Emotions Final
Putting into perspective
Emphasizing the relativity of the event compared to other events
Developmental Detail 6: Embarrassment Emerges in Toddlerhood
2 types of embarrassment: exposure embarrassment and evaluation embarrassment. Exposure embarrassment arises from being center of attention. Evaluation embarrassment arises from doing something poorly. Embarrassment emerges by the end of the 2nd year of life (toddlers have learned who they are and what's good and bad). One experiment had 4 year olds fail at a task to elicit evaluation embarrassment and sing old macdonald in front of people for exposure embarrassment. Cortisol was higher in evaluation embarrassment -- negative self-evaluative reactions are even more stressful than being center of attention
Acceptance
Accepting and resigning to what has happened
Motives for regulating emotion
All reasons start with the idea that the current emotional state is "undesirable"
Expression of emotion depending on culture
Asians don't express emotion as much so suppression is more common. The costs of emotion suppression seem to be lower for those who value it compared to those who don't. In Asia, asking for emotional support is viewed as stressful while in American it is seen as helpful.
Emotional dysregulation and somatic illness
Avoidance, inhibition, suppression, and holding back of negative emotions have deleterious consequences for physical health and can lower self-reported life satisfaction. Chronic inhibition can increase the risk of cancer and accelerate cancer progression, as well as cardiovascular and immune-related diseases
Self-blame
Blaming oneself for what has happened
Developmental Detail 3: Emotion and Developing Brains
Children who are maltreated, victims of early abused or neglected often develop social-behavioral problems. Show detriments in responding to emotional expression and forming emotional attachments to caregivers. Abuse/neglect negatively affects brain maturation. Prefrontal cortex (emotion regulation) smaller in children who had been maltreated. When comparing children who were in orphanages to those who were not, children who experienced adversity didn't show increased oxytocin levels when interacting with parents. Also, vasopressin was reduced which could have long-term detrimental effects on affiliative behaviors and stress regulation.
Why is expressive suppression taxing?
Concealing one's feelings draws attention to the internal aspects of the self and reduces attentional resources for encoding the external event. It increases the suppressors' concern as to whether they are successfully concealing their feelings. Sometimes language-based monitoring (Am I showing my face? Is this too obvious?) really impedes verbal memory in particular
controlled operating process
Conscious, intentional, and requires cognitive resources
Emotional contagion from evolutionary perspective
Could serve as the basic process on which perspective taking and empathy are built. The similarity in emotional responding strengthens social bonds within the group, especially when the members experience positive emotions.
2 ways that emotions can be called group processes
Emotions can be shared and shaped in groups (group emotions) and individuals can feel emotions because other members of their group have experienced or have caused an emotional event (emotions on behalf of the group)
How does the model of mental control work?
Each time the monitoring system detects the presence of the to-be-suppressed unwanted thought, the operating process is then activated with the goal to seek out other distracter thoughts that capture conscious attention and serve to keep the unwanted thought out of mind.
Developmental Detail 10: Babies Catch Emotions Too
Emotional synchrony (having the physiology of your emotions sync up with someone else's) is a basis for feeling empathy with that person. Earliest social bonds is with mother. Mothers/babies tend to catch each other's emotions. One study: mothers of 12-month old babies without baby present gave 5 minute speech in front of a critical or supportive audience. In control, mothers presented a speech alone with no audience. After giving the speech, mom and baby were reunited while mother answered questions. Heart rate was measured before and after. Negative group produced higher heart rate in moms, baby's did too. Even in less stressful group, babies still had increased heart rate to match mom's and made less eye contact with strangers in a following ineraction. Control babies had no effect.
Primitive emotional contagion
Especially relevant for group emotions; the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize movements, expressions, postures, and vocalizations with those of another person and consequently, to converge emotionally.
Consequences of expressive suppression
Has been found to impair memory for information encountered during the suppression period, suggesting it is cognitively taxing. Reported being less confident than non-suppressors in their capacity ti memorize image information, indicating they are aware of their memory impairment
Example of regulating emotion voluntarily
I don't want to go to that movie because I know it'll make me sad
Why is emotional dysregulation dangerous to the body?
