Chapter 8: Emotion and Motivation

the natural tendency to seek a particular goal

instinct

a motivation to take actions that are themselves rewarding

intrinsic motivation

the tendency to care more about avoiding losses than about achieving equal-size gains

loss aversion

the psychological cause of an action

motivation

the motivation to solve worthwhile problems

need for achievement

measures physiological changes associated with stress — if you tell a lie, this is a stressful event; so if you've lied there should be some sign of stress; there is a high false positive rate — many jurisdictions don't allow their use in evidence in court. Why don't they work on everyone? One of the factors - innocent people can be intimidated by the prison environment and therefore are more likely to be nervous/show signs of physiological arousal

polygraph

auditory pop-out from emotional word. If people hear a stream of words and then are asked to recount the words they heard, they are more likely to remember words that have to do with emotions

selective attention

anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, sadness

six basic emotions

Damasio - reasoning is guided by emotional evaluation of the consequences of an action — do you go to a party on an icy, stormy night? weighing cost of accident against the reward of fun — if you're from South Carolina in the northeast, you don't think about it and get in the car. Someone who is from the northeast had an accident a few years ago when they skidded on the ice — this means that they won't go to the party. When you say 'I feel like this' you're making a decision based on emotionally marked memories

somatic marker hypothesis

Decrease in emotional reaction by decreasing the strength of facial expression or denying other behavior appropriate to that emotion e.g. refusing to frown or cry when sad.

suppression

the theory that people cope with their existential terror by developing a cultural worldview

terror management theory

People were shown a photo of a crying woman because she was at a funeral, and they were asked what the woman was feeling. They said sadness, and their amygdala began to become active. Then they were told that the woman was actually at a wedding. The cortex began to become active and then the amygdala activity was decreased. Cognitive reappraisal is happening at the level of the cortex. Amygdala has a lot to do with the production of fear — amygdala has a lot to do with detecting whether something is a threat or not

the role of the amygdala in emotion

the theory that a stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the body and emotional experience in the brain. They suggested that our bodily experiences happen too slowly to be the source of our emotions. They instead think physiological and experiential responses occur simultaneously. Both are triggered by changes in brain phenomena — the idea that the beating heart and fear at seeing a bear happen simultaneously

Cannon-Bard theory

the theory that a stimulus triggers activity in the body, which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain. Emotional experiences cause emotional behavior; if you see a bear you run from the bear and then you feel the behavior as fear only after we run. Support - facial feedback theory; the configuration in which we hold our facial muscles influences the emotion we then claim as our experience - smile and you feel happy. They brought someone in, divided them into two groups - asks them a bunch of questions, they are given a mood reading - put their mood on a scale - and then asked them to do something simple i.e. hold a pencil in their mouth for five minutes - either you put it horizontal so that the muscles are pulled back on your face — or they had to hold it pointing outwards so that the smiling muscles aren't engaged, the frowning muscles are engaged instead. After they did that for five minutes, they asked the participants to go through the ratings again. They found an increase or decrease in baseline mood. If you came in with a mood rating of 3, if you held the pencil in your mouth horizontally, your mood was a 4. If you had to hold it outwards, it would have been a 2. Fake frown decrease of small amount in mood; fake smile increases by small amount in mood

James-Lange theory

inability to recognize facial expressions; hyper-sexual behavior in appropriate and inappropriate subjects — lack of fear, to study this, scientists damaged the amygdala in primates. There is a dominant male in a society of gorillas, lower ranked males learn not to challenge the dominant male. Dominant male has access to all women, the lower ranked males have to be sneaky with females to be able to have sex. They damaged the amygdala of lower ranked males - this led to these males openly soliciting the females for sex, stealing food — they had lost their ability to lose information about threatening situations to guide their behavior. They had to be removed from the society because otherwise they were going to be beaten to death by the dominant male. No longer using fear information.

Kluver-Bucy syndrome

he grouped needs into a pyramid shape and theorized that people are more likely to experience a need when the needs below it are met (more pressing needs put at the bottom of the pyramid) i.e. when people are hungry, they're less likely to seek moral clarity

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

involves putting one's feelings into words- this is an effective way to reduce the intensity of emotional states

affect labeling

not too good at predicting our emotional reactions to future events; our ratings of predicted enjoyment and actual enjoyment are usually very different (interestingly, schizophrenic people are more likely to line up predictions and actual enjoyments accurately)

affective forecasting

an evaluation of the emotion-relevant aspects of a stimulus

appraisal

the motivation to experience a positive outcome

approach motivation

the motivation not to experience a negative outcome

avoidance motivation

changing one's emotional experience by changing the way one thinks about emotion-eliciting stimulus; - decrease emotional response by re-interpretation of stimuli; like when you're taking a SAT test, you're really worried and stressed so instead you start thinking about how cool it is that you learnt all these cool new things. Or thinking about college application that you have lots of other great things about your application that doesn't have to do with the SAT; could always take the ACT instead. These thoughts will decrease the emotional response.

