we learn to appreciate ourselves in a more
abstract way accepting our emotional experiences
but realizing that their origins lie elsewhere
earlier in our lives or those of others with whom
we share a cultural background. And we can accept
ourselves at different stages within our own
lives.
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IV SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND A central point
in this analysis is that emotion emerged as a
concept in Western European society during the
past 300 years. It parallels the secularization
of society and an emphasis on the self. There are
two contrasting traditions in philosophy, art,
and psychology that emphasize either adaptation
or the search for meaning. Adaptation and
Philosophy Philosophers of the 18th Century
Enlightenment in England, like John Locke, set
the stage for Darwins emphasis on a struggle for
survival. They spelled out the dynamics
surrounding the human process of adaptation.
They focused on thoughts about the self and
choices which men would have to make to
maximize benefits. Individuals were described as
acting in a calculating manner based on cool
desires. Events in the environment are appraised
as facts to determine whether or not they match
our needs, concerns, and fears.
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The resulting feelings of pain or pleasure
provide feedback as to the success or failure of
their efforts. So, feelings play an important
role in this model because they provide us with a
sense for the success or failure of our adaptive
efforts. Feelings serve as the shadow of
cognition! Message We must learn to be strategic
to accurately appraise our stimulus environment
and then engage in concrete actions that help us
resolve our interests and concerns. Adaptation
and the Arts The aesthetics of the Enlightenment
stressed manipulating an audiences imagination
and emotions. This could be accomplished by
carefully selecting subject matter that
represented universally shared natural and social
worlds. In art, the goal was to create an
accurate illusion of the natural world, governed
by laws of causality, that could be immediately
apprehended in a single glance. In drama, French
neoclassicism emphasized the importance of the
three unities of time, place, and action in
determining dramatic illusion.
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Illusion in theatre involved a kind of passive
response in which the audience responds in
sympathy with increasing emotional stimulation
until reason surrenders to the force of the
passions. Today, people can manipulate their own
affective states. When we are bored, we can
choose to read books or watch films that are
filled with uncertainty and suspense. When we
want to feel connection, we might select books or
films with a more romantic theme. In other words,
we can intentionally choose materials that will
modulate our affective states.
Our research has shown that people in a negative
affect state prefer artworks that express emotion
in a direct and readily accessible manner.
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Adaptation and Psychology There is a clear
continuity over 300 years from the Enlightenment
to modern mechanistic psychology associated with
linear thought. The three traditions included in
this view are Centralism Behaviourism/Functiona
lism Cognitivism 19th century Centralism holds
that emotion is located in and shaped directly by
centres in the brain. The brain, in essence,
guides and controls emotional processes. Functiona
lism appeared at the turn of the 20th century and
held that emotions have adaptive value as
automatic responses to threatening events in the
environment. Behaviourism, which emerged as a
viewpoint in the early 1900s, treated emotion as
primarily disruptive and disregarded it as a
unique phenomenon. Rather, in accordance with the
formula Emotion Cognition Arousal, it
emphasized the evaluation of situational factors
as either beneficial or harmful and attributed a
potentially energizing and attention focusing
quality to moderate levels of bodily excitation.
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Cognitivism elaborates on the process of
evaluation within a logical and sequential
paradigm having to do with the resolution of
needs or concerns through pragmatic action. The
Search for Meaning and Philosophy The importance
of imagination and emotional experience is
central in Romanticism of the 18th and 19th
centuries. According to this humanistic, organic
and open-ended viewpoint, experience is
constantly changing and the person is perpetually
becoming. The Romantics developed a cult of
feeling that would counter a world ruled by
reason in which all subjects could be
considered. They wanted to achieve an
intellectual appreciation of human experience
facilitated by intense feelings. The sacred power
of individual unique consciousness is affirmed
and life episodes become the focus since all
humans have the capacity for intense and honest
feelings.
