Chapter 11 & 12
Read chapters 11 & 12. This does not need to be a double length blog. Summarize the main concepts. What was the most surprising thing you learned? What does this all have to do with motivation?
Provide a list of terms at the end of your post that you used from the chapter.
Chapter 11 defined emotion and discussed different aspects of emotion. Emotions have four different aspects. These include feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Feelings give emotion personal meaning while arousal is biological activity. This can include heart rate adjustments for coping. Purpose is the motivating factor when dealing with emotion. It is goal-directed to take a specific course of action. Expression, however, is the social component and relates to communication. Emotion can be caused from biological or cognitive influences as well. Biology can include influences from things like neural pathways in the brain. In the cognitive system, however, emotions come about because of mental events. According to the biological perspective, the number of basic emotions ranges between 2 and 10. According to the cognitive perspective, however, humans have a very complex, diverse emotional range than just these basic emotions. Most include fear, anger, distrust, sadness, joy, and interest. Emotions serve as biological reactions that help us with adaptation with everyday life tasks. Without the proper emotions, people wouldn’t function correctly in society. Also, emotions are a response to a specific event, whereas moods arise from other sources and are long-lived.
Chapter 12 talks about three central aspects of emotion. These include biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. When talking about the biological aspect, emotions direct actions by affecting the nervous system, the endocrine system, neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing (information processing), and facial feedback. From the biological perspective, there are ten different emotions. These include interest, joy, fear, anger, disgust, distress, contempt, shame, guilt, and surprise. The facial feedback hypothesis indicates that the subjective component of emotion is awareness of other feedback from facial action. Facial expression evokes specific emotions. For example, smiling evokes joy. Appraisal is a large aspect of cognitive perspectives of emotion. Primary appraisal evaluates whether anything of importance is at stake in a certain situation. For example, physical well-being, self-esteem, financial state, etc. Secondary appraisal, however, occurs after significant reflection. This revolves around how to cope with potential benefit, harm, or threat. Emotion is also very social. The book states that we can often “catch” other people’s emotions through emotion contagion involving mimicry, feedback, and contagion.
The most surprising or interesting thing I learned was just that in social interactions we actually “catch” other people’s emotions. I thought this was really funny because I know many people who will cry just because other people are crying, even if the context doesn’t affect them at all. This would be considered emotion mimicry, because people begin to emit the same emotions that others are just because they see others doing it. I thought this was very interesting to me because I often feel that other people’s emotions rub off on me. If they are smiling and showing excitement then it’s very difficult not to feel that way as well. But if they are crying and sad, I often feel sad too.
Emotions motivate us both biologically and cognitively. When emotions such as anger and fear change our bodies (heart rate, pulse) it motivates us to react in ways our body is telling us to react. When our heart rate increases from a negative emotion it may cause us to get angry (this is arousal). We may carry out actions such as hitting someone or something. Emotions can create these physiological reactions which cause us to want to change how we are feeling. Thus, our emotions motivate us to want to change the situation if it is negative. If we are feeling happy or excited, our emotions might motivate us to carry out a kind act or simply jump up and down! Thus, there are many aspects of emotion that create motivation in our everyday lives.
Terms: feeling, arousal, purpose, expression, biological, cognitive, mood, social-cultural, facial feedback, facial feedback hypothesis, facial expression, primary and secondary appraisal, mimicry
Chapter 11 was about the nature of emotion and answered the five perennial questions in the study of emotion. The five questions were: (1) what is an emotion?, (2) what causes emotion?, (3) how many emotions are there?, (4) what good are the emotions?, and (5) what is the difference between emotion and mood?.
To answer the first question of what an emotion is one must first define emotion. Emotions are short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to opportunities and challenges we faced during important life events. In other words, a significant life event leads to an emotion. There are four main dimensions, or components, of emotion. These include: feelings (gives emotion its subjective experience that has both meaning and personal significance), bodily arousal (neural and physiological activation that prepares and regulates the body’s adaptive coping behavior during an emotion), purposive (gives an emotion its goal-directed character to take actions necessary to cope with the circumstances), and social-expressive (emotion’s communicative aspect). Emotions are motivators – take away emotion, and you take away the motivation. Emotions are also readouts in that they indicate how well or poorly personal adaptations are going.
Emotions are caused through biological and cognitive processes. Theorists in favor of a cognitive perspective believe that “individuals cannot respond emotionally unless they first cognitively appraise the meaning and personal significance of the event.” Biological theorists believe that “emotional reactions do not necessarily require such cognitive evaluations; emotions can and do occur without a prior cognitive event, but cannot occur without a prior biological event.” The text further defines the causes of an emotion by explaining the two-systems view. Humans have two synchronous systems that activate and regulate emotion. These systems are: (1) innate, spontaneous, physiological system that reacts involuntarily to emotional stimuli, and (2) experience-based cognitive system that reacts interpretatively and socially.
To answer the question of how many emotions are there, one must take into account the differing views between the biological perspective and the cognitive perspective. Those in favor of the biological perspective emphasize primary emotions with a lower limit of two or three and an upper limit of ten (such as joy, fear, and anxiety, as compared to anger, fear, distress, joy, disgust, surprise, shame, guilt, interest, and contempt). Cognitive theorists believe that there are almost a limitless number of emotions that exist. It can be agreed upon though, that basic emotions meet these four criteria: (1) innate rather than acquired or learned through experience or socialization, (2) arise from the same circumstances for all people, (3) expressed uniquely and distinctively, and (4) evoke distinctive and highly predicable physiological patterned responses. The basic emotions listed in the text are: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, negative basic emotions (threat and harm), joy, interest, and positive basic emotions (motive involvement and satisfaction).
Emotions are good for the use of coping functions as well as social functions. All emotions are beneficial because they direct attention and channel behavior to where it is needed, given the circumstances one faces. In terms of social context, emotions: communicate our feelings to others, influence how others interact with us, invite and facilitate social interaction, and create, maintain, and dissolve relationships. Emotions exist as solutions to life’s stresses, challenges, and problems. They help to establish our position in our environment and equip us with specific, efficient responses that are tailored to problems of our physical and social survival.
