Emotions: Expressed and Experienced

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Emotions Expressed and Experienced

• Which comes first the expression or the feeling?
• Do we know our own emotions?

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Laughter
LOL!

• Is contagious
• can provide relief from pain, alleviate stress
  and promote functioning of the immune system.
• Can be used to promote solidarity among people --
  as well as for exclusionary purposes.

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Physiology and Feeling?

• We often take it as a given that we experience
  an emotion and then our bodies react to reflect
  that feeling.
• But it can be bi-directional.
• Hold the pencil in your teeth or with your lips
  and read comic strips

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James-Lange theory

• We feel sad because we cry, angry because our
  blood pressure rises, afraid because we tremble
• The emotional experience is the consequence of a
  specific physiological reaction.
• Support Hold the pencil in your teeth or with
  your lips and read comic strips

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Cannon-Bard Theory

• Stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the
  ANS and emotional experience.
• Blush and feel embarrassed at the same time

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2 Factor Theory

• Different emotions are merely different
  interpretations of a general pattern of bodily
  activity.
• Your heart beats fast.so is it fear, anger,
  love, caffeine.

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Love on a swinging bridge?

• 1974 - Dutton and Aron
• Experimental group Young men crossing a long,
  narrow, suspension bridge that rocked swayed
  230 ft above a river.
• Control group Young men crossed a long, narrow,
  suspension bridge that rocked swayed 230 ft
  above a river and rested for 10 minutes
• Approached by an attractive female (researcher),
  asked to complete a survey and given her phone .
  
• Who called her more?

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Love on a swinging bridge?

• 13 out of 20 called in the experimental group,
  while only 7 out of 23 called from the control
  group.
• Fear and attraction exchangeable?
• Supports the 2 factor theory.

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So which is correct?

• Turns out that each theory has some support, but
  isnt completely accurate.
• We dont just have general physiological response
  to emotion. -- certain combinations of
  physiological responses are related to certain
  emotions.
• But we also arent perfectly sensitive to these
  combinations -- we misattribute our physiology.
• The bodily reaction causes and is a consequence
  of the mentally feeling an emotion.

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WOW!

• Do we even know our own emotions?
• Do we know other peoples emotions!?

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demonstration

• Try to accurately decode the motion being
  expressed here.
• Im absolutely thrilled to be here
• Gee thanks
• Way to go dude
• Real nice

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demonstration

• Nervousness, surprise, disgust, anger, sadness,
  fear, and happiness have been found in studies to
  be the easiest emotions to detect. Whereas love,
  fear, desire, jealousy, pride, disappointment and
  relief are much more difficult to detect.
• Gender differences?
• What does this mean?
• the role of empathy in understanding others
  emotional reactions.

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http//www.kqed.org/quest/television/emotions-reve
aled

• Are expressions universal?
• The 6 anger, disgust, surprise, fear, happiness,
  sadness

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Cultural Differences

• While it seems universal to read the 6 major
  emotions there are different expectations of how
  people will show them.
• Awlad Ali Bedouins of Egypts western desert do
  not express feelings of loss or hurt in public
  instead they show indifference or anger or assign
  blame.
• Tahitian language lacks terms for sadness,
  longing and loneliness instead they interpret
  these sensations as a type of sickness

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Lie to Me

• Our attempts to obey our cultures display rules
  are sometimes betrayed by incomplete control of
  facial muscles

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Deceptive Expression

• Humans are generally not that good at detecting
  when others are lying
• Studies look at accuracy based on profession
  (100 perfect accuracy, 50 guessing)

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Deceptive Expression

• Polygraph
• measures physiological changes associated with
  stress
• high false positive rate
• Blood flow in brain
• some brain areas are more active when people lie
  than when they tell the truth

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stop
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The Emotional Brain

• Temporal lobe syndrome
• Amygdala
• appraisal
• bilateral amygdala damage
• no effect on recognition of happiness, sadness,
  surprise
• trouble recognizing anger, disgust, fear
• Nucleus accumbens

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The Emotional Brain

• Amygdala
• make a rapid appraisal (pink route)
• why?
• Cortex
• make a slow, thorough appraisal (green route)
• why?

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The Emotional Brain

• Emotional regulation
• typically to turn negative into positive
• may sometimes need to cheer down
• Reappraisal
• thinking can change feeling
• shown photo of woman crying at funeral
• amygdala became active
• asked to reappraise and imagine woman is at
  wedding
• cortex became active and then amygdala
  deactivated

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Emotional Communication

• Emotional expression
• emotional states influence the way we talk
  (intonation, inflection, loudness, duration)
• listeners can infer a speakers emotional state
  with better-than-chance accuracy
• can also infer emotional states from how someone
  walks and facial expressions
• Affective forecasting
• not too good at predicting our emotional
  reactions to future events

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Communicative Expression

• Universality hypothesis
• cross-cultural research supports this
• congenitally blind persons make same expressions
  as others
• The cause and effect of expression
• feelings cause emotional expressions (muscles)
• facial-feedback hypothesis
• people with trouble experiencing emotions have
  trouble recognizing the emotions of others

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Communicative Expression

• Deceptive expression
• Display rules
• intensification
• deintensification
• masking
• neutralizing

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What Is Emotion?

• Multidimensional scaling
• Dimension of arousal
• Dimension of valence (feeling)

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Physiology of Emotion
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Pg 208 in Blink

• Subjects look at cartoons while holding a pen
  between their lips or teeth
• Teeth found the cartoon much funnier
• Ekman, Friesen and Levenson