Emotions: Expressed and Experienced

Which comes first the expression or the feeling?

Do we know our own emotions?

Laughter

• 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.

LOL!QuickTime™ and a

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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

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 stripsQuickTime™ and a

decompressorare needed to see this picture.

Cannon-Bard Theory

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

time

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….

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?

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.

So which is correct?

• Turns out that each theory has some support, but isn’t completely accurate.– We don’t just have general physiological response

to emotion. -- certain combinations of physiological responses are related to certain emotions.

– But we also aren’t perfectly sensitive to these combinations -- we misattribute our physiology.

– The bodily reaction causes and is a consequence of the mentally feeling an emotion.

WOW!

Do we even know our own emotions?

Do we know other people’s emotions!?

demonstration

• Try to accurately decode the motion being expressed here. – “I’m absolutely thrilled to be here”– “Gee thanks”– “Way to go dude”– “Real nice”

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.

http://www.kqed.org/quest/television/emotions-revealed

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

sadness

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 Egypt’s 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 culture’s 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

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 weddingcortex 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 speaker’s 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

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