Finally, chapter 11 addressed the question of the difference between emotion and mood. Emotions arise from significant life situations and from appraisals of their significance to our well-being. Moods arise from processes that are ill-defined and are oftentimes unknown. Emotions mostly influence behavior and direct specific courses of action, whereas moods mostly influence cognition and direct what the person thinks about. Also, emotions emanate from short-lived events that last for seconds or perhaps minutes, whereas moods emanate from mental events that last for hours or days. (Moods are more enduring than are emotions). Positive affect is the everyday, low-level, general state of feeling good. Conditions that lead us to feel good create positive affect in ways such that people remain unaware of the causal source of their good moods. When a person feels good, positive affect essentially serves as a retrieval cue to put spotlight on positive material stored in the person’s memory.
Chapter 12 discusses and defines the aspects of emotion. The chapter examines the biological aspects of emotion, the cognitive aspects of emotion, as well as the social and cultural aspects of emotion.
Concerning the biological aspects of emotion, William James suggests that bodily changes do not follow an emotional experience; rather, emotional experience follows and depends upon bodily responses to stimuli. The two assumptions of the James-Lange theory are that: (1) the body reacts uniquely to different emotion-eliciting events, and (2) the body does not react to nonemotion-eliciting events. The contemporary view of the biological aspects of emotions is that physiological arousal accompanies, regulates, and sets the stage for emotions, but that physiological arousal does not directly cause emotions. The differential emotions theory emphasizes that basic emotions serve unique motivational purposes. It suggests that there are ten emotions that constitute the principal motivation systems for humans, and that emotions create: unique feelings, unique expressions, unique neural activity, and unique purpose and motivation. According to the facial feedback hypothesis, the “subjective aspect of emotion stems from feelings that are engendered by (1) movements of facial musculature, (2) changes in facial temperature, and (3) changes in glandular activity in the facial skin.”
Cognitive aspects of emotion are also addressed in chapter 12. Appraisal is the central construct in a cognitive understanding of emotion and is an estimate of personal significance of an event. Cognitive emotion theorists seek to use appraisals to explain all emotions. They refer to a term entitled compound appraisal to describe the unique patterns of each emotion. Compound appraisal consists of interpreting multiple meanings within the environmental event, such that the event might be both pleasant and caused by oneself. Another term addressed when explaining the appraisal process is that of emotion differentiation. The process of emotion differentiation is defined as how people are able to experience different emotions to the same event. Attributions are the reasons people use to explain an important life outcome and are important themselves because the explanation one uses to explain an outcome generates emotional reactions.
Finally, chapter 12 discusses the social and cultural aspects of emotion. On the basis of social interactions, emotions play a central role in creating, maintaining, and dissolving the interpersonal relationships, as emotions draw us together and emotions push us apart. Emotional contagion is the ‘tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person, and consequently, to converge emotionally.’ Emotional socialization, according to the text, is best illustrated in an example: when children learn from adults about emotions, most of what they learn falls under the rubrics of emotion knowledge, expressions management, and emotion control.
The most interesting thing I learned between chapter 11 and chapter 12 is a rather simple concept. It was very interesting for me, to learn that, for example, if one were to be in a happy state and to smile, that they would then be in an even more happy or excited state. It was interesting to learn that a simple facial movement can help to promote or prevent emotional feelings. This is interesting to me because I have already begun to apply it to my daily life. If I find myself happy and want to increase my level of happiness, I simply add a smile to my face. If I am upset, bored, or grumpy, I try not to show it too much as a facial expression because I know it will contribute and enhance the internal mood I am experiencing.
As I stated before, emotions are motivators – if you take away emotion, you take away motivation. Emotions act as coping functions/mechanisms (motivation). Emotions provide us with ingrained and automated ways for coping with major challenges and threats to our welfare. With these coping mechanisms, we are motivated to protect our well-being and our welfare. Emotions also serve as social functions and help us to: communicate our feelings to others, to influence how others react with us, to invite and facilitate social interaction, and to create, maintain, and dissolve relationships. All of these produce motivation when present. As long as we have emotions, we will be motivated to either act in a coping manner, or in a social manner to facilitate and maintain our welfare and well-being. One cannot have motivation without emotion.
Terms: emotion, feelings, bodily arousal, purposive, social-expressive, cognitive perspective, biological perspective, two-systems view, basic emotions, social functions of emotion, positive affect, James-Lange theory, contemporary view of biological aspects of emotion, differential emotions theory, facial feedback hypothesis, appraisal, compound appraisal, emotion differentiation, attribution, and emotional contagion
Chapter 11 talked about how emotions have a four-part character in dimensions of feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Feelings give emotions a subjective component that has personal meaning. Arousal includes biological activity such as heart rate that prepares the body for adaptive coping behavior. The purposive component gives emotion a goal-directed sense of motivation to take a specific course of action. The socail component of emotion is its communicative aspect, via facial expression. Emotion is the psychological construct that coordinates and unifies these four aspects of expereience into a pattern. This chapter also discussed how both biology and cognition play a role in the activation of emotion and biology has two ways that cause emotion. The first way argues that for two parallel emotion systems, a spontaneous and primitive biological emotion system and an acquired, interpretive and social-cognitive emotion system. The second one argues that emotion occurs as a dynamic dialetical process rather than the linear output of either the biological or cognitive system. It clarifies the difference between emotions and moods. Emotions arise in response to a specific event, motivates specific adaptive behaviors and are short-lived. Moods arise from ill-defined sources, affect cognitive processes and are long-lived.
Chapter 12 focused on 3 central concepts, biological, cognitive and social-culture. Emotions are biological reactions to important life events. Emotions energize the body by affecting the autonomic nervous system and its regulation of heart, lungs and muscles; the endocrine system and its regulation of the glands, hormones and organs; neural brain circuits such as those in the limbic system; the rate of neural firing and informational processing and facial feedback and discrete patterns of the facial musculature. The cognitive section discussed 2 different kinds of appraisail, primary and secondary. Primary evalutates whether or not anything important is at stake in a situation and secondary appraisal occurs after some reflection and revolves around an assessment of how to cope with harm or threats. Social-cultural plays a role because other people are our richest sources of emotional experiences. We share our latest emotional experiences during conversations and that is when our emotions are displayed and perceived.