cognitive reappraisal

jealousy, guilt

complex/compound emotions

motivations of which people are aware

conscious motivations

ast pathway - from stimulus to thalamus to amygdala and then you experience fear — almost like a subconscious response or the slow pathway - from stimulus thalamus to cortex to amygdala and then you experience fear

different pathways to experience emotion

a norm for the appropriate expression of emotion

display rule

an internal state caused by physiological needs

drive

a theory suggesting that organisms are motivated to reduce their drives; it isn't food per se that organisms find rewarding - it's the reduction of the drive for food

drive-reduction theory

a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of psychological activity; Emotion on a multidimensional scaling — from negative to positive valence (valence is feeling); high to low arousal — look where things fall on that continuum; gloomy closer to negative valence and low arousal; excited close to positive valence and high arousal

emotion

Emotions can influence decisions; humans are bad decision-makers, we're not overly rational - we make decisions quickly, rarely based on probabilities . Anticipatory: Later in time — What am I going to get? How much do I want this thing? Expected: It'll happen closer to now — What will happen later? Will I be happy or sad if I make that decision? Immediate: What do I feel right now?

emotion and decision-making

an observable sign of an emotional state

emotional expression

snakes and flowers; you only have the pop-out effect with the fearful stimuli - similar effects with faces

emotional pop-out effects

the strategies people use to influence their own emotional experiences

emotional regulation

a motivation to take actions that lead to reward

extrinsic motivation

the theory that emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they signify

facial feedback hypothesis

morphology, sincere expressions involve the so-called reliable muscles, which are those that people cannot easily control — the eye crinkling muscles are harder to control than the muscles that make the corners of your mouth upturn. Symmetry - sincere expressions tend to be a bit more symmetrical than insincere expressions, which is why a slightly lopsided smile suggests insincerity. Duration - sincere expressions tend to last between half a second and 5 seconds - expressions of much longer tend to be insincere. Temporal patterning: sincere expressions appear and disappear smoothly over the course of a few seconds, whereas insincere expressions tend to have abrupt onsets and offsets

features that distinguish between sincere and insincere emotion

memories plus situation plus emotional response

gut feelings

the claim that people are motivated to experience pleasure and avoid pain

hedonic principle

the tendency for a system to take action to keep itself in an optimal state i.e. when levels of food/warmth deviate from the optimum, the brain sends a signal to the organism to take corrective action

homeostasis

Emotional expression - emotional states influence the way we talk, 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

how do we communicate our emotions?

Intensify expression; De-intensify expression - muting expression; Masking - displaying a different emotion; Neutralizing - not displaying any emotion at all e.g. therapists have to neutralize feelings when they're listening to clients. Sometimes we have a lack of control over facial muscles

how do we deceive people about emotions?

the theory that emotions are based on inferences about the causes of physiological arousal. Our emotional response isn't just a function of some sort of an event, but we interpret our physiology based on the context or circumstances - you have some sort of a stimulus which will produce an emotion, there'll be something going on in the environment — consistent with contextual clues. Experiment done to support this theory: there were 4 groups, each group was told they would receive an injection that may have side effects - two groups were told the side effects, some were told it was going to be increased heart rate, increased breathing, feeling edginess. Two groups were not told. After given injection, they were told to wait with another participant (actually a confederate, a research assistant who is presented as a participant in the study) - the confederate was acting out either happiness or anger - the participant is asked to fill out a survey on their mood rating. If emotion is just about interpreting physiological arousal, the situation is the same for each participant — in fact, it's not just what you're feeling or doing, you're taking in everything else that's going on around you. In an ambiguous state, you're going to look at other people around you for guidance on how to feel. Results: if you were told effects and you were with the happy confederate or the angry confederate, there was a mild or no change in emotion. If you were not told the effects and you're with the happy confederate, you report increased happiness. If you're not told the effects and you're with the angry confederate, you report increased anger. This suggests that it's important that we're interpreting what's going in the context. E.g. kids in the playground all tumble and bruise their knee — they're looking at each other to determine how to feel - if one starts crying, they all start crying, if one laughs and runs off, they all do the same. The idea that emotional response doesn't occur in a vacuum

two-factor theory of emotion

motivations of which people are not aware

unconscious motivations

the theory that emotional expressions have the same meaning for everyone. Not everyone agrees with this categorization; this categorization not necessarily universal or cross-cultural, one of the emotions in certain cultures isn't recognized always . Some cultures have different display rules in terms of displaying emotion; same thing with gender rules — it's 'okay' for girls to cry but not for boys. Emotional expression is consistent across people; study individuals who are blind from birth - they've never seen a facial expression — blind and sighted athletes all celebrate in the same way; the victorious one is excited and throwing arms in the air, the losing one is clearly sad — as a sighted person would be. Also universal across species — measures how much an animal likes something; a scientist gave newborn babies sucrose (sweet taste) or a little bit of quinine (bitter taste) and saw the typical expressions of happiness (mouth smacking) and disgust (tongue protrusions); the same thing happened with rats

universality hypothesis

Helps set up the body for reaction to threat/danger — "fight or flight" reaction and the accompanying emotion of fear; Helps recover from stress; Helps mark important memories; Signal social intent/connection

what function does emotion serve?

Sociopaths and psychopaths are unable to arouse emotion so you can't measure the physiological arousal in their brain

why would you get a false negative on the polygraph?