Ch. 6

Emotional Intelligence (EI)

"the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth." four parts: Perceiving emotion, facilitating thought, understanding emotion, and managing emotion

Subjective roots of happiness

-Happiness appears to lie more in our outlook and personality than in our circumstances. -Subjective refers to how you feel about something, whereas objective refers to the something. EX) -Thus, how much money you make (objectively) has only a weak relationship to happiness, but how you feel about your income (subjectively) is a strong predictor of happiness. -Being married has only a weak impact on happiness, but being happily married is a strong factor.

EI and affective forecasting

-People high on emotional intelligence are better than others at affective forecasting (predicting future emotional states) and less susceptible to common errors. That is, they predict their future emotions more accurately than other people. -Scoring high on Managing Emotions was particularly conducive to being able to predict future emotions correctly.

emodiversity

-degree to which a person experiences the variety and relative abundance of human emotions -High emodiversity is linked to better mental and physical health, though it is hard to say what causes what. \ =Emodiversity does not necessarily mean extremity of emotion.

to regulate their moods, women tend to, whereas men tend to _________

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

affect

-sometimes defined as a result of mapping all emotions onto a single good-bad dimension. -Positive affect: encompasses all good emotions, such as joy, bliss, happiness, love, and contentment. -Negative affect: encompasses all bad emotions, such as anger, anxiety, fear, jealousy, and grief. -Most researchers argue that positive and negative affect are separate dimensions, not opposite ends of the same dimension -Affective reactions can occur without consciousness. You can have a quick positive or negative feeling about something as simple as a word without being fully conscious of it.

Dealing with anger

1) never show anger 2) vent (catharsis theory) -tends to make people more aggressive afterwards 3) get rid of anger -by reducing arousal state (eg. relaxing. distracting)

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

Answer D

counterfactual thinking

Bad emotions may help people think about their mistakes and learn how to avoid repeating them. Sometimes this process is aided by counterfactual thinking, which is the process of thinking about what might have been (see Chapter 5). Emotions make people engage in more counterfactual thinking, as in "I wish I hadn't said that"

anticipated regret

Decision making shows a "status quo bias," which means that people tend to stick with what they have and be overly reluctant to make changes, even if changing would logically put them in a better position. (less regret)

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

Happy

why emotions haven't been a victim of natural selection

It seems that emotions are meant to be communicated, and, in this sense, emotions do cause behavior. It may be natural to show one's feelings and artificial to hide them.

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.

6 goals of affect regulation

One can seek to get into, get out of, or prolong a good mood, and the same three options apply to a bad mood

percieving emotions

Perceiving Emotions, defined as the ability to recognize how you and those around you are feeling. It also involves perceiving emotions in objects, art, stories, music, and other stimuli.

Affect Intensity Measure (AIM)

Questionnaire measure that allows quick assessment of emotional style in terms of intensity

Washing away guilt

Research shows that washing one's hands can actually reduce feelings of guilt,

emotions cause behavior

The emotion (eg. sadness) does not directly cause behavior; rather, it makes people look for ways to escape the bad feeling. -it is wrong to say simply that emotion "causes" behavior. -Emotional distress drives people to want to feel better, and they choose actions that they think will cheer them up. -When emotion does cause behavior, as in the so-called heat of passion, it often produces behaviors that are not wise or beneficial to the individual.

managing emotions

The fourth is Managing Emotions, defined as the ability to be open to feelings, and to modulate them in oneself and others so as to promote personal understanding and growth.

facial feedback hypothesis

The hypothesis that emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they signify -Botox can impair the ability to recognize emotional expressions in others (can't replicate their emotions)

Facilitating Thought

The second is Facilitating Thought, defined as the ability to generate an emotion and then reason with this emotion.

happiness

The term happiness is used in different ways to refer to slightly different phenomena. Human beings and many animals share one form of happiness, and it refers simply to feeling good right now.

understanding emotions

The third is Understanding Emotions, defined as the ability to understand complex emotions and how emotions can transition from one stage to another.

emotions help us learn

Thus, emotions help people learn. The mere fact of having an emotion alters memory: It makes people remember important things better while impairing memory for low-priority information.

emotion

a conscious evaluative reaction that is clearly linked to some event

shame

a moral emotion that, like guilt, involves feeling bad but, unlike guilt, spreads to the whole person -"I am a bad person" -destructive -Guilt is good and shame is bad for the individual and society.