I have a pretty good control on my emotions and was actually told last week that I am very hard to read and that it wasn't a compliment. I took it as a compliment though. In Chapter 12, there is a short discussion on whether or not we can voluntarily control our emotions. I find this interesting because I like to think that for the most part, I can fake happy when needed. The chapter doesn't provide a yes or no answer, but it does talk about how some emotions just happen to us and we cannot be held responsible for the involuntarty feelings, physiology, desires and behaviors. We need an exposure to an emotion-generating event in order to conjur a specific emotional state. On the other hand, if our emotions can be voluntarily controlled, it'd be like how we control our thoughts, beliefs and ways of thinking.
This all relates to motivation because emotions constitute the primaty motivational system. If you are to remove the emotion, then you will remove the motivation. An example of this is that if you take away air, it produces a strong emotional reaction, such as fear. The terror would be the motivational force to get out of a situation where you had a shortage of air. With motivation, we are able to manage our emotions to be able to control or deal with the current situation.
Terms: Emotion, feeling, arousal, purpose, expression, personal meaning, adaptive coping behavior, goal-directed, motivation, communicative aspect, social-cognitive emotion system, autonomic nervous system, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal
Chapter 11 discussed five main questions related to emotions: (1) What is an emotion? (2) What causes an emotion? (3) How many emotions are there? (4) What good are emotions? (5) What is the difference between emotion and mood? The book defined emotions as “short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events” (p. 301). In other words: emotions are very complex, and they motivate us to behave in certain ways in response to specific events. The explanation of what causes emotions is also complex, and includes the debate between biology and cognition. The biological perspective states that emotions are innate, while the cognitive perspective states that they are learned through socialization. Due to these two perspectives, it is impossible to determine the number of emotions that exist; the biological perspective would argue that there are roughly six basic emotions, while the cognitive perspective would argue that there are unlimited learned emotions. Regardless of the perspective one takes, we can agree that emotions serve important functions. They help us to cope with life tasks, and also help us to communicate with others. They help to direct approach and avoidance behaviors, which differ from moods, which generally only influence what we think about.
Chapter 12 discusses three different aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive and social/cultural. The biological aspect suggests that emotions are simply biological reactions to life events, and that our bodies activate organs such as the heart, glands, brain structures, and facial muscles to prepare ourselves to cope effectively. Those who agree with this aspect believe that emotions cannot be controlled, which means that our behavioral and motivational urges resulting from our biological reactions are not voluntary. The cognitive aspect of emotion suggests that emotions emerge from information processing, social interaction and cultural contexts. This aspect includes the concept of appraisal, which is what we do to estimate personal significance of an event. Those who agree with this perspective think that an “individual’s personal motives (goals, well-being) lie at the core of the emotion process and the individual continually makes primary and secondary appraisals about the status of those personal motive as events unfold and coping efforts are implemented” (p. 348). The social and cultural aspects of emotion suggest that “emotions originate within both social interaction and a cultural context” (p. 357). In other words, if we were to move to a different culture and be surrounded by different people, our emotions would change dramatically. Those who agree with this aspect think that we are shaped by our social and cultural worlds to express motives in particular ways, and we are also shaped to control them in certain situations.
The most surprising and interesting thing for me was the difference between emotions and mood. I learned from the textbook that they arise from different causes. Emotions are caused by specific life events, while the source of moods is often unknown. I learned that emotions influence how we behave, while moods influence what we think about. The book tells us that emotions are short-lived, whereas moods can last hours or days. I always thought that emotions and moods were essentially the same thing, and I now know that that is not true.
Terms: emotion, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, biological aspect, cognitive aspect, appraisal, social and cultural aspect, mood
Chapters eleven and twelve explains emotions and contains in-depth information on the source of emotion and the affects that emotion has on an individual. Emotion is a multidimensional; it is subjective, biological, purposive, and social. The book defines emotion as a short lived feeling of arousal, purposive, expressive phenomena to help us adapt to opportunities and challenges we face during life events. These chapters have a plethora of information to analyze about emotion.
Our emotions are expressive and purposeful. Each emotion is goal directed, and helps us transition from our event to make an emotion to transition to communicate how we feel. Expressions communicate why, and they are social and public. The relationship between emotion and motivation enlightened me. All emotions serve as a motive and energize a direct behavior to be goal directed. Emotions somewhat serve as feedback based on the well-being for personal adaptation. This class has taught me that feedback is one key factor in basically anything to do with motivation and emotion. The following reading debates the prime attributer to emotion, biology or cognition. Personally I see both sides and I think depending on the event is what fuels the contributor. Dankseep believes brain is in control of all emotional experiences. His study is based on infants and animals. Therefore, their emotions cannot be verbalized therefore they are non-cognitive. However, Lazaws states that without understanding emotions have no reason. Buck enforces the two system view. Both systems work together to create a response to particular events. The chapter then breaks down emotions.
Emotions are broken down into six main emotions; fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. The fact that emotions were broken down into six really surprised me, although, after reading about face training I understood a little bit better. The end of chapter 11 explains coping functions. Emotions help us to adapt, therefore when we express we start to cope and adapt to things necessary to make a goal directed action. Coping is the most important factor with emotions. Chapter twelve breaks down the aspects of emotion and the biological factors when dealing with emotion.
James Lange theory explains that a stimulus factors into a bodily reaction, and then produces an emotion. The contemporary perspective say emotions create support to let us adapt to our behaviors. Brain activity stimulated three main systems including; behavioral approach system, fight or flight system and behavioral inhibition. The main braid sections involved are the left and right prefrontal cortex, dopamine pathways, and non-cognitive brain areas. Overall, brain activity increases and becomes active to reinforce the emotions and coping are needed based on an environmental event. The effects emotions have on a body also surprised me. The temperature would be something I would like to test out, as well as the glandular activity in the facial expression. This overall chapter and exercises have made me more aware of emotions and facial expressions and I find it really helps me understand a person and improves the situation overall. Regardless of culture we can control and learn emotion. An event is crucial to produce a reaction. The second chapter leads me to believe that cognitive is secondary to emotion. The brain activity supports my thoughts on biological being primacy. Although cognitive is highly relied on for further emotion. Emotions are manageable to an extent; however the immediate response seems to be biological. Emotions also have a large impact on our well-being and can be brought into our social needs. This chapter opened my eyes to many things and improved my social interactions as well as made me think further into my emotions.