Increased sympathetic nervous system activation - inhibition theory; selective inhibitory efect on immune functioning (cumulative sympathetic arousal may produce changes in gene expression that increases the vulnerability for inflammation-related diseases and viral infections)
Prosocial motives
In order to protect the feelings of others. Ex. concealing your feelings of romantic interest in the partner of your best friend is a good idea if you want to remain friends with them
Developmental Detail 4: A Baby's Cries Go Right to the Mother's Brain
Infant crying is functional. It elicits caretaking responses from parents and serves evolutionary function of ensuring the survival of the infant. Calls of all mammal infants are similar, different animals even respond to other animal's calls. Cries vary along an acoustic continuum that reflects the degree to which the infant is distressed. Caretaker behavior involves approaching, soothing, and attempting to identify and address specific causes such as illness, fear, or other discomfort. Has effects on maternal brain -- hearing baby cries and white noise, only reacted to the cries in area involved in maternal behavior and empathy
Developmental Detail 5: Distressed and Smile Expressions Come First
Infants don't make facial expressions of emotion -- they need o be learned through observing people or emerge from primitive reflexes later on in development. Expressions serve as social communication functions. In distress, their faces bunch up so everyone can hear shrieks. Differentiated displays of negative emotion emerge later in development when communicative situations for the underlying emotion have developed. Smiling begins at about 6 weeks in response to seeing or interacting with people (even blind ones)-- incredibly rewarding for parents and reinforces positive parent-infant bonding
Why isn't cognitive appraisal as taxing as expressive suppression?
It does not involve constant self-monitoring. Once the situation is reappraised in non-emotional terms, it does not require further self-regulatory efforts and leaves attentional and cognitive resources intact for the processing of information
Developmental Detail 8: Aging Brains Are More Positive than Negative
Late adulthood is associated with increasing attention to and recall of pleasant versus unpleasant information (positivity effect) Old people tend to pay attention to positive more than to negative information. Adults tend to recall more positive than negative memories. as people age, become more aware of the limitation of their time left in life, leading them to expose themselves to more positive information than negative. When older adults are constrained to pay attention to specific aspects of the information, the positivity effect is reduced and they recall the same amount of negative and positive information as younger people
Automatic processes of contagion
Learning, imitation, co-attention
Study about social consequences of expressive suppression in married couples
Low expressiveness in married couples has been found to be associated with negative feelings and reduced martial satisfaction in both spouses. Responsive listening was beneficial for marital satisfaction
Social consequences of expressive supression
May impair the suppressor's responsiveness in a social encounter and may impair appropriate contingent responses. It conceals feelings, social motives, and the behavioral intentions.
Developmental Detail 2: Getting Little Ones Emotional (Ethically)
Mother often enlisted to help generate emotional responding (although sometimes they aren't good actors). Scripted interactions can be used to elicit emotions (giving cracker and then taking it away out of reach makes them mad because they aren't mobile yet). Films can induce emotional states in older children (5+)
Developmental Detail 1: Developmental Theory of Emotion
Nature and nurture make possible the full differentiation and elaboration of emotional life. involves documenting ages at which the components of emotion are first observed in infants and children and charting their course over the life cycle. Includes the maturation of other systems and cognitive capacities (you can't detect fear if your visual acuity isn't fully developed yet). Attachment relationship with caretaker plays role as well
Is cognitive reappraisal as taxing as expressive suppression?
No
Developmental Detail 9: Older Adults Regulate Emotions Better Than You Do
Older people dedicate more resources to using emotion regulation techniques that promote positive experiences. As people age, they start to use some emotion regulation strategies less and others more. Older adults less likely than younger to rely on the expressive suppression of a full-blown emotion, because it is quite resource demanding. Older adults become more strategic about situation selection. As they age, they rely on smaller, closer-knit social support networks as a resource. These networks help older adults predict how they will feel in situations and are more defective at avoiding toxic social situations. Experience and perceive less anger in interpersonal situations and in general benefit more than younger people from the avoidance of interpersonal confrontations in the first place
Experiment of rebound effect
Participants who had been taught to report on their stream of consciousness were told to report their thoughts into a tape recorder and to avoid thinking about a white bear. Other participants did not receive the white bear instruction. Later, when again reporting on their stream of consciousness without avoiding thoughts, the white bear thought came to mind much more for individuals who were told to suppress it.
Ways that emotions of others affect our own
People influence our understanding of what we are feeling and of the cause of our feelings n the situations which we are not sure. Our expressions of emotion and the intensity of our emotion are also affected by the mere presence of other people because they serve as receivers of our emotional communications and amplifiers of our expressions
Inhibition of emotional thoughts and experience of emotion
Physiological arousal found to increase after suppression of emotionally arousing thoughts in response to an emotionally upsetting film about work accidents. The more one tries to put something emotional out of their mind, the more physically aroused they become. It may diminish the specific thought, but it causes some people to be aroused when the thought returns to the mind. Accepting the unwanted thought facilitates habituation and reduces the other emotional responses over the course of time.
