PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion

Lecture 6

Professor: Gerald Cupchik

cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca

S-634

Office Hours: Thurs. 10-11, 2-3

T.A.: Michelle Hilscher

hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca

S-150

Office Hours: Thurs. 10-11, 2-3

Course Website: www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik

Stanley Schachter (1922-1997)

study,” as well as the work of Cantril and Hunt (1932) and Landis and Hunt (1932) who “replicated” the findings.

Nisbett and Schachter (1966) stated: “In nature, of course, cognitive and situational factors trigger physiological processes, and the triggering stimulus usually imposes the label we attach to our feeling”. This sounds like McDougall.

Schachter was trained in the lineage of the leading scholars in experimental social psychology: Kurt Lewin & Leon Festinger.

He saw his project in relation to Cannon’s (1929) criticism of James’ theory, to the effect that “the same visceral changes occur in very different emotional states and in non-emotional states”.

Schachter cited Maranon’s (1924) “fascinating

Stanley Schachter (1922-1997)

Schachter elaborated his cognitive analysis in terms of Festinger’s (1954) notion of “evaluative needs”, that is, pressures to “understand and label his bodily feelings” of “emotional excitement”… “in terms of his knowledge of the immediate situation”.

This could involve a process of social comparison to determine the relative appropriateness of one’s feelings in a given situation.

“The perception-cognition figure with a gun in some fashion initiates a state of physiological arousal; this state of arousal is interpreted in terms of knowledge about dark alleys and guns and the state of arousal is labeled as fear”.

The Role of Arousal

Hohmann (1962) studied the emotional life of paraplegics and quadriplegics with spinal cord injuries.

Results show that the higher the lesion the less the feeling of anger, fear, sexual excitement and grief.

So, the less arousal from the viscera, the less the emotional experience.

1. The higher the lesion, the less the visceral innervation…

2. Expect decreasing manifestation of emotion as height of lesion increases…

Interviewed respondents about feelings in situations of sexual excitement, fear, anger, grief, sentimentality.

Recall emotion arousing incident prior to injury and comparable feeling after.

Three Basic Propositions

1. In a state of arousal for which the individual knows no immediate explanation, he will “label” this state and describe his feelings in terms of available cognitions.

2. Given a state of arousal with a completely appropriate explanation (e.g., “I feel this way because of an injection of adrenaline), no evaluative needs will arise and the individual is unlikely to label his arousal in terms of alternate available cognitions.

3. Given the same cognitive circumstances, the individual will react emotionally or describe his feelings as emotional only to the extent that he experiences a state of physiological arousal.

Schachter and Singer (1962)

1. Manipulate state of arousal experimentally.

2. Manipulate extent of explanation of bodily state.

3. Creation of situations from which explanatory cognitions may be derived.

The experimental paradigm involved giving people injections of either adrenaline or a control solution, saline, under the guise of testing the effect of a vitamin called Suproxin on visual acuity.

Schachter and Singer (1962)

Independent variables:

1. Arousal state - Placebo versus Epinephrine

Placebo = saline solution (no bodily effects)

Epinephrine = causes heart rate and systolic blood pressure to increase… leading to the experience of tremor, palpitations, and sometimes flushed or accelerated breathing.

Effects occur within 3-5 minutes.

Schachter and Singer (1962)

Independent variables:

2. Explanation - A doctor who gave injections to the male subjects either provided accurate descriptions of the effects of the drug Suproxin, misinformed subjects, or failed to tell them anything about the effects.

Informed = Precise explanation of the effects of the epinephrine injection. Direct information from the doctor about subjective experience.

Ignorant = Not informed about any side effects.

Misinformed = Wrong symptoms are described to the subject…numb feet, itching sensation, slight headache.

Schachter and Singer (1962)

Independent variables:

3. Socially relevant cognitions - In case “evaluative needs” were stimulated by the subject’s experience of the bodily effects of the drug, given what they were told about it, two kinds of role models were provided. These “stooges” were ostensibly in the same drug situation but behaved in distinctly opposite manners during the waiting period before having their vision tested.