Key Terms: Emotion, subjective, biological, purposive, social, arousal, expressive, feedback, well-being, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, cognitive, biological, social needs, behavioral approach system, fight or flight system and behavioral inhibition, left and right prefrontal cortex, dopamine pathways,
Chapters 11 and 12 deal with the emotional side of people and all the different aspects that go along with emotion. Chapter 11 starts of by explaining what emotion is. There is no straight forward definition to emotion because it is so multidimensional. It consists of subjective feelings, biological reactions, purposive, and a social phenomenon. These four dimensions make up what a person calls their emotions. There are ways to make emotions occur. They usually are set off by a significant life event that triggers reactions from people’s minds and bodies. The mind plays part in the cognitive process and the body plays a part in the biological process. There is a big debate of whether the biological factors or the cognitive factors are the ones to initiate the emotion first. Representatives of the biological perspective say our bodies act out an emotion before we are even cognitively aware of that emotion, while the representatives of the cognitive perspective say that if you take away the cognitive processing, the emotion will disappear. Overall, there has been a two-system view that was formed saying it takes both cognitive and biological factors to start the emotions process. Chapter 11 also brings up the question of how many emotions are there. According to the biological perspective, the basic emotions of fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest are the only important emotions. The cognitive perspective thinks that the secondary emotions are just as important and maybe even more important than the basic ones. Another question brought up in this chapter is what good are emotions? Emotions do not just happen randomly; they are here for a reason. They can help people cope with life tasks and also are used as social expressions and interactions. Emotions are ways to deal with stresses, challenges and problems in life.
Chapter 12 explains all the different theories of emotion. There are many biological aspects of emotion and theories that go along with them. The first theory explained in this chapter is the James-Lange theory. This theory states that our emotional experience follow our bodily responses. This is different than the original view that emotions come before the bodily action. This theory was highly criticized and out of that criticism came the contemporary perspective. This theory states that there are specific physiological reactions to each emotion and that emotions have biological and physiological support. Another theory in this chapter is the differential emotions theory. This theory states that basic emotions have unique motivational purposes. There are 10 basic emotions that have unique subjective quality and unique facial expressions. The theory also supports the idea that there is unique neural activity for each emotion and they have distinct purposes. There is one last idea on emotions and that is the facial feedback hypothesis that believes that emotions come from facial movements, changes in facial temperature, and changes in glandular activity in the face. This is still just a hypothesis and also has a lot of criticism.
Chapter 12 also talks about the cognitive aspects of emotions and how they differ from the biological perspective. The first cognitive aspect talked about is appraisal. This is defined as an estimate of the personal significance of an even (p.344). Emotions come after appraisals. A person looks back at a life event and determines if it was good or bad and then once they had determined that, the emotion of liking or disliking will follow leading a person to take a different course of action. Appraisals can also be complex. A complex appraisal is when the good is separate into many different kinds of benefits and the bad is separated into many different types of harm or threat. A person primarily looks for anything that may be a stake within the event and then secondly they will look for a way to cope with either the harm or the benefit. This is how the appraisal process lays out. Overall, Chapters 11 and 12 were full of information on how and why people feel and use emotions in their life.
The part that I found to be the most surprising while reading these chapters was the section on how moods and emotions are different. I had always categorized these two things as being the same. I did not know that moods stem from ill-defined and unknown reasons, unlike emotions that come from life events and how they are significant to our well-being. Also emotions direct behavior while mood is a cognitive process that only affects what a person thinks. This was interesting to me because I know that I personal am in bad moods some days and I always tried to link it with a specific event in my life. I now know it may just be because of some unknown reason as to why I feel moody. Everyday mood can be affected by emotions, but most of the time it has nothing to do with what emotion is playing out in your behaviors at that time. People are always feeling something usually as an after effect of an emotional experience, but emotions are not every day occurrences.
Emotions may not seem like they are connected to motivation, but they are a major type of motive that people use in their lifetime. Emotions are able to energize and direct a person behavior just like motivation does. Some researchers go as far to say that emotions are a primary motivational tool. This means that they believe emotions drive most motivations in a person. The book use the example of air deprivation and that it can produce both a physiological drive to get air and an emotional drive of fear or terror that makes a person try to find air. This is how emotion and motivation are connected and are an important part to how a person lives their life.
Terms: emotion, cognitive perspective, biological perspective, two-system view, basic emotions, James-Lange theory, Contemporary perspective, Differential emotions theory, facial-feedback hypothesis, appraisal, complex appraisal, mood
We are getting to a different part of the class, one which discusses emotions. Chapters 11 and 12 were about emotions and how they relate to motivation. Chapter 11 tries to answer “five perennial questions.” These are: 1) What is an emotion? 2) What causes an emotion? 3) How many emotions are there? 4) What good are these emotions? And 5) What is the difference between emotion and mood? To answer the first question of what is an emotion, the book has a difficult time giving just one straightforward definition. Instead, emotions are described as multidimensional and made of four parts. These parts are feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, and social-expressive. It is within this first section that the relationship between motivation and emotion is discussed. Emotions are described as being one type of motive and also reflecting the status of other motives. The second question of what causes an emotion is answered through the discussion of two perspectives: biological and cognitive. The third question of how many emotions are there is again answered through the two perspectives and multiple theories are gone over. It is in this section that the basic emotions of fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest are discussed. The fourth question, what good are these emotions, is answered by the explanations of coping functions and social functions. Finally, in Chapter 11, the last question of the difference between emotion and mood is answered by defining moods as enduring while emotions may be situational.
Chapter 12 was about the aspects of emotion. The first aspect discussed is the biological. The James-Lange theory is gone over in detail as well as contemporary perceptive, differential emotions theory, and facial feedback hypothesis. The cognitive aspect of emotion is next and this discussion focused on appraisal, felt emotion, perception, and action. The concept of primary and secondary appraisals is talked about and attribution theory is gone over in some depth. Lastly, the social and cultural aspects of emotion are given attention. The ideas of social interaction, emotional socialization, and managing emotions are all a part of this section.
The most surprising thing I learned was that when people act out their anger, success often occurs within the realms of relationship problems and political agendas. Although the book says that the positive occurrences are a result of nonviolent anger, it is still surprising to me that anger can bring about anything extremely positive. I was also surprised to learn that only 10% of anger episodes lead to aggression. I guess I thought that number would be much higher, especially among men! It seems like a lot of anger episodes involve hitting, punching, or kicking something or someone. The 10% statistic was shocking.