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The Experience of Meaning in Art German Romantic
dramatists, like Johann Schlegel (1719-1749)
believed that theatrical drama should reflect the
social realities and historical traditions of the
audience and also heighten social awareness. By
selecting critical moments in life and expressing
them in carefully fashioned dialogue, playwrights
can expose the hidden workings of a characters
mind. The unity of action is more important than
the unities of time and place. By providing a
meaningful context to account for action, the
author brings coherence and meaning to the
audiences experience. August Schlegel
(1767-1845) saw dramatic illusion as a waking
dream, to which we voluntarily surrender
ourselves. He included audience participation as
an important aspect of theatre and added that
their awareness of participating in sustaining
the illusion contributes to the overall aesthetic
process.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English
critic and poet, described aesthetic illusion as
the product of a willing suspension of disbelief
for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
The logic of the imagination provides a basis for
the fluid continuity of conscious experience. In
our experimental work, we have found that viewers
and readers can develop deep relationships with
texts, artworks, and industrial design
objects. People can feel a personal relationship
with creative works, see them as an expression of
their identities, or as embodiments of idealized
social values and messages. Encounters with
artworks can simulate reflections about personal
growth and encourage people to come to terms with
their personal or collective histories. In the
search for meaning, people encounter not just the
artists but themselves.
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Some artworks that relate to the search for
meaning
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Some artworks that relate to the search for
meaning
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The Experience of Meaning in Psychology The
Romantic viewpoint is embodied in a more organic
and wholistic approach in psychology with three
major traditions Peripheralism Psychodynamism
Existential Psychology Peripheralism originated
in the later 1800s with William James who founded
American psychology. In an attempt to unify body
and mind, peripheralism holds that emotion is
shaped by feedback from changes in the viscera
(heart, lungs, gut) and expressive responses in
the face and body to significant affect evoking
events. Psychodynamism is the idea, folllowing in
the Freudian tradition, that critical emotional
episodes in our lives have a long term impact so
that when we substantially encounter events like
them, we re-experience the emotion. The
unconscious plays a role here because emotions
which are too powerful and unpleasant can be
repressed and become difficult to access. The
challenge of therapy is to have clients find a
narrative that links critical early life
experiences to current and sometimes inaccessible
feelings.
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Existential phenomenology is concerned with the
structure of experience in relation to being and
becoming. It holds that significant life
experiences are associated with intensifications,
distortions or transformations in our experiences
of time, space, causality, sensory awareness and
connection with others. Like the style of a
painting, these transformations become the
crucible within which lifes narratives are
experienced. Feelings shape the form of our
emotions.
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V TWO CONTRASTING EMOTIONAL STYLES IN LIFE With
the increasing secularization of Western European
society over the past 300 years, emotion has
emerged as a phenomenon associated with an
individuals self. It is a phenomenon integrating
mind and body, one that is not passively
undergone but which results from the
interpretation of personally and collectively
meaningful situations. We can see, however, that
there are two very different approaches to this
phenomenon, one emphasizing adaptation and the
other a search for meaning. A rational approach,
associated with the Enlightenment, is strategic
and relates to an adaptive appraisal of
environmental options to outcomes which can be
felt along a pain-pleasure dimension. A romantic
approach, associated with German Romanticism, is
holistic and emphasizes a spontaneous and
expressive reaction to personally meaningful
situations and events. These contrasting
approaches to emotion are embodied in very
different emotional styles in everyday life. Some
people appear better at adaptation whereas others
are more disposed to a search for meaning in
emotional experiences.
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Im now going to describe these styles their
upsides and down sides. Adaptation-Oriented
People Adaptation-oriented people appraise
their worlds in a very precise manner, matching
things (people, objects and events) against their
needs and concerns. They work efficiently their
attention focused and energy mobilized. In the
extreme, think of the Type-A personality. They
closely monitor their reactions as well, the
feelings or pain or pleasure that follow from the
careful execution of strategies or plans. These
feelings help them to choose their next move. But
they also restrain or suppress potentially
distracting emotions. After all, you cant make a
good and rational decision if you are distracted
by emotion. That raises a good question Can
adaptation-oriented persons get stuck in their
mode (or mold) and have trouble finding their
emotions? Always being rational at the front end
of stimulus analysis but unable to find emotion
at the back end of personal reaction?
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Too much objectivity too much restraint! The
adaptation-oriented person risks being lost in
objectivity. This person must reawaken to the
depth and unique nature of lifes situations to
slow the disposition to evaluate things and
events in terms of good or bad utility to search
for the structure and meaning embedded within
individual events. Meaning-Oriented
People Meaning-oriented people respond to
situations in a deep and personal way. Powerful
events can hit them like a tsunami and elicit
strong emotions. These events are rich in
substance and structure not just passing
stimuli complex meanings related to family and
friends, related to the group with which one
identifies so strongly with its history and very
soul! These emotional experiences have a strong
bodily component both somatic and expressive
they feel their gut responses they feel the
sadness in their own faces. But they can feel
overcome and sometimes even overwhelmed.
