PSYC18%20-%20Psychology%20of%20Emotion

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PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion Lecture 7
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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The Social Constructionist Perspective Jim
Averill Emotions are products of cultures. The
ways that emotions are embodied in a cultures
social practices, including its language,
participates in and partially constitutes the
moral order of the culture and serves to maintain
it. Averill sees emotions as a special kind of
social role. Emotions are a socially
constructed syndrome that includes an
individuals appraisal of the situation which is
interpreted as a passion rather than as an
action.
Averill says that emotion is experienced as an
action because we play an active role in creating
situations that are then experienced emotionally.
He also says that emotion is experienced as a
passion because when we experience emotions we
often ignore our active role in having created
them and feel overwhelmed and taken over by them.
We feel like we have lost control.
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• The Social Constructionist Perspective
• Jim Averill
• Syndrome a set of events that occur together in
  a systematic fashion.
• Components that tend to occur together
• Subjective Experiences particular feeling
  qualities associated with emotions.
• Expressive Reactions facial expressions and
  bodily postures that accompany an emotion.
• Patterns of Physiological Response autonomic
  nervous system and other changes.
• Coping Reactions behaviour we engage in while
  we are emotional.

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• The Social Constructionist Perspective
• Jim Averill
• NOTE
• Not every emotion is associated with all the
  components.
• For example Fear Yes, Hope No Fear has a
  bodily and cognitive component Hope has only a
  cognitive component.
• 2. Not every instance of a particular emotion
  need include all the components.
• For example Anger with or without a facial
  expression like a scowl.
• There is no single response, or subset of
  responses, which is essential to an emotional
  syndrome.
• Emotional syndromes are polythetic or not
  definable in terms of a limited number of
  characteristics.

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The Social Constructionist Perspective EMOTIONS
ARE TRANSITORY SOCIAL ROLES. A role is a
socially prescribed set of responses to be
followed by a person in a given
situation. Emotions as social roles temporary
enactment of a prescribed set of responses in
which a person may be seen as following a set of
rules that tell him or her the proper way to
appraise a situation, how to behave in response
to the appraisal, how to interpret his or her
bodily reactions to the appraisal, and so on.
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The Social Constructionist Perspective THE
RULES OF EMOTIONS ARE LEARNED! We learn from our
society the sets of rules that implicitly govern
our emotional performances. This approach
emerges from the social constructionist
perspective of the 1970s which focused more on
the social self than the personal self. Emotions
are associated with attitudes, beliefs,
judgments, and desires reflecting the cultural
values of particular communities. So appraisals
are not seen as innate responses to
evolutionarily significant events. Emotions
reflect moral judgments about events in the world.
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The Social Constructionist Perspective As we
know, emotions used to be referred to as
passions, a word that implies the experience
of passivity, as if emotions were alien forces
which overcome and possess an individual. GRIPPED
BY FEAR SEIZED BY ANGER Averills approach to
emotion is primarily metaphorical. He sees
emotions as ACTIONS rather than passions.
Emotional behaviour is engaged in to realize
particular social and individual goals. Emotions
dont just happen to us but they are things we do
willfully. The experience of emotions as passive
passions is an interpretation or attribution we
make about our own behaviour. We thereby disclaim
responsibility for what we do when we are
emotional.
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According to Frijda, the experience of passivity
is part of what it means to be emotional in our
culture. Social functions of emotions Fear can
be seen as one of the means by which social norms
are maintained in the regulation of social
behaviour. We can compare the emotional lexicons
of different cultures to get a sense for which
emotions are important in that culture. (e.g.,
absence of fear in a warrior culture) The
acquisition of a culturally appropriate lexicon
by children is central to the socialization of
emotion and is a major determinant of changes in
childrens experiences of emotion.
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Basic Emotions and Darwinian Survival Fear and a
situation of danger. Anger and the need for
defense. Love and the need for caring
attention. Complex Emotions and Social
Construction Shame, embarrassment, guilt and so
on more emphasis on situational interpretation.
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• The Aesthetics of Action Theory Reaction model
  of aesthetics.
• The main idea is that cultural materials are
  chosen which embody particular qualities that
  modulate feeling dimensions like pain-pleasure
  and calm-excitement.
• Want to manipulate a dimension of experience like
  pleasure or excitement.
• Choose films, books, so on, which embody
  properties that will modulate these bodily
  states.
• Romantic film or book and the need for
  sentimental positive feelings.
• Horror or suspense movies and the need for
  excitement.