So what does emotion have to do with motivation? As I discussed previously in the summary, emotions are actually considered one type of motive. Emotions guide and energize our behavior towards something, just as motivations do. In addition, emotions tend to “reflect the satisfied versus frustrated status of other motives.” In this way, if one is not reaching a specific goal, emotions reflect the disgusted or angry status of how the motivation of reaching that goal is going.
Terms: emotion, biological and cognitive perspectives, James-Lange theory, contemporary perspective, differential emotions theory, facial feedback hypothesis, appraisal, perception
Broadly, chapters 11 and 12 cover the topic of emotions. Breaking the chapters down into two major parts, the author discusses the biological component of emotions and the cognitive component of emotions. Emotions are not a straightforward thing to study. There are so many components. Because of the intricacies and depth of emotions, one theory regarding why we have emotions, where emotions come from, what purpose emotions serve etc. is not enough. Just like the study of motivation, the study of emotion must contain research from many areas. Emotions cannot be solely explained in a biological sense yet they also cannot be explained simply via a cognitive theory.
Simply put, emotion has four components: feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose and social expression. Emotions not only communicate information to us (e.g. how do you feel about something), they also communicate information to those people in our surroundings and they stir us to perform certain behaviors. The biological view of emotion is more concise. Biological researchers hold the belief that there are a limited number of emotions (between 2 and 10). Biological researchers view emotions as universal to all humans and they believe that our emotions are a result of our biology and of evolution. Emotions are, in part, biologically rooted. In situations of fear our autonomic nervous system stirs certain bodily reactions in order to prepare us to respond to the fear inducing situation. Many aspects of our emotional beings are rooted biologically: the nervous system, endocrine system, our neural circuits, and neural firing rates.
Those adhering more to the cognitive perspective of motivation believe that emotions are innumerable. Researchers who study the cognitive side of emotion believe that an array of emotions may result from the same biological root. Because our biology does not specify which emotions we are feeling in certain situations, the cognitive side of us must then take over to understand our emotions. Appraisals play a large role in our emotional experiences. Appraisals are the ways that we interpret situations. When we encounter certain situations in life we assess them in order to determine how we feel about them. Before we feel any emotion, we must cognitively assess the situation. If it appears to be a negative situation, we may feel scared and then react in a way to reduce the fear that we feel.
There is also a social aspect to the emotions that we feel and experience and understand. Being raised in the U.S., we have a different upbringing to those raised in India. The emotional education (emotional socialization) that we have gone through is different. We may use and understand emotions differently than someone in the Middle East or Asia. Our parents and those close to us at a young age play a big role in teaching us about when certain emotions are appropriate and what certain emotions mean.
So, why do we have emotions? Emotions serve many functions. The book mentions a few: for coping purposes and social purposes. Within the social purpose of emotions there are four sub purposes: communicating our feelings to others, influencing how others interact with us, inviting and facilitating social interactions and creating maintaining and dissolving relationships. Emotions really do serve an array of purposes. Our lives are constantly filled with emotions whether they are our own emotions or a friends or the emotions of someone we have never met.
In the more broad biological section of chapter 12 I was surprised to learn that frowning leads to the constriction of our nasal passages with then increases the temperature in our brain which results in a negative emotional state. Therefore, the expression of frowning can contribute slightly to experiencing a negative emotion. The facial feedback hypothesis says that what we do with our expressions influences the emotions we feel. If we are happy and we smile, then we will feel even happier. I was also surprised when I was reading in chapter 11 on page 322 about emotions “excess baggage in the age of reason”. What surprised me was that the book said that this is a viewpoint held by Buddhists…I didn’t know that they felt that way about emotion!
Emotion plays a huge role in motivation. When we are afraid we are motivated to reduce this fear in some way. When we are angry, like the book says, because of some sort of injustice, we are motivated to end the injustice. I’m a little unsure that I agree with the book on the point that anger is the most passionate emotion, but I do believe that when it is “good” anger it can direct us and energize us to act. When we act nonviolently, our anger can really benefit us and provide us with a lot of energy, and as long as it is not too consuming and distracting, it can direct our behavior. We are also motivated to build connections with those around us. Sometimes, we will smile when we are not extremely happy. We might be doing this to appear friendly in order to make friends or encourage others to have a conversation with us. Finally, we may be motivated to use emotions to motivate others to do something. For instance, we may show someone that we are sad in order to receive comfort from them.
Chapter 11 was all about emotion. The primary focus was on the nature of emotion. Emotions typically arise as reactions to important life events. Once these are triggered, they generate feelings. It defined emotion to the best possible response. Emotion is something that is multidimensional, so there is no easy way to give it one common definition. Emotions are multidimensional; therefore, the chapter then broke emotion down into the different aspects. The four aspects are: 1) Feelings (gives emotion its subjective experience that has both meaning and personal significance 2) Bodily Arousal (includes our neural and physiological activation) 3) Sense of Purpose (gives emotion its goal-directed character to take the action necessary to cope with the circumstances at hand) and 4) Social-Expressive (is emotions communicative aspect). Emotions may seem like they are a very simplistic happening since they occur every day, but this is not even close to the truth. Emotions have to be activated and then regulated, which causes researchers to take in-depths looks. Both biology and cognition play a role in emotions. This causes debate on what emotion truly are. One side being that it is an innate, spontaneous, and primitive biological emotion system, whereas, the other believes emotion occurs as a dynamic, dialectical process rather than the linear output. Either way, emotions serves as biological reactions that help humans in everyday life. Imagine a world with no emotions, there would not be one. Emotions play a huge role in society.
Chapter 12 was similar to chapter 11, but focused more on understanding the emotional events and processes that occur. This happens within that split second between the actual life event and the emotional response. This chapter broke down emotion into the three central aspects: 1) Biological (emotions direct actions by affecting the nervous system, endocrine system, brain, and facial feedback) 2) Cognitive (emotion is an appraisal), and 3) Social-Cultural (others are our richest source of emotional experiences). Emotions help serve as coping functions that allow the individual to prepare himself/herself to adapt to everyday life occurrences. This revolves around how to cope with potential benefit, harm, or threat.
