PSYB10H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Jean-Paul Sartre, September 11 Attacks, Daniel Kahneman
Chapter 6: Emotion
• Emotions are important guides of thought and action
• Once set in motion, emotions wield powerful influences on what people perceive, how they reason,
what they deem right and wrong, and what matters to them
• Any situation can be construed in multiple ways and can call forth a variety of actions
• Emotions are magical transformations (Jean Paul Sartre) in that they powerfully and immediately shift
the individual to specific ways of thinking and acting
• Social psychology reveal that although emotions can indeed disrupt sound reasoning and make people
behave irrationally, they can also aid reason and are vital to healthy relationships, sound functioning,
and effective pursuit of the good life
Characterizing Emotion
• Emotions, like light, are easy to know when someone sees them, but they are exceptionally hard to
define
• Emotions: brief, specific psychological and physiological responses that help humans meet goals,
many of which are social
• Brief, specific, socially oriented states
• Brief in that that last for seconds or minutes, not hours or days
• Facial expressions of emotion typically last between 1 and 5 seconds
• Many of the physiological responses that accompany emotion last dozens of seconds or minutes
• The moods that we experience last for hours or even days
• Emotional disorders last for weeks or months
• Emotions are also specific: we feel emotions about specific people and events
• Philosophers call the focus of an emotional experience its intentional object
• Emotions typically help individuals achieve their social goals
• Emotions motivate us to act in specific ways that affect important relationships and help us navigate
our social environment
• Gratitude motivates us to reward others for their cooperative actions
• Guilt motivates us to make amends when we have harmed other people
• Anger impels us to right social wrongs and restore justice
• Not every episode of emotion is beneficial; but in general, emotions motivate appropriate goal-
directed behaviour that makes for stronger social relationships
The Components of Emotion
• Emotions involve many components, and the claims that scientists have made about emotions depend
on what component of emotion if in focus
• Although emotions certainly involve physiological components, there is now consensus that emotions
arise as a result of appraisal processes
• Appraisal processes: the ways people evaluate events and objects in their environment based on
their relation to current goals
• The appraisals that trigger different emotions, known as core-relational themes, are fairly similar across
cultures
• Core-relational themes: distinct themes, such as danger or offense or fairness, that define the core of
each emotion
• Appraisals of loss trigger sadness in most parts of the world, violations of rights trigger anger,
expressions of affection trigger love, and witnessing undeserved suffering triggers compassion
• Primary appraisal stage: an initial, automatic positive or negative evaluation of ongoing events based
on whether they are congruent or incongruent with an individual’s goals
• Unconscious, fast, and automatic appraisals of whether the event is consistent or inconsistent with
the person’s goals give rise to general pleasant or unpleasant feelings
• These more automatic appraisals are triggered by stimuli of significance to our survival—smiling
and angry faces, snakes, pleasant and unpleasant sounds, bad odours, loud sounds
• Secondary appraisal stage: a subsequent evaluation in which people determine why they feel the way
they do about an event, consider possible ways of responding to the event, and weigh future
consequences of different courses of action
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• More specific and deliberative appraisals transform initial pleasant or unpleasant feelings into more
specific emotions, such as fear, anger, pride, gratitude, or sympathy
• The individual takes stock of the situation and figures out who is responsible for the event, whether
it is consistent with social norms, how fair it is, and the extent to which effective action can be taken
to deal with the event
• Appraisal processes get emotions going
• Specific emotions are associated with patterns of activation in regions of the brain and the release of
neurotransmitters
• Emotions engage responses in your body; and even activation in the immune system
• We express our emotions with facial expressions, voice, posture, and physical touch, as well as in
language, art, poetry, and music, which give shape to our conscious experience of emotion
• When feeling different emotions, we see our lives and the world through an emotion-tinted lens,
selectively perceiving emotion-congruent events in our current environment and recalling emotion-
related episodes from the past
• Specific regions of the brain—a part of the frontal lobes known as the orbitofrontal cortex and an old
part of the middle of the brain known as the periaqueductal grey—are activated during feelings of