Self-distracting
Positive consequences for depression and cardiovascular health; rather than inhibiting an emotion/thought, an individual takes a self=distanced point of view when thinking about an emotional experience. Leads people to re construe experiences rather than recount them and reduces blood pressure reactivity, facilitates coping, and is effective for reducing depressive symptoms (including rumination)
Benefits of social sharing
Provides short-term socioaffective benefits and is beneficial in the long term -- it enables people to reappraise the emotional event in a more positive way. Writing about emotional events is beneficial for people's physical and mental health.
Differences in individuals and emotional regulation
Reappraisers work on their emotions before events occur, modifying their expression, experience, and even the context of their social sharing of emotion with some success. Reappraisal decreases the expressive and subjective aspects of emotion in negative emotion-eliciting contexts, without any cognitive, physiological, or interpersonal costs. Habitual suppressors mostly engage in effortful modification of the display of what they are already feeling. Some of he cognitive and social costs of using these are experienced in a more chronic way
Experimental (and ethically questionable) study of emotion contagion
Researchers and FB teamed up. Researchers slightly reduced or increased the amount of negative content one someone's facebook feed. users states were influenced by this manipulation - when positive posts were reduced, people produced fewer positive posts and more negative posts and vice versa.
Study about social consequences of expressive suppression
Some participants regulated their emotional reactions to viewing an upsetting film and others reappraised the film to control their emotions while engaged in an interaction with a partner. Participants who suppressed could reduce their expression of emotion, but were less responsive and more distracted when interacting with their partner. Partners of individuals who were suppressing emotions were found to have higher blood pressure during the interaction, alluding that it was stressful for them.
Validating listener is better or worse for social sharing of emotion?
Someone who seems more emotionally detached and expresses alternative views of the distressing episode is beneficial in terms of less intrusive thoughts, but validating listeners are perceived much better.
Example of regulating emotion involuntarily
Spontaneously turn their head away to avoid looking at the scene of an automobile accident
Self-protection motives
Suppress their emotions or fake an emotion in order to protect their personal safety or to elicit helpful reactions from others. Ex. employee may try to control the experience and expression of anger in front of her employer to avoid negative consequences in the workplace
Which area of the world are negative effects found for emotion suppression?
The West, where we value overt emotion expression
Rebound effect
The ironic and counterproductive effect of the active suppression of an unwanted thought.
Positive refocus
Thinking about pleasant, joyful things that distract from the negative event
Refocus on planning
Thinking about the steps necessary to deal with the negative event
Developmental Detail 7: The Act of Giving Makes Toddlers Feel Happy Too
Toddlers in previous studies played a game with toys that did or did not involve the act of giving. The toddler either gave a toy to a puppet and the puppet responded positively, or the toddler played with a toy that produced an appealing sound that a puppet had taught them to activate and the puppet responded positively. Even though they were all having a good time, the toddlers who gave the puppet a toy expressed the most happiness. New experiment: got treats of crackers and gave them away either costly or not costly. Giving away treats made them most happy and happiness was not caused by the puppet's reaction of gratefulness, just the act of giving
Suppression of unwanted thoughts
Try to regulate emotions by suppressing thoughts that elicit unwanted pleasant, painful, or unpleasant feelings. This strategy is not very effective
Instrumental motivation
Trying to regulate your emotions because you believe certain emotions are appropriate and others are inappropriate to tasks you need to perform
Assimilation/accomodation of social sharing of emotion
Verbalizing and putting emotional experiences into words causes people to distance themselves form the emotional experience, enabling them to reprocess the emotional information and restore the threatened beliefs about the world. Working through the emotional experience allows people to integrate the emotional event in their existing emotional schemas and scripts (assimilation) or modify them to adjust to a new reality (accomodation)
Why is group emotion difficult to study?
What constitutes as a group, 4, 1000? Calculating the mean of self-reported emotion of everyone in the group does not say anything about whether there is a shared emotion because the average level does not tell us anything about the variability of emotional experiences
Can emotional suppression have desirable effects? If so, how?
Yes. It can be desirable in situations in which interpersonal distance is required, like interactions with a superior. Hiding one's feelings may be beneficial when it is used as a temporary tool that allows the individual to conform to personal needs an social demands in a given context.
Hedonic motivation
You try to regulate your emotions because you want to feel better. Feeling bad and wanting to feel good can even lead to destructive patterns like gambling and drinking
Regulation of physiological arousal
affected by medication/beta-blockers, reducing sympathetic arousal and tension. Other examples: weed, booze, coffee, cigarettes. Can also be achieved through muscle-relaxing exercise
Attentional deployment
allows you to affect the emotional impact of a situation by how you take in information in your environment. Occurs when individuals use selective attention to limit (or enhance) their exposure to the emotionally evocative aspects of an event. Ex. when you are watching a horror film, you might avert gaze from something gross and look at something neutral.