After reading about it, then looking back on real-life situations, it makes sense. I thought it was very interesting and intriguing reading about how we feed off others emotions. We can “catch” others emotions through things such as: mimicry, feedback, and contagion. I thought about situations that revolve around crying. It is very common, that when one person cries and people see this, it “hits home” with them and they start to feel the sadness as well. Emotions are very contagious. One particularly for me, is I enjoy watching comedy movies with a couple certain people because I definitely feed off their laughter. Personally, I enjoy seeing/hearing others laugh and then I seem to join in a lot of the time. It is just a natural instinct.
As both the chapters have stated, is it obvious emotions are motivators for us. They can do this both biologically and cognitively. When emotions such as happiness and surprised change our bodies, it motivates us to react in a different way than if we were disgusted or embarrassed. Emotions provide us with and automated way for coping with difficulties in our lives. We are built to protect our own self and look out for our best interest. Emotions can help with serving as social functions too. The concept of relationships ties in with emotions. Everything in life, we (as humans) respond to in some way, shape, or form. And with this, we react with some sort of emotion.
Key Terms: emotion, multidimensional, feelings, subjective experience, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, social-expressive, biological, cognitive, appraisal, social-cultural
Chapter 11 and 12 describe the nature and aspects of emotions. Chapter 11 goes on to describe just what exactly emotion is, what causes emotion, how many emotions are there, what good are the emotions, what is the difference between emotion and mood. Emotions are multidimensional; they exist as subjective, biological purposive and social phenomena. Emotions are subjective feelings because they make us feel a certain way along with biological because they prepare are body for adapting to whatever situation one faces. The definition of emotion is a short lived, feeling—arousal –purposive—expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. Emotions relate to motivation in two ways. Emotions energize and direct behavior and emotions serve as an ongoing system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going.
What causes emotion is a question asked by many researchers. The main argument is that emotion is caused by either cognition, biologically, or a mixture of both. In the book Paul Ekman points out that emotions have very rapid onsets, brief durations, and can occur automatically/involuntarily. Thus, emotions happen to us, as we act emotionally even before we are consciously aware of that emotionality. Emotions are biological because they evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life tasks. If you believe in the cognitive prospective, you believe that emotions are developed through mental processes. Richard Lazarus states that without understanding of the personal relevance of an event’s potential impact on personal well-being, there is no reason to respond emotionally. Stimuli appraised as irrelevant do not elicit emotional reactions.
How many emotions are there? There’s a huge debate on what emotions are fundamental and which ones are not. Usually basic emotions are innate rather than acquired or learned through experience, arise from the same circumstances for all people, are expressed uniquely and distinctively, evoke a distinctive and highly predictable physiological patterned response. The book states that fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest are the six basic emotions.
What good are the emotions? Darwin explained that emotions help animals adapt to their surroundings. Displays of emotion help adaptation much in the same way that displays of physical characteristics do. Emotions just don’t happen out of the blue, they are used as a coping mechanism. Fear invokes protection, anger invokes destruction, joy invokes reproduction, sadness invokes reunion, acceptance invokes affiliation, disgust invokes rejection, anticipation invokes exploration, and surprise invokes orientation. Social functions can be taken away from emotions as well; communicate our feelings to others, influence how others interact with us, invite and facilitate social interaction, create, maintain, and dissolve relationships. We have emotions to help with the challenges, stresses, and problems to be solved in life. Emotions exist as a solution to these challenges, stresses, and problems.
The difference between emotions and moods is that they arrive from different causes. Emotions arrive from significant life situations and from appraisals of their significance. Moods, on the other hand, emerge from processes that are ill-defined and are oftentimes unknown. Emotions are also affected by behavior, while moods, however, mostly influence cognition and direct what the person thinks about.
The biological aspects of emotion happen when facing a situation of personal significance. The body prepares itself to cope effectively by activating the following, heart, lungs, and muscles (autonomic nervous system), glands and hormones (endocrine system), limbic brain structures such as the amygdala (neural brain circuits, neural activity and the place of information processing, and discrete patterns of the facial musculature. Cognitive aspects of emotion arise from appraisals. Appraisals are an estimate of the personal significance of an event (is this life event significant?). Appraisals often function to intensify the emotion, appraisals often overlap emotions they are a part of, children experience very basic emotions while adults experience usually have a variety of different appraisal specific emotions. Two types of appraisal, primary and secondary, regulate the emotion process. Primary appraisal evaluates whether or not anything important is at stake in a situation. Secondary appraisal occurs after some reflection and revolves around an assessment of how to cope with a potential benefit, harm or threat.
Facial feedback hypothesis was the most surprising thing I learned about in these chapters. According to facial feedback hypothesis the subjective aspect of emotion stems from feelings by movements of the facial musculature, change in facial temperature and changes in glandular activity in the facial skin. Emotions provide feedback and awareness of behaviors. I’ve never really read into facial feedback much so to learn that if trained right, you can tell if someone is lying just by slight emotions seemed very interesting to me.
A person brings personal motives into a situation. When personal motives are at stake, emotions follow. Furthermore, emotions constantly change as primary and second appraisals change. So a person’s personal motives lie at the core of the emotion process and the individual continually makes primary and secondary appraisals about the status of those personal motives as events unfold and coping efforts are implemented. Basically are reactions to certain situations can give us a clue if we are motivated to do a task or not. If my dad tells me to mow the lawn and I don’t like that task, he’ll probably know that because of the face I make in anger or disgust.
Terms: motivation, appraisal, emotion, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, anger, fear, distress, joy, disgust, surprise, shame, guilt, interest, contempt, coping functions, social functions, mood, facial feedback, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal.
Chapter 11 asks a few different questions about emotion. The questions that the chapter answers are, what is emotion, what causes emotion, how many emotions are there, and what good are emotions? The text explains that emotions are multidimensional, and they exist as asubjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena. It explains that emotions are also agents of purpose a lot like hunger has a purpose. Emotions arise when we encounter a significant life event. Peoples mind and body react in adaptive ways. To answer the question "how many emotions are there?" depends on whether on favors a biological or cognitive orientation. A biological orientation emphasizes primary emotions and downplays the importance of secondary or acquired emotions. A cognitive orientation emphasizes the individual, social, and cultural experiences. Chapter 11 also discusses the basic emotions like, joy, fear, etc. Chapter 12 discusses the aspects of emotion. It discusses the biological, cognitive, and social aspects of emotion. It describes emotions as biological reactions to important life events. The James Lang theory states that the body reacts uniquely to different emotion eliciting events, and that the body does not react to nonemotion eliciting events.
