Chapter 6 - Emotion and Affect

The curve between arousal and performance is _____________ for complex tasks than for simple tasks.

lower

Schacter-Singer theory

- The idea that emotion has two components: a bodily state of arousal and a cognitive label that specifies the emotion - (schacter two factor) - Assumes emotions have such a distinct PA that we can tell them apart - Harder with negative emotions - There are some instances were PA happens before we are aware of the ES - PA->ES->CA->Emotion - Physiological arousal -> external stimulus -> cognitive appraisal -> emotion - Hair on back of neck feeling when you're alone in a parking lot

Affect-as-information hypothesis

- The idea that people judge something as good or bad by asking themselves "How do I feel about it?" - (a particular emotion has informational value for a current goal or task)

According to the affect-as-information hypothesis, people judge something as good or bad by asking themselves which of the following questions?

"How do I feel about it?"

Emotion

- A conscious experience that is a reaction to an external event (deliberate) - Negative Emotions stronger than Positive: negative emotions are felt more intensely, last longer, and matter to us more; negative emotions are more tied to our survival

Arousal

- A physiological reaction, including faster heartbeat and faster or heavier breathing, linked to most conscious emotions

Conscious emotion

- A powerful and clearly unified feeling state, such as anger or joy

Disgust

- A strong negative feeling of repugnance and revulsion - Avoidance emotion - Tends to be emotion that has some of the strongest PA - Gender Difference: women deal with this emotion more often and more strongly; women are the ones who get pregnant, so we need fine tuned disgust reactions to avoid harming developing offspring

Hedonic treadmill

- A theory proposing that people stay at about the same level of happiness regardless of what happens to them - Win lottery = happier right away, but will return to the same level of happiness they had prior to winning at some point

Jealousy

- A threat in a relationship: perceived and they have the belief it's there, even if it isn't - Requires three people (minimum): person feeling emotion, person they're in a relationship with, and the person who's the threat - Worries about threat affecting relationship - Gender Difference: men tend to get more jealous when it comes to sexual components; women get more jealous when it comes to emotional components - Friend sharing information with partner but not you

Risk-as-feelings hypothesis

- The idea that people rely on emotional processes to evaluate risk, with the result that their judgments may be biased by emotional factors

Broaden-and-build theory

- The proposition that positive emotions expand an individual's attention and mind-set and promote increasing one's resources

Anger

- An emotional response to a real or imagined threat or provocation - Emotional response to some sort of threat - Unique among negative emotions: most negative emotions can be described as avoid emotions that tell you to leave environment - Anger is an approach emotion: tells you not to leave environment, prepare for a fight - Adaptive: when we register that someone is angry, it tells us that there is a risk of physical aggression that is coming; will trigger my own anger or my fear; being able to spot anger allows us to make decision to prepare or flee because you won't be able to beat them - Anger Superiority Effect: anger is the emotion we are quickest able to identify in others 1. Conceal: way of dealing with emotion; we are ok at this, but not if we are super angry 2. Catharsis: take out anger on something else; not actually effective at getting rid of anger; often times makes you angrier (Catharsis theory: the proposition that expressing negative emotions produces a healthy release of those emotions and is therefore good for the psyche) 3. Rid: overcoming approach and leaving situation or beating the shit out of what is making you angry

Life satisfaction

- An evaluation of how one's life is generally and how it compares to some standard

Emotion helps guide cognition and decision making

- Based on if you feel this is a happy or sad thing, it'll change the way you think about that thing; making your least favorite class have your favorite color folder to help you like it more - Certain emotions we like to feel more or less; affective forecasting; if I make this decision, how will it make me feel in the future? We are bad at this; regret is super influential to our affective forecasting, but we are horrible about knowing when we will feel regret - Affective forecasting: the ability to predict one's emotional reactions to future events

Embarrassment

- Blush: what makes it fairly unique; allows you to display emotion you're feeling - Apologize and repair: things that are causing embarrassment - Trivial: embarrassment is fairly trivial; dropping 1 egg vs a dozen eggs is a much different transgression

Matsumoto & Willingham (2009)

- Compared blind athletes to sighted athletes - Who had been blind since birth - Found that they displayed the same emotions when the won or lost their athletic contests - Blind athletes were never taught those facial expressions because they've never seen them - Something ingrained in us that causes our face to display the same way when successful or after defeat

Dark triad of personality

- Consists of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.