sympathy
• People feeling sympathy show a slowing of their heart rate
Universal and Cultural Specificity of Emotion
• Open-handed gestures that convey warmth and kindness appear to be universal
• An evolutionary approach assumes that the many components of emotion—facial expression,
vocalization, physiological response—enable adaptive responses to the threats to survival and
opportunities faced by all humans
• The reasoning is that emotions such as fear enable adaptive responses to threats to survival,
whereas emotions such as love, compassion, and jealousy help people form and maintain
reproductive relationships just as critical to gene replication
• By implication, the components of emotion, including facial expression, should be universal
• In contrast, the cultural approach assumes that emotions are strongly influenced by values, roles,
institutions, and socialization practices and that these vary across different cultures
• As a result, people in different cultures should express their emotions in very different ways
• Scientific studies of emotional expression reveal support for both perspectives
• How humans express emotion is at once universal, and subject to striking cultural variations
Darwin and Emotional Expression
• In The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin proposed that human emotional expression
is similar to that of other mammals
• Darwin’s principle of serviceable habits: thesis that emotional expressions are remnant of full-blown
behaviours that helped our primate and mammalian predecessors meet important goals in the past
• Darwin’s analysis generated three hypotheses about emotional expression
• It posits universality
• Darwin reasoned that because all humans have the same 30-40 facial muscles and have used
these muscles to communicate similar emotions in our evolutionary past, people in all cultures
should communicate and perceive emotion in a similar fashion
• A second prediction concerns the similarity between our emotional expression and that of our
primate and mammalian ancestors
• Darwin reasoned that because humans share an evolutionary history with other primates and
mammals, our emotional expressions should resemble the emotional expressions of other
species
• Darwin argued that blind individuals will still show similar expressions as sighted individuals
because the tendency to express emotions in particular ways in encoded in the nervous system
The Universality of Facial Expression
Cross-Cultural Research on Emotional Expression
• To test Darwin’s universality hypothesis, Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen took more than 3000 photos
of people well trained in expression, as they portrayed anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and
surprise according to Darwin’s descriptions of the expressions
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• Presented these photos to people in Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and the U.S.
• Results: a home run for Darwin
• However, there was a flaw: participants in these cultures had all seen Western media, and they
may have learned how to identify the expressions through this exposure
• So, they went to Papua New Guinea to study the Fore, a hill tribe living in Stone Age conditions
• U.S. college students correctly interpreted the posed expressions of the Fore, with the
exception of fear
People from cultures that
differ in religion, political
structure, development, and
self-construals nevertheless
agree in how they label the
photos depicting anger,
disgust, fear, happiness,
sadness, and surprise.
• Some limitations of Ekman’s study
• It is vulnerable to the free-response critique: the researchers provided the terms with which
participants labelled the facial expressions
• If given the chance to label the faces in their own words (with free responses), perhaps people
from different cultures would choose different terms that reflect culture-specific concepts
• If the Fore had been allowed to label the photos with their own words, they might have labelled
a smile as gratitude rather than happiness or labelled it with some concept that does not
map onto Western conceptions of emotion
• But in fact, when participants in different cultures are allowed to use their own words to label
facial expressions, they show high degrees of similarity
Emotional Expression in Other Animals
• Chimps show threat displays and whimpers that are similar to our own displays of anger and sadness
• When affiliating in friendly fashion, nonhuman primates show a teeth-revealing display known as the
silent bared teeth display that resembles our smile
• But when playing and wrestling, they show the open mouth pant hoot, the predecessor to the human
laugh
• Careful cross-species comparisons revealed than human displays of embarrassment resemble
appeasement displays in other mammals
• Embarrassment signals remorse for social transgressions, prompting forgiveness and reconciliation
when people violate social norms
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