Euphoric stooge = playfully crushes paper to play basketball, etc.

Bibb Latané, who served as the confederate in the euphoria condition, “pointed out that the confederate exerted a great deal of pressure on the subject to join him in the euphoric behaviour and that this constituted a relevant situational inducement.”

Angry stooge = in response to a tasteless and inappropriately intrusive questionnaire.

Schachter and Singer (1962)

Dependent variables:

The data comprised self reports of mood and observed behaviour. Schachter and Singer maintained that the overall pattern of data in their experiment support their version of the two-factor theory of emotion.

Results:

The major finding was that subjects in the Anger-Ignorant and Euphoric-Misinformed conditions showed the highest self-report and greatest behavioural display of the relevant emotion. No Anger-Misinformed condition.

Schachter and Wheeler (1962)

Overview:

Male subjects viewed a slapstick film under influence of either epinephrine, placebo, or chlorpromazine (a sympatholytic agent). They measured laughter and ratings of funniness of the film.

Schachter and Wheeler (1962)

Independent Variables:

Arousal State-

Placebo

Epinephrine

Chlorpromazine

Dependent Measures:

Mirth = amount of laughter

Stimulus rating = how funny they found the film

Results:

Subjects laughed more in the epinephrine arousal condition but did not like it more.

Cupchik and Leventhal (1974)

Showed that gender played a role in the relative independence of expressive behaviour and evaluation for male subjects. Male and female subjects were presented with single-frame cartoons with canned laughter present or absent as a background.

Male subjects displayed more mirth but their evaluations were not affected in the canned-laughter condition, while females showed both increased mirth and evaluation. This implied greater interrelation between expression and evaluative feelings for females compared with males.

After Schachter – Cognitive Social Psychology

& Attribution Theory

Schachter’s research spun off an entire industry having to do with making accurate and inaccurate (misattribution) judgments of internal states.

For example, he did research on internalizers and externalizers in relation to eating behaviour.

Internalizers respond to hunger cues in the gut and externalizers respond to taste. We can also say that externalizers respond to muscular feedback related to satiety cues.

George Mandler’s Information Theory

Approach to Emotion (1962, 1975)

This approach emphasized the active role played by people in interpreting and understanding the world around them.

His information processing approach to emotion places an emphasis on the role of “meaning analysis and cognitive evaluation” that deals “both with events in the external world and with the organism’s own actions and behaviours”.

Like Schachter, Mandler focuses on “undifferentiated arousal”.

“Human beings apparently have difficulty in discriminating slight changes in physiological patterns.” It is determined by the meaning analysis that caused it given the individual’s values and environmental events. This arousal “which decays relatively slowly, will potentiate subsequent feeling states”.

George Mandler’s Information Theory

Approach to Emotion (1962, 1975)

“Discrepancy and interruption” of ongoing plans and actions signals important changes in the environment and is the most important cause of the arousal. This arousal prepares the organism physiologically to respond to the evoking events. It also signals consciousness for “troubleshooting” and “attention, alertness, and scanning of the environment” which entails interpretation, and analysis both of the stimulus and of one’s capacity to respond effectively to it.

So activity in the sympathetic nervous system initiates the search for causes. This reorienting of consciousness calls attention to important events in the environment. Emotion is bound up with the “troubleshooting” function of the mind because it stimulates the individual to reorient attention, plans, and activities in a conscious manner. Furthur, “interruption may lead to expressions of fear, anger, surprise, humor, or euphoria depending on factors other than the interruption itself”. In the end, this theory is about mental life and consciousness in general, and not just about emotion.

Magda Arnold (1960)

Sequence: PERCEPTION APPRAISAL EMOTION

Past experience and goals are an important part of appraisal.

Appraisals are “sense judgments”. This phrase emphasizes their “direct, immediate, non-reflective, nonintellectual and automatic nature.”

They are judgments about the meaning of situations but are not in-depth cognitive judgments.