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They can also be trapped in these emotions which,
after all, are based on interpretations of life
events and not on absolute truth which is how it
might feel to them. The meaning-oriented person
risks being lost in subjectivity, weighted down
by emotions that so powerfully affect them not
being able to stand outside themselves and see
the intensity of it all and the possible
arbitrariness of interpretation shaped by earlier
life experiences with which they have lost
touch. It may help this person to realize that
there are different ways to construe or
understand situations and that there is no one
fixed or correct way of doing so. In other words,
there are different ways of constructing meaning,
different contexts into which events might be
placed some shared with others some that are
unique to each of us.
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VI REVIEW So we have a layer cake of two
traditions reaching back 300 years in Western
European culture. Two Themes Adaptation and
Search for Meaning Two Intellectual
Traditions Enlightenment Realism and Romantic
Emotionalism Two Traditions in
Psychology Centralism/Behaviourism/Functionalism/
Cognitivism Peripheralism/Psychodynamism/Existenti
al Phenomenology Two Personal Styles Restrained
Adaptation and an Expressive Search for Meaning
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VII A NEW PARADIGM How do we bring balance into
our lives and unity to these contrasting
intellectual traditions and ways of
being-in-the-world? We have been looking at
emotion within the framework of contrasts and now
we will look at emotion such that the separate
processes are integrated one within the other
while preserving the potential for
uniqueness. The paradigm of complementarity
Every challenge has a silver lining! In a sense,
we bring an Eastern view to our Western way of
living. Complementary Relations Between
Adaptation and the Search for Meaning I have
talked about these two themes as if they were
unrelated as dichotomies. And yet, one lies
within the other Is it not true that in an
effort to adapt to a new society, to a changing
society, people have to understand the different
meanings in that society?
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Isnt it also true that, in our search for
meaning, we must come to terms with the
challenges and rapid changes to which we must
adapt as time unfolds? The same principles apply
to societies as well as individuals. The
multicultural as well as the society in
transition must address both ways of
being-in-the-world. This creates a dynamic energy
which can help both the society and the
individual to achieve a new level of
integration. Todays Message We need to face the
challenges in our lives and yet realize how
actively involved we are in the construction of
personal and collective meaning. We need to
balance objective detachment and subjective
engagement. We need to see the many layered
nature of our own being-in-the-world a world of
situations, and one in which we ourselves can
evolve over time.
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SECOND HALF Continuing from last week
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FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH TO EMOTION WHAT WORKS,
IS! This reflects a pragmatic interest in
activities of the mind and body in adapting to
the environment. William James (1890)
consider the TOTAL SITUATION
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THE 3RD PHASE OF ACTION THEORY 1920 -
PRESENT The Wittenberg Symposium on Feelings
Emotion October, 1927 at Wittenberg College in
Ohio Published as a book in 1928 by Martin
Reymert What is above all important to an
organism is action. (Edouard Claparède,
1928) The press throughout the country carried
daily accounts of the sessions. Many important
publications sent special representatives to
report the proceedings. (Reymert, 1928, p.ix)
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ACTION THEORY IN THE 20TH CENTURY REFLECTS TWO
OLD THEMES (1) During the Enlightenment the
focus was on the effects of internal
desires. (2) After Darwin the emphasis was on
adaptation to environmental demands.
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EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE William McDougall It
emphasizes the capacity to strive toward an end
or ends, to seek goals, to sustain and renew
activity adopted to secure consequences
beneficial to the organism or the
species. feeling and emotion are incidental to
the striving activity, the conations of the
organism and are distinguished in terms of the
conative activities which they accompany. Specifi
c emotions are the affective phases of specific
instincts.
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EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE G.S. Brett Instincts
are equivalent to muscular reactions and emotions
are equivalent to visceral reactions For
Aristotle, feeling is controlled chiefly by
success or failure in the realization of purpose,
conscious or unconscious, pleasure as the
accompaniment of unimpeded activity. D.T.
Howard It is evident in lower species, such as
bees or ants, whose adaptive habit patterns of
the nervous system are reflexive, automatic,
routine and predetermined.
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EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE Francis
Aveling Conation - an experienced act, mental or
bodily, of doing (striving or effort). The order
of events in emotion would seem to be 1.