Affect regulation

- Control emotions we are feeling - Goals: get into a specific emotional state, get out of, or prolong - Largely dependent on the situation: even same stimuli can cause different emotional reaction depending on situation you're in - Positive affect/state: do good feeling things (like favorite hobby, watching favorite movie), Social Support (reaching out to friends or family; just being able to interact can help mood), and Exercise - Negative affect/state: rumination (constantly thinking about stimuli that caused negative emotions; like what caused breakup; to cause or prolong; women more likely), Distraction (watching depressing movie to think about thing that caused you to be depressed; men more likely), and Consumption (eating a tub of ice cream after being broken up with; don't feel good about self after eating a thousand calories of icecream; Women more likely to consume food and men more likely to consume alcohol) - Affect regulation can have at least six different goals: One can seek to get into, get out of, or prolong a good mood, and the same three options apply to a bad mood

Emodiversity

- Degree to which a person experiences the variety and relative abundance of human emotions - A specific person's ability to feel a range of emotions - Shifting emotional sphere = large amount of this

Display norms and gender norms with emotion (or love)

- Display: differs between cultures; cultural rules that tell us when, how, and to whom we should display our emotions; use self control and will power to avoid displaying emotion in certain scenarios - Gender: men fall in love faster, more deeply, and are more strongly affected when love ends; women have friends but men lose themselves in relationships

Emotion helps with behavioral control

- Embarrassment is good example - Make someone feel embarrassed, they're likely to try to repair violation and do what you want - Mean Girls and Regina being the one not allowed to sit with them - Risk-as-feelings hypothesis: the idea that people rely on emotional processes to evaluate risk, with the result that their judgments may be biased by emotional factors

Self-conscious emotions

- Emotions that require social interaction and comparison: socially attuned relationships - Central to motivation and regulation: depends on what people are doing around us and how we feel in comparison; for us to work harder or ruin the other person's life - Emerge Later in a person's development - Facial expression: not a specific facial expression; not in universally identifiable - More about others than self preservation - Compared to universal emotions (about self preservation) - Guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride

Social comparison emotions

- Envy and jealousy

Sex guilt

- Feeling guilty about sexual thoughts, acts, or fantasies. - Homophobes are most turned on by gay sex

Mood

- Feeling something/internal state not related to an external event

Larson & Pleck (1999)

- Gave both adult men and adult women beepers - When beeper went off, they were supposed to rate their current emotion and rate it out of 10 - Found: men and women were the same (slight suggestion men were stronger)

Self-evaluative/self-conscious emotions

- Guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride/hubris

Guilt/shame

- Guilt: an unpleasant moral emotion associated with a specific instance in which one has acted badly or wrongly - Shame: a moral emotion that, like guilt, involves feeling bad but, unlike guilt, spreads to the whole person - Guilt occurs based on an action: you hit another person's car - Shame is about who you are as a person: feel bad about who you are - Survivor's Guilt: PTSD; action person feels guilty about is avoiding death (or injury) in traumatic event; closely studied after 9/11 (an unpleasant emotion associated with living through an experience during which other people died) - "Out damned spot!": Macbeth; guilt and shame have a close relation to cleanliness; people try to clean/cleanse things to make selves feel better; Lady Macbeth saw blood on her hands; organizing computer, house, showering; studied in relationship with cheating - Empathy: Guilt = more likely to feel empathy, Shame = less likely; shame is much more self-focused (so focused on how you are a bad person, it's hard for you to put on someone else's shoes; when guilty, you think about how you're making other people feel)

McMillen & Austin (1971)

- Had people come into lab and had a confederate there who supposedly just finished the experiment - Half of participants, confederate sat and did nothing; other half, confederate told participants about experiment they were about to do - Experimenter asks them after if they've heard anything about the experiment - Every single one said no: half are liars - Filled out bubble sheet and experimenter afterwards asked for help putting bubble sheets in machine (boring task) - Dependent variable was how long the participants helped - Truthful ones: average 2 minutes - Liars: average 63 minutes: they felt guilty for lying; used this opportunity to sway own guilt

Emotion helps with shared information

- If i show fear over something, it can show you this is a dangerous thing - Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock (2014): questionably ethical way; manipulated people's facebook feeds Into largely positive or negative, looked at what kinds of statuses people were posting, emotional valence of people reflected their feeds; more likely to comment on things they saw in their specific feeds - Affect-as-information hypothesis: the idea that people judge something as good or bad by asking themselves "How do I feel about it?"