Emotions have a survival purpose and are impulses to action or a readiness to respond to the environment in a particular way (e.g., anger and urge to strike; fear and urge to flee).

Assess the object in terms of how it affects us personally in relation to harm or benefit… desirable or undesirable, valuable or harmful, so we are drawn toward or repelled by it.

Drive Reduction Model

Situation appraisal sets in motion physiological responses experienced as unpleasant tension. When action is complete, physiological response abates and tension is reduced.

So…Emotion is the “felt tendency towards anything appraised as good or beneficial or away from anything appraised as bad or harmful.”

1. Feelings are essential ingredients of emotion.

2. Physiological changes that accompany emotion provide a basis for felt experience and survival related purposes.

Recognize emotion by appraising the situation.

APPRAISAL SETS IT ALL IN MOTION!

Nico Frijda (1984)

Situational meaning contains three kinds of awareness:

1. Situational meaning structure

2. Arousal

3. Action tendencies

1. Situational meaning structure

Relevance of event

Seriousness of event

Urgency of event

Inescapability

Nico Frijda (1984)

2. Arousal

Autonomic arousal… Schachter and Mandler

3. Action tendencies

“States of readiness to respond” associated with emotions including facial expression.

These tendencies “establish, maintain or disrupt a relationship with the environment”.

Emotions arise to solve problems that humans face in encounters with the environment.

Nico Frijda (1984)

Like Magda Arnold… Emotions are an “awareness of action tendencies - of desires to strike or to flee, to investigate or be with”.

“Different action tendencies are what characterize different emotions”.

Event coding - Appraisal - Significance evaluation - Action readiness - Action

Appraisal - compare coded event with concerns

Evaluation - diagnose what can be done about it

Richard Lazarus (1964)

Traumatic film

Control, Intellectualization, Denial, Trauma

Appraisal is affected by expectations and affects reactions.

Emotions are responses to perceived environments that “prepare and mobilize” us to cope in an adaptive manner.

Relational meaning… how event affects us…

How situation will affect us in terms of good or bad.

What person brings to the situation in terms of expectations, goals, and intentions.

Emotions arise out of personal meaning that people bring to the situation that are relevant to their goals and aspirations.

Primary appraisal - assess relevance of an event for a person’s well being (goals)

Secondary appraisal - deal with and evaluate coping response

Eponymy (Boring, 1963)

Definition: Naming a school, movement or paradigm after a person.

Three factors from Boring:

(1) Narrow attention by readers that focuses on prominent figures or features associated with a school, movement, or paradigm.

(2) People want heroes and so they focus on successful researchers in that way.

(3) Ambitious researchers need goals, awards and honours to activate them. This motive can be related to the Action Model.

And one extra factor from Cupchik in view of Schachter’s success with Maranon’s original idea.

Theatrical eponymy – The association of a scholar with an experimental paradigm because of its dramatic qualities. See this in relation to the paradigm from Schachter and Singer (1962) in which the subject received an injection, with or without an explanation, and was exposed either to a euphoric (happy) or angry stooge in a dramatic scene.

Also related to this is the distinction between personalistic and naturalistic explanations for developments in science.

Personalistic explanations focus on the individual (Darwin, Newton, Freud, Einstein) as the great genius. The personality of the figure was behind his or her great discoveries.

Naturalistic explanations focus on the intellectual context in which certain ideas or problems were salient.

The German concept of Zeitgeist refers to the intellectual spirit of the times which might have influenced the scholar to develop what seemed like a new idea.

COGNITIVE APPROACHES to emotion…

Karl Pribram (1967, 1968)

1. He offers a memory based theory of emotion rather than a viscerally or arousal based theory.

2. He takes into account past experience and the present, emotion-evoking situation.

3. Emotion is related to the plans or projects rather than the level of activation.

4. Organized stability is the baseline from which disturbances or perturbations occurs. Input that is incongruent with the baseline produces a disturbance.

5. An important part of the baseline is continuing activity of the viscera regulated through the autonomic nervous system.