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Experience oriented approaches to emotion
William James Peripheralism Now we begin the
BIG TRANSITION from the Action Approach to a more
Experience Oriented Approach that encompasses
Jamess PERIPHERALISM, PSYCHODYNAMICS,
PHENOMENOLOGY. Let me review the transition we
are about to make The first phase of the course
focused on Action Theory which has been with us
in various guises since the British Enlightenment
of the 1700s. This theory shaped both our ideas
about emotion and even extended to an explanation
of how drama works. Philosophers of the
Enlightenment, like John Locke, emphasized a
practical approach to life in which we attempt to
realize goals and evaluate events in the
environment in terms of how beneficial they are
to us. Our experience of pleasure or pain is an
index of whether or not we have succeeded.
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Philosophers of the Enlightenment favoured a kind
of Classical approach to art and drama which
emphasized the manipulation of peoples emotion
through the authors control over action, place
and time. In the 1800s, the Darwinian perspective
emphasized challenges posed by the physical and
social worlds and this carried over into the
early 1900s with McDougalls emphasis on our
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. Walter Cannon, the great
American physiologist, extended this idea with
his Emergency Response theory, the mobilization
of our Sympathetic Nervous System as part of Fear
or Anger responses to threat or frustration.
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Duffy and Schachter, among others, continued this
tradition of separating a planful mind, on the
one hand, from a body whose function was to
provide energy and focus for the problem at
hand. It is crucial to remember that, among
other things, this Action Theory approach
involves a separation of mind and body. The mind
does the planning and the body helps execution or
can hinder it if the state of excitation becomes
too great.
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The EXPERIENCE APPROACH should be placed in the
tradition of Romanticism which emphasized the
role of imagination and interpretation both in
everyday life and in relation to art, poetry and
drama. Recall their focus on critical life
episodes or scenes that reveal something special
about the nature of our lived-world. WILLIAM
JAMES (1842-1910) and the Peripheral
Approach EMOTION The Experience of Bodily
Changes Jamess basic principle was that the
body is central to the generation and experience
of emotion. While Darwin was primarily concerned
with the expression of emotion, James was
interested in the experience of emotion.
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• Common sense leads us to say the following about
  the sequence of emotional events
• We PERCEIVE an emotion eliciting stimulus
• We EXPERIENCE emotion
• We EXPRESS it
• For example
• We lose our fortune, are sorry and weep.
• We are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.
• We meet a bear, are frightened and run.

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James argued that this sequence is wrong BODILY
CHANGES FOLLOW DIRECTLY FROM THE PERCEPTION OF
THE EXCITING FACT AND OUR FEELING OF THESE SAME
CHANGES AS THEY OCCUR IS THE EMOTION. In other
words 1. We feel sorry because we cry. 2. We
feel angry because we strike. 3. We feel afraid
because we tremble. These changes are automatic
responses of the body and the experience of these
changes is the emotion.
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• James listed three kinds of bodily changes
• Expressive behaviour
• Instrumental acts such as running away
• Physiological changes in the heart
  circulatory system
• The modern interpretation is that
• Bodily changes Visceral changes