State-dependent retrieval

- It is easier for us to remember things that match our emotional state - Pulling things out of memory - All other fights come to mind when in argument with a person

Emotion helps cushion us

- More true for positive emotions - When we have felt positive emotions recently, it helps us to not feel as negatively about negative events - Got broken up with by partner, so thinking about good times with that partner helps to cushion blow or friends can help you feel better - Positive emotions can also help us branch out: happiness helps us to be curious, broaden knowledge and social space, negative emotions are what keep us alive - Broaden-and-build theory: the proposition that positive emotions expand an individual's attention and mind-set and promote increasing one's resources

Mood and attributions

- Positive mood = more generous attributions - Negative event = assume it's more external: They cut me off because they must be on their way to hospital - Positive event = internal: I'm in a great mood and my friend got me coffee because they're an amazing person (not because they need a favor)

Pride/hubris

- Pride is about an action, hubris is about who you are as a person: doing well on test = think you're the smartest person in class - Accomplishment vs violation: these are about an accomplishment; as a result of a good response - Hubris is not necessarily a good thing: can lead into narcissism - Act vs Person

Envy

- Requires two people: the envier and the envee - Benign: self-focused; I wish i had what they had, so i will work harder to get what they have; encourage and motivates to work harder; often times leads to some amount of imitation; positive envy - Malicious: other-focused; motivates you to destroy the other person; what separates the two is if you feel the other person deserves what they have; they did not work to get there and do not deserve what they have; they've done something to get ahead

Elements of emotion

- Stimulus: thing that kicks off reaction - Arousal: stronger or weaker reaction - Appraisal: conscious labeling of experience

Emotional intelligence

- The ability to perceive, access and generate, understand, and reflectively regulate emotions - Four parts: perceiving emotions, facilitating thought, understanding emotions, and managing emotions

Affect

- The automatic response that something is good (positive affect) or bad (negative affect) - More general, do you feel positively or negatively - Reflexive action - Good vs bad, liking vs disliking (automatic) - Automatic affect: a quick response of liking or disliking toward something

Affect balance

- The frequency of positive emotions minus the frequency of negative emotions - Measures happiness

Excitation transfer

- The idea that arousal from one event can transfer to a later event - If one thing causes you to have increased PA, you can sometimes transfer that response to a different stimuli - Dutton & Aron (1974): had male participants meet them out in nature and one group walked across a stone bridge that was low to the ground and interacted with an averagely attractive female research assistant; Gave them her number if they had any questions later on; Other group: walked across a rope suspension bridge that was higher and less stable. Same thing with same research assistant; Dependent variable: how many people called the assistant; More people called in the scary group and later rated her as more attractive; PA was not caused by research assistant, however once they interacted with her, that excitation transferred to her - Arousal from first event (drinking caffeine) transfers to the second event (frustration): angier response than usual to stressful event - People with stimulant shot and were told there were no side effects reacted the strongest because they did not blame their arousal state on the injection - Pleasant and unpleasant arousal cannot be interchangeable or mistakable; it's one or the other

Yerkes-Dodson Law

- The proposition that some arousal is better than none, but too much can hurt performance - The best performance is going to happen under moderate arousal - Lower = not paying attention to what you're doing and you'll make mistakes - Too much = too much pressure and you'll overthink - Why sports teams do great all season and lose their championship game - Differences in curve depending on if it's a simple or difficult task - Extreme hill = simple task because everything is easy so you do not need to pay much attention and make some mistakes, then you know it the most - Focuses attention: arousal can help with this; too much = can't focus, not enough = asleep

James-Lange theory

- The proposition that the bodily processes of emotion come first and the mind's perception to these bodily reactions then creates the subjective feeling of emotion - ES->PA->CA->Emotion - External stimulus -> physiological arousal -> cognitive appraisal ->emotion - Facial Feedback Hypothesis: forcing people into physiological arousal by making them make the expression of a certain emotion (the idea that feedback from the face muscles evokes or magnifies emotions) - Failure overall because different emotions can have same physical reaction

Emotion helps group formation and control

- Want to be around same people who are feeling same emotions about some stimuli we are; shows a level of similarity - Can make people the same thing and make them feel specific emotions depending on the stimuli; carousels created because an employer thought if his employees had a happy family, they'd be happy at work

Mood congruence

- We tend to process and attend to information that matches the mood we are in - Listening to sad music when sad Easier to process - Not using as many cognitive resources

Ekman et al.

