PSYC18 - Psychology of Emotion

Lecture 8

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

More About Ekman and Friesen:

Darwin had proposed that facial expressions would be universally recognized so Ekman and Friesen tried to demonstrate this.

Their argument is that if emotional expressions are subject to evolution by natural selection, members of the same species must exhibit the same emotional expressions and people should be able to recognize them.

Ekman and Friesen studied people who were ‘visually isolated’ from the West (the Fore in New Guinea). They used pictures of facial expressions involving happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. Subjects could discriminate between facial expressions representing these emotions but there was some confusion between fear and surprise.

More About Ekman and Friesen:

1. Emotional expressions represent a “basic”, “primary”, or “fundamental” list of wired-in emotions.

2. These basic emotions are essential to survival and have correlated facial expressions which others can decode.

Culturally Defined Display Rules:

Patterns of expression management learned while being socialized in a particular culture (e.g., American students felt it was more appropriate to display sadness to one’s friends and family than did Japanese students.)

Non-Verbal Leakage:

Emotion escapes through a non-monitored channel…such as nervous tapping of feet at a job interview. You did not realize you were doing it and so did not intentionally bring it under control.

Spontaneous versus Posed Facial Expressions:

This discussion has focused on spontaneous facial expressions but posed ones should be considered too. Are you going to feel the same emotional experience if you are faking a smile?

Pure Expressions of Emotion and Affect Blends:

Affect blends are combinations of primary affects in response to particular situations.

1. There are no pure facial expressions!

2. The role of context in the interpretation

of affect blends is fundamental!

Carroll Izard: Dimensional and Category Approaches to Facial Expressions

Dimensional Approach:

This approach assumes that emotion is not a special state and can be related to behaviour in general. It essentially reflects bodily states and activity. This underlies the Action Theory perspective.

Spencer (1890) differentiated between agreeable and disagreeable feelings (or pain versus pleasure) as sensory experiences.

Wundt (1896) also distinguished three dimensions of affective experience:

1. Pleasant - Unpleasant

2. Relaxation - Tension

3. Calm - Excitement

Category Approach:

This approach postulates basic or primary affects which form the basis for emotion. Emotional experience is affected by facial expressions and neural patterning. This is more perceptual and experience oriented.

Izard associates emotion categories with:

1. Innately determined neural substrates

2. Characteristic facial expressions

3. A distinctive subjective or phenomenological quality

Izard’s list of emotions:

Interest, joy, distress, anger, contempt, fear, shame and guilt

Schlosberg (1954) distinguished three dimensions of facial expression:

1. Pleasant - Unpleasant

2. Attention - Rejection

3. Sleep - Tension

Osgood (1954) distinguished three dimensions of connotative meaning in words using the Semantic Differential

1. Evaluation (pleasant-unpleasant)

2. Activation (relaxed-tense)

3. Potency (weak-powerful)

Another Way to Think About Dimensions:

1. HAPPINESS versus SADNESS and FACIAL FEEDBACK

2. FEAR versus ANGER and VISCERAL FEEDBACK

3. INTEREST versus DISGUST

THE CENTRAL POINT IS THAT EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE IS SHAPED BY BODILY FEEDBACK FROM THE FACE AND VISCERA!

A FEEDBACK SYSTEM REQUIRES TIME AND SO EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES BUILD UP OVER TIME…

...AND HAVE A HOLISTIC STRUCTURE!!

Consider a contrast between the objective & subjective approaches in psychology.

Positivism goes hand in hand with an objective approach in science. In language use, every word must have a single meaning specified by an operation or scientific definition. It is nomothetic or rule oriented and searches for general laws.

Romanticism fits with a subjective approach. We find the language of romanticism in myths and in everyday speech. Precise and narrow language cannot capture the complexities of psychology and personal life. It is ideographic and concerned with individual meanings in life.

Psychodynamics & the Experience Approach

For psychodynamic theorists, behaviours in everyday life can refer to many meanings at once. People are understood as behaving in ways that are intentional and purposive though this might be unconscious.

The goal of the psychodynamic viewpoint is to interpret and not to predict. It does not try to explain which is the goal of mechanistic and behavioural psychology.

Mapping out the multiple referents of behaviour is fundamentally different from identifying causal or determining antecedents.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) believed in the Darwinian view of humans. The ultimate source of human meaning lies in biological instincts inherited through the process of natural selection.

From the Psychodynamic Viewpoint:

1. Emotion is a qualitatively different phenomenon from thought.

2. Emotion is motivational in life and is more powerful than thought most of the time.

3. Emotion, more than thought, refers to some additional invisible unconscious processes.

4. Emotion expresses those aspects of a person’s fundamental nature that are not readily apparent to the conscious mind.

From the Psychodynamic Viewpoint:

So, every emotion is the manifest content of a complicated psychological process which is largely unconscious.

* The unconscious origins of emotion are the latent content.

* The manifest content expresses the latent content in some altered form.

Emotion goes beyond the immediate situation. People carry around with them latent concerns from situation to situation.

* Emotion is NOT a behaviour which is a function of the environment.

* Emotion is NOT quite what it appears to be consciously. To understand an emotion one must seek out the latent content of the emotion and relate it to the fundamental nature of the person.

Freud worked with the notion of instinct or drive. An instinct is genetically determined and, when operative, it produces a state of psychic tension or excitation. This tension prompts the person to act which leads to gratification and the cessation of excitation.

Homeostatic Model:

Tension --> Motor Activity --> Cessation of Tension

This model reflects the deterministic philosophy that Freud was trained in. The human organism is seen as a complex energy system. It derives its energy from food and expends it for various purposes including: circulation, respiration, perceiving, thinking and remembering.

Energy that was directed to psychological work was called psychic energy. We start with an absolute amount of psychic energy which is given over to different activities.

The instinct concept links psychology and physiology. It is a psychological representation of an inner somatic source of excitation.

1. the bodily excitation is called a need2. the psychological representation is a wish

For example: consider the state of hunger.

Physiological condition of nutritional deficit in the tissues of the body leads to --> Wish for food

Four Characteristics of an Instinct:

1. Source - bodily condition or need2. Aim - to abolish the deficiency3. Object - activity involved in satisfying the need4. Impetus - force or strength determined by the intensity of the underlying need

This is an internal tension reduction homeostatic model

The source and aim are constant throughout life but the objects or means to satisfy the needs can change. This implies that psychic energy is displaceable from object to object.

All adult interests, preferences, tastes and habits are displacements of energy from original object choices.

* The life instinct relates to survival and the form of its energy is called libido. Freud focused on the sexual aspect of this instinct. * The death instinct involves aggressive drives and was described after World War I.

Freud arrived at his psychodynamic approach based on evidence from hysterical symptoms and actions performed under post-hypnotic suggestion.

Unconscious mental events can manifest themselves in behaviour. Ideas can be unconscious and very strong and this leads to the idea of “inadmissability to consciousness.”

Unconscious ideas which can become conscious are called preconscious ideas. Those denied access are called unconscious.

Repression: Ideas charged with affect are repressed and the idea and affect are separated.

The affect (1) can be inhibited, (2) remain in consciousness but attached to another idea or (3) it can undergo transformation into anxiety.

These repressed ideas become organized into and expressed as fantasies.

Consider the contrast between PRIMARY and SECONDARY mental processes.