What I found most interesting was the facial feedback hypothesis. According to the facial feedback hypothesis, the subjective aspect of emotion stems from feelings engendered by movements of the facial musculature, changes in facial temperature, and changes in glandular activity in the facial skin. I had no idea there was so much change that takes place in our faces when we experience a certain emotion. Facial feedback only does one job, and that is emotion activation. Once an emotion is activated it is the emotion program, not facial feedback that recruits further cognitive and bodily participation to maintain the emotional experience over time. This relates to the exercise we did with the website for the previous post. I thought this was so interesting! This is the kind of thing that really keeps me interested in psychology. I would love to become an expert on something like this some day. I realize it is a long shot, but I would love to continue studying it. I would like to hopefully go over more things like this in class. If I had the chance I would take an entire class on something like this.
Chapter 11 is all about "the five questions of emotion" - 1) what is an emotion? 2) what causes emotion 3) how many emotions are there? 4) what good are the emotions? 5) what is the difference between emotion and mood? Emotions are a lot more complex than what I thought! The book defines emotion as multidimensional that exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena. They are short lived and very hard to define in a short sentence, as emotion has many parts that make it so. The cause of an emotion comes from a specific life event and our mind and body react in different ways which result in feelings, a sense of purpose, bodily arousal or social expressiveness. What good are having emotions? They provide us with coping mechanisms and social functioning. They are a good way to show people how we feel or how we fit in society. Emotions are also helpful for helping us to get through stressful problems we deal with on a daily basis.
Chapter 12 describes the aspects of emotion; biological, cognitive, and social. This chapter highlights many different theories. James-lange theory is a biological theory is on the basis of what our body does after an emotion arises. Another great theory from chapter 12 is the differential emotions theory. It's emphasis is that emotions serve unique, or different, motivational purposes. Facial feedback hypothesis is another good one. It says that emotion is the awareness of proprioactive feedback from facial behavior. When our faces take different shape or temperature, we recognize this is an emotion.
The most surprising thing I learned from these chapters was the part on facial expressions across different cultures. It is amazing to me that you can probably have a conversation with someone who doesn't even speak the same language as you, or even lives half way across the universe. I experienced this two winters ago when I traveled to India. We stayed and discovered a very small, spiritual village in north east India. Not a lot of people were able to speak English so a lot of the communication had to come from signaling and the face had a lot to do with it! Smiles, for instance were a great communication tool to help let know that we were "good" people.
Chapter 11 does a good job at explaining how emotion relates to motivation. Emotions are a type of motive, it says, which energize and direct behavior. For example, if you get hurt and cry, your motivation to seek out help from a friend may be aroused. Emotions also help us regulate how well or how poorly we are personally adapting to a situation. The book uses goals as an example; whether we are feeling distressed or joyful.
Terms: emotion, james-lange theory, differential emotions theory, facial feedback hypothesis
Chapter 11 was about the nature of emotion and answered the five perennial questions which are 1) what is an emotion? ,2) what causes an emotion?, 3) how many emotions are there?, 4) what good are the emotions?, and 5) what is the difference between emotion and mood? Emotions are short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. When we encounter a significant life event, an emotion comes to life. People’s mind and bodies react in adaptive ways. That is, encountering a significant life event activates cognitive and biological processes that collectively activate the critical components of emotion, including feelings, bodily arousal, goal-directed purpose, and expression.
The biological perspective emphasizes primary emotions, with a lower limit of two or three and an upper limit of 10. The cognitive perspective say that humans experience a greater number than 10 emotions. However, there are 6 basic emotions which are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. These emotions are used to cope and adapt to our surroundings.
There are three criteria’s that distinguish between mood and emotion; different antecedents, different action-specificity, and different time course. Emotion and mood arise from different causes. Emotions emerge from significant life situations and from appraisals of their significance to our well-being. Moods emerge from processes that are ill-defined and are oftentimes unknown. Emotions mostly influence behavior and direct specific courses of action. Moods mostly influence cognition and direct what the person thins about. Emotions emanate from short-lived events that last for seconds whereas moods emanate from mental events that last hours.
Chapter 12 talks about the different aspects of emotion which are biological, cognitive, and social and cultural. The biologically out body prepares itself to cope effectively by activating the autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing, and facial feedback. The James-Lange theory suggests that we experience an emotion and that the felt emotion is quickly followed by bodily changes. The cognitive section talked about primary and secondary appraisal. Primary appraisal involves an estimate of whether one has anything at stake in the encounter such as health, self-esteem, a goal, financial state, respect, or well-being of a loved one. Secondary appraisal, which occurs after some reflection, involves the person’s assessment for coping with the possible benefit, harm, or threat. Emotion is very social. As we interact with others, we tend to mimic their facial expressions.
In chapter 12 I found emotional contagion really interesting. Emotional contagion is the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person and to converge emotionally. I find myself mimicking other people’s emotions when it comes to crying. I always cry during movies when the actor is crying. I also start laughing when others around me are laughing.
Emotion relates to motivation in two ways. First, emotions are one type of motive. Emotions energize and direct behavior. Second, emotions serve as an ongoing “readout” system to indicate how well or how poorly adaption is going. Emotion acts at as a primary motivator. When a person’s well-being is threatened we feel a strong emotional reaction and that drives us to act on it.
Terms: Emotion, arousal, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, mood, James-Lange Theory, primary appraisal , secondary appraisal, emotional contagion.
Chapter eleven attempts to defines emotions, as well as discuss the functions and affects of emotions. The chapter begins by suggesting that emotions are a "short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events." Emotions are complicated and multidimensional, which makes it difficult to specifically define and categorize emotions. One of the largest ambiguities when it comes to emotion is weather they are biological or cognitive. According to the two-system view, individuals posses both cognitive and biological which interact with one another. The biological system is innate and "traces its origins to the evolutionary history of the species," while the cognitive system is learned through experience and social feedback. Chapter eleven concludes by reviewing the basic emotions; emotions that are both innate, arise universally from the same circumstance, are expressed uniquely form one another, and evoke a specific and predictable physiological response. There is no specific consensus upon exactly which emotions make up this list, but all agree they are similar to the list provided in the book: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. Emotions serve both emotional and social functions. They serve as non-verbal messages to others, and allow individuals to effectively experience and interact with their surroundings.