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

automatic affect

a quick response of liking or disliking toward something or as good and bad feelings toward something, and may occur outside of consciousness.

hedonic treadmill

a theory proposing that people stay at about the same level of happiness regardless of what happens to them -the hedonic treadmill does not work very well when life gets worse.

anger

an emotional response to a real or imagined threat or provocation -testosterone -approach and avoidance tendency: feels bad but signals approach

life satisfaction

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

survivor guilt

an unpleasant emotion associated with living through an experience during which other people died.

guilt

an unpleasant moral emotion associated with a specific instance in which one has acted badly or wrongly -"i did a bad thing" -constructive

6 basic emotions

anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise

Easterbrook hypothesis

arousal tends to narrow attentional focus, so that more attention is directed at whatever is eliciting the emotions

Least effective ways to regulate emotions

being a lone and watching TV

dark triad of personality

consisting of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism -"Machiavellianism" comes from the Italian philosopher and writer Niccolò Machiavelli. Machiavelli advocated using any means necessary to gain raw political power, including aggression and violence. -psychopaths

affective forecasting

efforts to predict one's emotional reactions to future events -Most people are fairly accurate at predicting which emotions they would feel, but they substantially overestimate how long they would feel that way.

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

emotion

Schachter-Singer Theory

emotion has two separate components—physiological arousal and cognitive label—each of which is crucial. -Physiological arousal is similar in all emotions. The cognitive label is different for each emotion. -The arousal is the on/off switch and volume control: It determines that there is going to be an emotion, and how strong it will be. --The cognitive label is like the channel switch: It dictates what emotion will be felt. Sometimes

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

Most effective ways to regulate emotions

exercise

sex guilt

feeling guilty about sexual thoughts, acts, or fantasies -there's a disconnected between brain and genitals (mislabeling arousal)

Affect is generally mapped onto ___________ dimensions.

good and bad

positive moods rely on...

heuristic thinking that relies on mental short cuts.

emotional intelligence is negatively related to.

leadership skills

the curve between arousal and performance is _______ for complex tasks than for simple tasks.

lower

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

machiavellinism

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

managing emotions

affective reactions to things that are "good" and "bad" generally occur in the first __________ of thought

microseconds

people generally _______ how long they will feel a particular emotion.

overestimate

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

percieving emotion

The two basic arousal states are

pleasant/unpleasant -"Good" arousal cannot be converted into "bad" arousal, nor can "bad" arousal be converted into "good" arousal. (Mostly due to automatic system response)

there is a(n) ________ relationship between emotional control and mental health?

positive

According to the Yerkes-Dodson law...

some arousal is better than none, but too much can hurt performance.

Mood

sometimes defined as a feeling state that is not clearly linked to some event. You may not know why you are in a good or bad mood, but you do know that you feel happy or sad.

disgust

strong negative feeling of repugnance and revulsion. -a strong cue to AVOID things

affect balance

the frequency of positive emotions minus the frequency of negative emotions

affect-as-information hypothesis

the idea that people judge something as good or bad by asking themselves "How do I feel about it?"

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 -anticipated emotions seem to help inform decisions but current emotional states can bias the process and lead to risky choices

Yerkes-Dodson Law

the principle that performance increases with arousal only up to a point, beyond which performance decreases -The curve is lower for complex tasks than for simple tasks because performance is generally lower for complex tasks. -In both cases, though, the link between arousal and performance resembles an inverted (upsidedown) U, going up and then back down.

excitation transfer

the process whereby arousal caused by one stimulus is added to arousal from a second stimulus and the combined arousal is attributed to the second stimulus --being hungry then frustrated bc of this -The mind then searches for a label to make sense of the emotional state.

catharsis theory

the proposition that expressing negative emotions produces a healthy release of those emotions and is therefore good for the psyche

broaden and build theory

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

James-Lange theory of emotion

theory proposing that emotions result from our interpretations of our bodily reactions to stimuli -emotional stimulus -- phsycological arousal -- experienced emotion -Proven innacurate -HOWEVER, lead to an important contemporary hypothesis—the facial feedback hypothesis.

Mood maintenance theory

we seek out information that supports our current emotional state