- Went all over world including a place that has had no contact with outsiders - Showed them pictures of people experiencing emotions - Found 6 universal emotions: understood and displayed in virtually the same way across all cultures Happiness Sadness Fear Anger Disgust Surprise (cut from Inside Out but in Bing Bong's flower)

Happiness

- What matters? What correlates with happiness is things your culture acknowledges as success; $70,000 = amount where happiness does no longer correlate with money; consistently we see that people with children are less happy than people of similar demographics without children (children bring stress) - How do you increase? A lot of it is person: find out what is good to you (hedonism comes into play) - Abel & Kruger (2010): sorted baseball cards into does this person have a full, half, or no smile; looked at how long those baseball players lived; full smiles lived 7 years longer - Happy people tend to live longer - Infants well-tuned: infants are good at understanding happiness; at three months, can differentiate between a happy face and another face; at seven months, they can tell the difference in intensity (mildly please or extensively happy)

Under high levels of arousal, what answer on a four-item multiple- choice test are students least likely to consider?

Answer D

Which of the following emotions motivates people to plan ahead and avoid taking unnecessary risks?

Anxiety

T or F: Young boys are more emotional than young girls; Men are more emotional than women

Both false

What is the most effective strategy for improving a bad mood?

Exercise

Purposes of emotion

Group formation, group control, shared information, behavioral control, guides cognition, guides decision making, and cushions us

Which statement best describes the research about guilt and shame?

Guilt is good and shame is bad for the individual and society.

Which of the following lists contains only "basic" facial emotions (i.e., biologically determined, culturally universal in expression)?

Happiness, sadness, surprise

Before interacting with someone who is depressed, what type of stimuli do people seek out?

Happy

Which theory of emotion predicts that we are angry because we hit someone?

James-Lange

What dimention of the "dark triad of personality" is related to emotional intelligence?

Machiavellianism

Which of the following is the conclusion of research evidence regarding emotional expression in males and females?

Males and females don't differ much in how emotional they are

Which branch of emotional intelligence involves the most psychologically integrated processes?

Managing emotions

Mimi just won the lottery in the state where she lives. What is her emotional response likely to be over time?

Mimi will be very happy at first, but she will later return to her level of happiness before she won the lottery.

Which branch of emotional intelligence involves the most basic psychological processes?

Perceiving emotions

________________ emotions are generally associated with forming social bonds, whereas ___________ emotions are generally associated with breaking social bonds.

Pleasant; unpleasant

Which theory of emotion predicts that arousal from an event can be mislabeled?

Schachter-Singer

How many "basic" facial emotions have been observed across dozens of different cultures?

Six

Emotional intelligence is negatively related to _________________.

alcohol-related problems

Bill thinks that if he's irritated with his children, he'll feel better and be less inclined to hit them if he just yells and screams. Bill believes in the notion of _____________.

catharsis

Affect is generally mapped onto ___________ dimensions.

good and bad

To regulate their moods, women tend to _____________, whereas men tend to ____________.

eat; drink ruminate; distract themselves not use humor; use humor

Fatima feels deep sadness because her dog died. What term most accurately describes what Fatima is feeling?

emotion

Conscious is to unconscious as ____________ is to ___________.

emotion; affect

Tyrone had a stressful day at the office, so he stopped at the gym on the way home to work out. even after he gets home, tyrone still feels wound up. When his wife remarks in passing that he forgot to take out the trash, tyrone responds by yelling and cursing at his wife. tyrone's overreaction to his wife's comment illustrates ________________.

excitation transfer

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law, there is a(n) _____________ curve between arousal and performance.

inverted U-shape

Affective reactions to things that are "good" and "bad" generally occur in the first ____________ of thought.

microseconds

According to Easterbrook, arousal influences performance by ____________ attention.

narrowing

People generally __________ how long they will feel a particular emotion.

overestimate

There is a(n) _______________ relationship between emotional control and mental health.

positive

One measure of happiness, affect balance, is equal to ____________.

the frequency of positive emotions minus the frequency of negative emotions

How many basic arousal states are there?

two