The increase in sympathetic nervous system
activity controls the functioning of the glands
and other internal organs such as the heart and
stomach. These changes are expressed as sweating,
salivation, shedding tears, secreting digestive
juices and stomach motility. Implication
Different emotions are accompanied by
recognizably different bodily states. Jamess
theory permits an almost infinite number of
emotions because it associates individual
emotions with specific physiological states. Each
emotion would be characterized by a specific
physiological package.
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This indirectly leads to the idea that the
voluntary arousal or manifestation of bodily
changes should produce emotions (e.g., put on a
happy face). James was influenced by his own
introspections 1. Unmotivated emotion
attacks of anxiety, panic or fear in the absence
of an appropriate cause. Also, anxiety attacks
could sometimes be alleviated by controlling
ones breathing and changing ones posture. 2.
Persons who could not experience any feelings
from his or her body (corporeal anaesthesia).
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Carl Lange (1834 1900) developed a similar
theory the bodily concomitants come first,
followed by the experience of emotion. James also
distinguished between COARSE and SUBTLE
emotions. 1. COARSE EMOTIONS are fixed action
patterns and are wired-in. 2. SUBTLE EMOTIONS are
learned or acquired (e.g., resentment). They can
be moral, intellectual or aesthetic emotions and
feelings.
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Walter B. Cannon (1871 1945), the great
American physiologist, offered a critique of
William Jamess theory which led to a rejection
of his work for a period of time. Cannon did his
research on the physiology of digestion and
disturbances of digestion which led him to reject
Jamess ideas about autonomic specificity. The
1920s was a period in medical history when
psychosomatic medicine was established as a
separate discipline for example in the area of
stress.
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Critiques 1. Total separation of the viscera
from the CNS does not alter emotional
behaviour. 2. The same visceral changes occur in
very different emotional states and non-emotional
states. 3. The viscera are relatively
insensitive structures. 4. Visceral changes are
too slow to be a source of emotional
feeling. 5. Artificial induction of the visceral
changes typical of strong emotion does not
produce them. This is where he applied the data
from Maranons study about the 79 who received
an injection but did not experience an
emotion. The most important points are Number 2
and 3!



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Cannon assumed that the cerebral cortex
constantly inhibits emotional expressions that
are integrated in the thalamus. Perception of an
emotion evoking situation produces cortical
disinhibition and frees the thalamic centres from
their normal restraint. When disinhibition
occurs, the emotional expression automatically
appears. Incoming sensory impulses from the
viscera and skeletal muscles arrive at the
thalamus and are relayed to the cortex. This
gives conscious experience an emotional quality.
Cannon therefore argued that emotional reactions
are coordinated at subcortical levels. This is an
example of the Centralist Approach to
emotion. James had argued that there are no
special brain centres for emotion. So Jamess
peripheral approach to emotion can be contrasted
with the centralist approach in which cognition
filters perception and selects behaviour. IMPLICAT
IONS THE FACIAL FEEDBACK HYPOTHESIS Awareness
of ones own facial expressions is the emotion.
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Floyd Allport (1890 - 1978) argued in 1924 in
support of Jamess idea that feedback from facial
expressions could help differentiate emotions.
Accordingly, afferent (incoming) feedback from
the face differentiates anger from fear. Sylvan
Tomkins (1911-1991) maintained in the 1960s that
feedback from facial muscles differentiates
emotions. Accordingly, affect is primarily facial
behaviour and secondarily it is bodily behaviour,
outer skeletal and inner visceral activity.
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On what basis does Tomkins maintain this
position? 1. A newborn exhibits greater
responsiveness to facial and head stimulation
than to bodily stimulation. 2. The rapid
development of head movement, visual fixation and
eye-hand coordination. Standing and walking
appear later. 3. The greater density of
afferent-efferent channels moving information
between the face and the brain. 4. The facial
muscles show greater resistance to
habituation. 5. The face is the centre of
affective expression.
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Ekman and Friesen (1960s) also emphasized the
high sending capacity of the face. 1. Greater
number of discriminable stimulus patterns due to
the relative anatomical independence of the
brow-forehead, eyes-lid-bridge of nose and lower
face including cheeks, nose, mouth, chin and jaw.
(Science Centre) 2. Physical potential for rapid
muscular change or low transmission time
permits facial displays to evolve drastically
over short periods of time. This relates to the
concept of micro-momentary affect displays as
brief as 1/50th of a second. Primary Affect List
Happiness, interest, surprise, fear, anger,
disgust and sadness
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Summarizing The face is the place for
emotion!! 1. Afferent-efferent routes 2.
Anatomical independence 3. Rapid muscular change