Cognition of a significant stimulus 2. Conative
set towards it (action readiness) 3. The
stirred-up characteristic of emotion
proper Therefore, since the somatic resonance
is regularly subsequent to the conation, conation
is the cause of emotion
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EVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE Harvey Carr In fact,
an immediate, effective, and well-coordinated
response prevents the arousal of an emotional
reaction. This highlights the orderly and
coordinated character of non-emotional
adjustments as opposed to the relatively
uncoordinated and somewhat chaotic course of
events in the emotional reactions.
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Motor Psychology - Margaret Washburn 1.
Consciousness has at its disposal certain motor
processes motor phenomena motor
accompaniment of thinking rather than
sensation... 2. The motor accompaniment of
thinking, as distinguished from sensation, has
slight, incipient or tentative muscular
reactions to a situation but which as only
tentatively performed are a kind of rehearsal
of the reactions 3. All thinking
involvesorganization of tentative movements
into systems and the persistent influence of
an idea of an end or purpose that is due to an
association with a persistent bodily attitude or
static movement systemactivity attitude -
feeling of effort We see here a focus on the
response side of adaptation rather than on
stimulus processing.
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WHEN DOES AN EMOTION OCCUR? Edouard
Claparède Emotions occur precisely when
adaptation is hindered for any reason whatever.
The man who can run away does not have the
emotion of fear Fear occurs only when flight is
impossible. Emotion is a confusion of
instinct, a miscarriage of instinct. Emotion is
useless or harmful and from the functional
point of view, appears to be a regression of
conduct.
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WHEN DOES AN EMOTION OCCUR? D.T. Howard John
Dewey (1894, 1895) provided the first
unambiguous statement of a functional theory of
the emotions. 1. Emotional behaviour consists of
interruptive forms of action stimulated by
rapidly changing circumstances with slight or
intense organic and visceral processes 2. Refers
to the confusion and excitement which disrupt
behaviour that normally takes place in response
to the stimulus(p. 141) The extreme gross
emotional states have no value
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WHEN DOES AN EMOTION OCCUR? In a more poetic
vein The affective tone of an emotional state
is one of blankness and lostness a condition in
which the thousand colors of feeling lose all
definiteness and are mixed indiscriminately in
the star-dust of general psychical confusion
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THE TWO FACES OF EMOTION 1. It can be viewed as
functional or else it would not have survived the
evolutionary process. 2. Excessive emotion can
be disruptive and hinder the adaptation process.
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HOW DOES EMOTION FACILITATE ADAPTATION? Harvey
Carr The emotional reactions are those that are
awakened when the organism is unable to respond
in an orderly and efficient fashion to a highly
stimulating situation Emotion is a somatic
readjustment which is instinctively aroused by a
stimulating situation and which in turn promotes
a more effective adaptive response to that
situation this greater efficiency is sufficient
to increase materially the chances for the
organisms survival An emotional stimulus is a
very effective one, and being denied any motor
outlet, it necessarily discharges into the
somatic mechanisms - the only available outlet at
the time - and tends to awaken a vigorous
appropriate adjustment.
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HOW DOES EMOTION FACILITATE ADAPTATION? Robert
S. Woodworth Emotions are extensions of
instinctive reactions when the automaticity that
was present in the animal world no longer
exists. It facilitates survival activity by
pairing characteristic modes of overt behaviour
and characteristic affective states. For
example Instinctive avoidance behaviour and the
emotion of fear. Instinctive aggressive
behaviour and the emotion of anger. Exploratory
behaviour and the emotion of wonder.
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EMOTIONS CUE ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOUR 1. You can focus
on the stimulus side (analyzing inputs) OR 2.
You can focus on the response side (analyzing
adaptive behaviour).
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WHAT ABOUT FEELINGS? Claparède 1. Feelings are
like attitudes and express a relation or
evaluation about a particular situation. 2.
Feeling is an instrument of adjustment. 3.
Consciousness of the danger of a situation
results in a feeling of dangerand the emotion
of fear follows the feeling of danger 4. We
project onto external situations feelings they
arouse in us. So, to comprehend is to take an
attitude towards things. To understand that a
situation is dangerous is to take, with regards
to this situation, an attitude of flight or of
protection.
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SUMMARY The Processes Underlying Action
Theory 1. HELPS An appraisal of the situation
stimulates an attitude or set towards appropriate
action and the somatic accompaniments are
experienced as emotion, a feeling of effort to
react to a stimulating situation. 2. HINDERSWhen
the level of visceral excitement becomes too
great, there is a potential miscarriage of
instinct and a failure to cope.