Emotions

• Whole-organism responses to a stimulus, involving:

1. Physiological arousal

2. Expressive behaviors

3. Conscious experience

• Mood – overall feeling one has that lasts for an extended time frame

Basic Emotions

• Fear, surprise, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness• Basic emotions are innate (inborn) and “hard-

wired”• Complex emotions are a blend of many aspects of

emotions• Classified along two dimensions

1. Pleasant or unpleasant2. Level of activation or arousal associated with the

emotion

Concept of Emotion• A class of subjective feelings created by stimuli that

have high significance to an individual

• Simply stated: Categories of feelings caused by things in the environment that are important to us– stimuli that produce high arousal generally produce

strong feelings– are rapid and automatic– emerged through natural selection to benefit survival and

reproduction

Evolutionary Explanations of Emotion

• Darwin argued that emotions reflect evolutionary adaptations to the problems of survival and reproduction

• Today’s evolutionary psychologists believe that emotions are the product of evolution and that they help us solve adaptive problems posed by our environment

Functions of Emotion • Move us to act, triggering motivated behavior • Help us to set goals, but emotional states can also be goals

in themselves. • Involved in rational decision making and purposeful

behavior. • Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand

and manage:– your own emotional experiences– to perceive, comprehend, and respond appropriately to

the emotional responses of others.

The Subjective Experience of Emotion

People vary in their subjective experience of emotion in the following ways:

• People vary greatly in the intensity of their emotions

• The sexes differ little in their experience of emotions

• The sexes differ in the expression of emotion: women are more emotionally expressive

The Subjective Experience of Emotion

• There are a limited number of basic emotions that all humans, in every culture, experience.

• They are thought to be biologically determined, the products of evolution

• People often experience a blend of emotions or mixed emotions, rather than a pure emotion.

Culture & Emotional Experience • Studies of Japanese subjects added a

third dimension, interpersonal engagement—the degree to which an emotion involves relationships with others.

• Because Japan is a collectivistic culture, one’s identity is seen as interdependent with those of other people, rather than independent, as is characteristic of individualistic cultures

The Neuroscience of Emotion

The Nervous System & Emotion

Biology of Emotion:An Overview

• View ABC Report on Science of Happiness (8 min)• Do genes or life experiences have the most effect on emotion?• Do we have a “happiness set-point?”• Can we change our brain through meditation?• View Psychology: The Human Experience DVD Segment 20

on Physiology of Emotion (3:04) • What were early studies on the biology of emotion focused on?• What do modern studies focus on?• What did scientists learn from stroke victims about the left &

right frontal lobes when it comes to emotions?

Divisions of the Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System• The division of the peripheral nervous system that

controls the glands and muscles of the internal organs

• Monitors the autonomic functions• Controls breathing, blood pressure, and digestive

processes• Divided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic

nervous systems• Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that the

basic emotions are associated with distinct patterns of autonomic nervous system activity

Divisions of the Nervous System

Sympathetic Nervous System

• The part of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body to deal with perceived threats

• Fight or flight response

Divisions of the Nervous System

Parasympathetic Nervous System

• The part of the autonomic nervous system that calms the body

• Brings the body back down to a relaxed state

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Autonomic Nervous System

Fear: A Closer LookThe Role of Brain in Emotion

Physical Arousal and Emotions• Sympathetic nervous system is aroused with emotions

(fight-or-flight response)• Different emotions stimulate different responses

– Fear—decrease in skin temperature (cold-feet)

– Anger—increase in skin temperature (hot under the collar)

• A recent study using PET scans found that each of four emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, and fear) produced a distinct pattern of brain activation and deactivation

• This indicates that each emotion involves distinct neural circuits in the brain

High Arousal• Arousal response - pattern of physiological

change that helps prepare the body for “fight or flight”– muscles tense, heart rate and breathing increase,

release of endorphins, focused attention– can be helpful or harmful– in general, high arousal is beneficial for instinctive,

well-practiced or physical tasks– harmful for novel (new), creative, or careful

judgment tasks

Yerkes-Dodson Law

• Some arousal is necessary

• High arousal is helpful on easy tasks

• As level of arousal increases, quality of performance decreases with task difficulty

• Too much arousal is harmful

Degree of arousal

Qu

alit

y o

f p

erfo

rman

ce

Very difficult task

Moderatelydifficult task

Easy task

Brain-Based Theory of Emotions

• Amygdala– evaluate the significance of stimuli and generate

emotional responses– generate hormonal secretions and autonomic

reactions that accompany strong emotions– damage causes “psychic blindness” and the

inability to recognize fear in facial expressions and voice

Brain-Based Theory of Emotions• Frontal lobes

– influence people’s conscious emotional feelings and ability to act in planned ways based on feelings (e.g., effects of prefrontal lobotomy)

left frontal lobe may be most involved in processing positive emotions

right frontal lobe involved with negative emotions

Parietal

Frontal

Occipital

Temporal

How You Experience Fear• When a person is faced with a potentially threatening

stimulus, the visual stimulus is first routed to the thalamus.

• Information is then relayed simultaneously along two neural pathways:

1. crude, archetypal information travels rapidly to the amygdala (in the limbic system),

2. More detailed information travels to the visual cortex, where the stimulus is interpreted

• If the cortex determines that a threat exists, the information is relayed to the amygdala along the longer, slower pathway.

Amygdala then sends information along two pathways

1. One pathway leads to an area of the hypothalamus, then on to the medulla; together, they trigger arousal of the sympathetic nervous system

2. Another pathway leads to a different hypothalamus area that, in concert with the pituitary gland, triggers the release of stress hormones.

• Joseph LeDoux believes that the direct thalamus–amygdala connection represents an adaptive response that has been hard-wired by evolution in the human brain.

• The indirect route allows more complex stimuli to be evaluated in the cortex.

Fear Pathway in the BrainWhen you’re faced with a potentially threatening stimulus—like a snake dangling from a stick—information arrives in the thalamus (blue) and is relayed simultaneously along two pathways. Crude, archetypal information rapidly travels the direct route to the amygdala (red), triggering an almost instantaneous fear response. More detailed information is sent along the pathway to the visual cortex (blue), where the stimulus is interpreted. If the cortex determines that a threat exists, the information is relayed to the amygdala along the longer, slower pathway. The amygdala triggers other brain structures, such as the hypothalamus, which activate the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system’s release of stress hormones.

I Have Had it with the SNAKES!

Applications of Neuroscience &

Emotion

Lie Detection• The polygraph doesn’t really detect lies.

• Some of its many problems include:– false negative results,

– false positive results, – highly subjective interpretations of the physical

changes that occur

• A variety of nonverbal cues, especially microexpressions, are associated with deception, but no single nonverbal cue indicates that someone is lying

Are Lie Detectors Accurate?

Benjamin Kleinmuntz and Julian Szucko (1984) had polygraph experts study the polygraph data of 50 theft suspects who later confessed to being guilty and 50 suspects whose innocence was later established by someone's confession. Had the polygraph experts been the judges, more than one-third of the innocent would have been declared guilty, and almost one-fourth of the guilty would have been declared innocent.

Brain Fingerprinting• Uses an electroencephalograph to analyze

brain waves to determine whether a stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar.

• The brain emits a P300 wave in response to a familiar stimulus.

• If a suspect emits a P300 wave in response to details that only the criminal would know, the examiner would conclude that the suspect possessed "guilty knowledge" of the crime.

• Brain fingerprinting is still controversial and has only recently become admissible as evidence in court.