Antecedent-focused emotion regulation
attempts to control or modify an emotion before it has even been elicited (because we know what is to come)
According to Wegner's model of mental control, thought suppression involves what two processes?
automatic monitoring and controlled operating process
Other blame
blaming others for what has happened
Rumination
consciously drawing attention to negative thoughts and feelings with the goal of making sense of them and thus reducing their unpleasant impact -- seen to worsen depression symptoms
individual differences in emotional contagion
dependents on temperament (approach vs withdraw, distractability/attention span, intensity of our emotional responses), gender, early experience, and personality characteristics
Association explanation for the rebound of suppressed thoughts
distracter thoughts that are used to replace the unwanted thought become strongly associated with the unwanted thought. Distracters serve as memory cues that prompt the unwanted thought whenever they come to mind or appear in the environment. Explains why rebound effects are stronger when the suppression and subsequent expression periods take place in the same physical and emotional environment
What makes an emotion undesirable?
due to negative hedonic tone (psychological unpleasantness)
Emotional dysregulation is associated with
eating disorders, alcohol abuse, and anxiety and mood disorders; chronic emotional suppression was found to be associated with more self reported depressive symptoms, lower life satisfaction, weaker self-esteem, and lower overall well-being
automatic monitoring
effortless and involuntary; functions outside of conscious awareness. No cognitive resources. Searches mental content for instances of unwanted thought.
Social sharing of emotions
emotional disclosure; following intense emotional experiences, people are inclined to talk about their feelings to others, which may influence their emotions
Gustave Le Bon's Psychology of Crowds
groups provide contexts for intense and contagious emotional experiences
Catastrophizing
explicitly emphasizing the negativity of the event
Regulation of experience
focused concentration on, or suppression of, intense thoughts that accompany feelings. Ex. rumination and emotional thought suppression
Group emotion and variability of emotion
high homogeneity in the emotions experienced by members of a given group is a good indicator of the existence of a group emotion because it suggests that the whole group is experiencing a similar state. Groups of people experience group emotions when the members' evaluations of their own emotional state are highly consistent within groups or tend to converge over time
Canned laughter
intended to provoke the audience's mirth (a positive affective state and positive attitude toward the series/product
Positive reappraisal
interpretation of a negative event in a positive way in terms of personal growth
Situational selection
involves seeking out events or people that you know might evoke feelings that you want to experience and avoiding those you know who don't want to experience. Ex. decide not to attend a party because you know your ex will be there and it will make you angry/sad
Cognitive change
modify how we think about a situation in order to increase or to decrease the occurrence of specific emotions. Ex. might start to get upset about not being acknowledged by neighbor (which seems to be intentionally ignoring) but it may just be that they didn't see you, they're just not polite to anyone, has issues of their own, etc. Essentially just reappraising a situation as possibly being due to another cause.
Group emotions
occur in and are shared within a collective of interacting individuals at a moment in time. Emotions are affected by the emotions of the people around us in many ways
Group members and emotional contagion
participants take part in negotiation task. Each group has 3-5 people including a confederate trained to express either a positive (smile) or negative affective state (blank face). They were trained to convey high energy (loud tone of voice and talking fast) or low energy (slow talking and low tone). Behavior of participants was videotaped and evaluated by independent judges who rated their moods. Members of the groups tended to experience the same affective state as the confederate
Experiment with instrumental motivation
participants tried to ramp up their fear and anger when participants considered these emotions helpful -- chose to engage in activities that mad them angry before playing a computer game that involved confrontation with enemies but not before playing a computer game that involved building an empire
Study about co-attention
participants were either together or alone when tasting chocolate. they were not permitted to talk to each other, but they took greater pleasure in eating high-quality chocolate and less pleasure in low-quality chocolate when sharing that experience with others compared to eating alone. The presence of other people affected the extent to which they focused on the cause of their pleasure and displeasure
Adaptive cognitive regulation strategies negatively correlated to depression/anxiety
positive reappraisal, positive refocus, putting into perspective, acceptance, refocus on planning
Field study of emotion contagion
real world social networks on our long lasting moods (depression and happiness) over 20 years. Moods transferred through social networks with people who have close social relationships experiencing similar emotional states
Social sharing of emotion
revealing one's feelings to someone else; people are more likely to talk about intense and disturbing emotional episodes.