6. A mismatch between expectations and actual bodily changes in heart rate, sweating, butterflies, and so on, is sensed as a discrepancy.

Karl Pribram (1967, 1968)

7. So emotion is related to ongoing organization of plans, programs or dispositions.

“Emotion is a perturbation, an interruption, disruption of normal ongoing activity.”

Pribram extends the homeostatic model from intraorganic events to the total organism-environment relation.

8. Emotion is an e-motion, a process that takes the organism temporarily out of motion and effects control through the regulation of sensory inputs.

9. Central control through the regulation of peripheral inputs takes two forms:

(A) Inhibition of peripheral inputs while organism decides what to do.

(B) Facilitation of attention to critical inputs from the environment.

Oatley and Johnson-Laird

* They follow in the tradition of Mandler and Pribram by focusing on the interruption of goals.

* Emotions signal important events in the environment and prepare one cognitively and physiologically for activities that may involve changing one’s plans or goals and altering ongoing behaviour.

EMOTIONS FUNCTION IN THE MANAGEMENT OF ACTION!

* Emotions emerge at significant junctures in plans.

* Emotion signals do this quickly and without the aid of consciousness.

* Emotions involve a readiness to respond in particular ways to particular stimuli.

Oatley and Johnson-Laird

* Emotions are triggered by stimuli that are relevant to goals – for example:

(A) Anxiety when self-preservation is threatened.

(B) Anger when plan being carried out is frustrated.

(C) Happiness when a goal is achieved.

* Complex emotions are not combinations of simpler, basic

emotions. They have added propositional evaluation which is

Social and includes reference to models of the self.

* Emotion involves intrasystemic communication between modules in the system.

* Emotion involves intersystemic communication in the sense that many of our more complex emotions communicate information about mutual plans and goals of interdependent social actors.

Oatley and Johnson-Laird

So, emotions are mental states with coherent psychological functions. They have:

An action readiness component (like Frijda) based on an evaluation of something happening that affects the person’s concerns and the evaluation need not be conscious.

A phenomenological tone or felt quality.

Emotions are accompanied by:

• A conscious preoccupation

(e.g., anger and thoughts of revenge)

(B) Bodily disturbance

(C) Expressive gesture in the face

Oatley and Johnson-Laird

Oatley imagines a heirarchy of modules in the brain that execute functions

and help us realize our goals. This is a computational model.

SO EMOTIONS HELP US ARRANGE GOAL PRIORITIES.

We are consciously aware of only the top level of the cognitive system

that contains a model of the system’s goals.

The Semantic Field of Emotion

0 – Generic emotions: emotions and feelings

1 – Basic emotions: happiness and elation

(They have intensity & duration)

2 – Emotional relations: love and hate

3 – Caused emotions: gladness and horror

4 – Causatives: irritate and reassure

5 – Emotional goals: desire and avarice

6 – Complex emotions: embarrassment and pity

Roseman’s Cognitive Structural Theory

For 14 emotions, 5 dimensions or ways of appraising events

(Like the VALUE X EXPECTANCY model we discussed earlier)

1. Situational State – Are the events one encounters in a particular situation consistent or inconsistent with one’s motives?

Consistency leads to positive emotions and inconsistency to negative emotions. (Like Arnold’s harmful-

beneficial distinction).

2. Probability – How certain are you that a particular outcome will occur?

Uncertainty and fear or hope.

Certainty, joy, sadness, sadness or disgust.

Roseman’s Cognitive Structural Theory

3. Agency – Who is responsible for events in a particular situation?

Caused by self = GUILT

Caused by other = ANGER

Circumstances beyond one’s control = SADNESS

4. Motivational State – Do the events one encounters involve obtaining a reward or avoiding a punishment? (Appetitive vs. Aversive Motivation)

Obtain reward = JOY

Avoid punishment = RELIEF

5. Power – Perceive oneself as weak or strong in a particular situation.

Weak = FEAR

Strong = FRUSTRATION/ANGER