PSY-220 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Autonomic Nervous System, Sympathetic Nervous System, Botulinum Toxin
11 Jan 2017
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Chapter Eleven: Emotional Behaviors
I. What is Emotion?
a. Psychologists define emotion in terms of three components:
i. Cognition (what's going on in the mind rather than action)
ii. Action (how do you react; social cognition; actions associated with emotions)
iii. Feeling (what sort of change does that ake to ou pesoalit; ho does
that ake ou feel)
II. Emotions, Autonomic Arousal, and the James-Lange Theory
a. Emotional situations arouse the autonomic nervous system
b. Each situation evokes its own special mixture of sympathetic and parasympathetic
arousal
c. Fundamentally a neuroscience theory
d. When you notice a stimulus that is going to evoke a reaction in you, your body
reacts to the stimulus first, then your brain puts a label on it
e. The James-Lange theory of emotion suggests that autonomic arousal and skeletal
action occurs first in an emotion
f. The emotion that is felt is the label that we give the arousal of the organs and
muscle
g. James-Lange theory leads to predictions:
i. People with a weak autonomic or skeletal response should feel less emotion
ii. Increasing oe’s espose should ehae a eotio
h. Research indiciates the following:
i. Paralyzed people report feeling emotion to the same degree as prior to their
injury
ii. People ith pue autooi failue still epot feelig eotio ut less
intensely
1. Pure autonomic failure: output from autonomic nervous system to
body fails
iii. Suggest other factors are involved in the perception of emotion
i. BOTOX blocks transmission at synapses and nerve-muscle junctions
j. People with BOTOX injections show
i. Slower time in reading unhappy sentences
ii. Weaker than usual emotional responses after watching short videos
iii. Points to body change being important for feeling an emotion
iv. Hoee, people ith etai tpes of ai daage sho oal
responses
k. According to the James-Lange Theory, eotioal feeligs esult fo the od’s
action
l. Panic attacks are marked by extreme sympathetic nervous system arousal (rapid
heartbeat, fast breathing, etc.)
m. Creating certain body actions may also slightly influence emotion
i. Smiling slightly increases happiness inducing a frown leads to the rating of
stimuli as slightly less pleasant
n. Idiates that peeptio of the od’s atios do otiute to eotioal feelig
o. Hoee, od’s atios ae ot euied
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