Maladaptive cognitive regulation strategies positively correlated to depression/anxiety
rumination, catastrophizing, self-blame, other blame
4 antecedent-focused emotion strategies
situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, and cognitive change
Expression discharge hypothesis
social sharing of emotion contributes to emotional recovery (no support for this). It's actually been found that social sharing reactivates the emotion. Not seen as unpleasant or painful when disclosing to someone, though. People tolerate re-experiencing negative emotions during social sharing because it satisfies socioaffective needs and facilitates a cognitive reappraisal of the emotional event
Display rules
specify the emotional expressions appropriate to a specific situation
Feeling rules
specify the feelings one should experience according to social and cultural conventions
Accessibility explanation for the rebound of suppressed thoughts
suppression increases the accessibility of the to-be-suppressed thoughts because the automatic monitoring process continues to search for the unwanted thought even when suppression is no longer required. Suppression increases the likelihood that the previously suppressed thought rebounds, without being cued by a distracter
Emotional rebound
suppression of emotions does not cause a rebound. It's particularly efficient in banishing emotional thoughts (when cognitive resources are not taxed). May be due to people's prior experience with controlling intrusive emotional thoughts. Thought suppression is more common for emotional thoughts. Presence of emotion-relevant distracters may redirect attention away from the emotional thoughts and reduce their rebound. Ex. suppression of disgust found to facilitate avoidance of disgust-related images when they were presented together with images representing cleanliness but not when they were paired with neutral, disgust-irrelevant images
Co-attention
synchronization of attention with other people. Attending to the same objects and events can lead people to have the same emotions because they spend more time thinking about the same cause of their feelings.
Social benefits of social sharing of emotion
talking about an upsetting past experience was found to provide important subjective benefits to participants. Its perceived as meaningful, helpful, and reliving because it made them feel understood and comforted and allowed people to understand themselves more clearly. Need for sharing was usually linked to need for support, comfort, consolation, and bonding
Inhibition theory
the conscious effort to inhibit one's emotional thoughts, feelings, and emotion-related behavior generates physiological arousal. Chronic inhibition produces cumulative physiological arousal and increase the likelihood of stress-related psychological and physical health problems.
Impression management motive
the fear of being judged negatively by others because of expressing an inappropriate emotion; based on knowledge of norms that prescribe what emotions are appropriate in a particular context
Response-focused emotion regulation
the modification of the subjective, expressive, or physiological aspects of an emotion when the experience is already occurring.
Cognitive load explanation for the rebound of suppressed thoughts
the rebound effect is more likely when cognitive resources are reduced due to a concurrent task, time pressure, or stress. Undermines the cognitively costly operating process so the monitoring processes find even more instances of the unwanted thoughts. under cognitive load, the monitoring process continues to search of the to-be-suppressed though. Because the operating process is no longer able to replace the thought with distracters, the unwanted thought will become even more accessible
Regulation of expressive behavior
the suppression or amplification of facial expressions of emotion in particular, but also bodily and vocal displays of emotion, which could modulate emotional experience
Emotional contagion
the tendency to "catch" another person's emotions. Can occur without any intention or awareness of transmitting or catching of the emotion.
Emotion regulation strategies
the way of regulating emotion is consistent with the opportunities, capacities, and goals of the individual at that time. Can affect different components of the emotion, including cognitive, physiological, behavioral-expressive, and experiential aspects.
Emotional thought suppression
trying not to think about the thing in order to not feel bad. May actually facilitate the return of the suppressed emotions
Situation modification
trying to alter the features of a situation in order to modify its emotional impact. Ex. asking a friend to keep his dog on a leash during a visit and asking a housemate to turn her music down
Emotion regulation
ways that individuals influence the intensity, duration, and type of emotions they experience and do not experience; the situations under which they experience a given emotion; and how and whether they eventually express those emotions
Imitation
we automatically imitate the facial expressions, postures, and vocal expressions of others (especially those who are part of our own group) and it activates a similar emotion in ourselves. Observation of a person experiencing an emotion activates in perceivers the same sensory-motor states and same patterns of activation in the brain implicated for that emotional response. The state will be shared if individuals are observing people who they want to empathize with or have a close understanding of.
Learning
we learn when other people express an emotion. Automatically associated with your perception of the emotion on the face and bodily expression of others. May be the reactions of others produce behavioral changes that irritate you, but the stimulus eliciting the emotion in the person observed may have no direct impact on the perceiver. Ex. individuals may learn that when other people are happy, they act kindly and generously, leading others to feel good. Individuals may automatically experience joy as soon as they detect the smallest indicator of the other people's happiness
