PSYC 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Stanley Milgram, Robert Zajonc
12 Oct 2016
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Document Summary
A functional perspective suggests emotions are signals to motivation: eg: need to belong and guilt. Well-suited to help us manage the push of biological processes and the pull of socio- cultural forces. If you do well on someting, our emotions make us feel good so we want to do it again, if we do something bad, we feel bad so we will not do it again. Conscious experience: thoughts, especially the labelling of the emotion. Expressive behaviour: shame head down, narrow shoulders, arm in, pride shoulders wide, chest out, head up, arms out. Agreement that emotions function as one type of motivator, but views about the importance vary. Early psychology focused on psychological drives as motivators (eg: hunger, thirst, sex), not the emotional state linked to it. Followed by a view that for humans emotions were the causal and immediate source of the motivated action: eg: air deprivation. Take away the emotion, and you take away the motivation.