Meanwhile, chapter twelve covers three aspects of emotion; biological, cognitive, and social/cultural. Emotions are "biological reactions to important events in life," and allow the body to effectively respond to the consequences of these events through the autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits, neural activity, and facial feedback. According to the James-Lange Theory an individuals body immediately reacts to a stimuli, and emotional experiences are the individuals way of making sense of these reactions. It was out of this theory that the contemporary theory arose which states that each emotion corresponds to specific bodily functions. Physiological arousal does not cause but rather "accompanies, regulates, and sets the stage for emotion." Another important biological theory is the facial feedback hypothesis, which suggests that emotions are caused by facial feedback such as musculature, temperature, and gland activity in the face, and serves as an emotion activator.
Appraisal is one of the fundamental concepts when discussing the cognitive aspects of emotion. Appraisal is an individuals personal estimation of the importance of an event. The textbook uses a perfect example when discussing Olympic medalists. A bronze medalists might think 'I'm proud I received a medal,' where as a silver medalist might think 'I could have won the gold." Both these individuals would have experienced similar events, but because of their appraisal, experience very different emotions (pride versus regret).
The textbook finishes the chapter by exploring social and cultural aspects of emotion. An individuals environment, both social and cultural constructs effect how an individual experiences and expresses emotions.
The most surprising thing to me was the difference between mood and emotion. I had always viewed them as relatively similar, however they are significantly different. They both arise from different circumstances; emotions from signification life situations and their appraisals, where as mood emerges from more ambiguous processes. Emotions also differ in the sense that they directly influence behavior and action, while mood directs thought and more cognitive behaviors. Finally, emotions arise from brief events- seconds or minutes long, while moods can last as long as hours or days.
Focusing specifically on their relationship to motivation, emotions are both a type of motive and serve as indicators of how well or poorly personal adaptations are going.
Terms: Emotions, Two-System View, Innate Emotions, James-Lange Theory, Contemporary Theory, Facial Feedback Hypothesis, Appraisal
Chapter 11 was all about the five perennial questions involving the nature of emotion. The first of the five questions asks, “What is an emotion?” The thing is, there is not a simple answer to this question. Emotions are multidimensional, and they exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena (p.299). Emotion is the psychological construct that unites and coordinates these four aspects of experience into a synchronized pattern (p.301). Also, there is a relationship between emotion and motivation because of the fact that emotions are a type of motive and because emotions serve as an ongoing readout system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going (p.302).
The second perennial question asks, “What causes an emotion?” In response to this question, the textbook states that when we encounter a significant life event, an emotion comes to life (p.303). These significant life events activate cognitive and biological processes that work together to activate the critical components of emotion, such as feelings, bodily arousal, goal-directed purpose, and expression. There is much controversy over whether emotions are initially stemmed from biological reasons or from cognitive reasons. This is where both the biological perspective and the cognitive perspective come from. There is also a two-systems view that incorporates both of the perspectives.
The third perennial question asks, “How many emotions are there?” A biological orientation emphasizes primary emotions, whereas a cognitive orientation acknowledges the importance of the primary emotions but stresses the complex, secondary emotions (p.308). Therefore, this is why there may be fewer emotions according to the biological perspective versus the cognitive perspective. Everyone agrees that there are dozens of emotions, but the debate centers on which of these are most fundamental. This is where emotion families are created, putting similar emotions into different categories with one emotion being the basic, fundamental one. Our textbook uses fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest as the basic emotions.
The fourth perennial question asks, “What good are the emotions?” Whether an emotion is aversive or pleasant, it serves as a coping function for humans. They help people deal with fundamental life tasks. From this standpoint, there is no such thing as a bad emotion or a good emotion because all emotions are considered beneficial since they direct attention and channel behavior to where it is needed, given the circumstances one faces (p.318). Emotions also serve social functions by helping us communicate our feelings to others, influencing how others interact with us, inviting and facilitating social interaction, and creating, maintaining, and dissolving relationships (p.319).
The fifth and final perennial question asks, “What is the difference between emotion and mood?” According to the textbook, the main differences lie in different antecedents, different action-specificity, and different time course. Moods are more enduring than emotions are. Mood exists as a positive affect state or a negative affect state. These are independent ways of feeling and can be felt at the same time. The textbook goes on to explain how there are many benefits of feeling good.
Chapter 12 was all about the aspects of emotion. It started off talking about the biological aspects of emotion such as the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system, the neural brain circuits, the rate of neural firing, and facial feedback. It then discussed the James-Lange theory versus the contemporary perspective, as well as the differential emotions theory, which focuses on basic emotions serving different motivational purposes.
It then discussed the facial feedback hypothesis, which states that the subjective aspect of emotion stems from feelings engendered by movements of facial musculature, changes in facial temperature, and changes in glandular responses located in the face. Facial feedback holds the job of emotion activation, and once an emotion is activated, the emotion program recruits further cognitive and bodily participation to maintain the emotional experience over time (p.337). There have been multiple tests done on the facial feedback hypothesis, but the results found are small, and other factors could be considered more important.
The chapter then went on to discuss whether or not facial expressions of emotion were universal. Cross-cultural investigations showed that human beings display similar facial expressions regardless of cultural differences. This tells us that emotion-related facial behavior has an innate, unlearned component (p.342).
The chapter next jumps into the cognitive aspects of emotion, which include appraisals, knowledge, attributions, socialization history, and cultural identities. An appraisal is an estimate of the personal significance of an event (p.344). Appraisals precede and elicit emotions (p.344). After the whole process of appraisal is discussed, the chapter moves on to topics like emotion differentiation and emotion knowledge. Emotion differentiation is how people experience different emotions to the same event (p.351). Emotion knowledge happens as people gain experience with different situations. This enables them to learn to discriminate shades within a single emotion (p.352). Next, attributions are discussed, which are the reasons people use to explain an important life outcome (p.353).
The next subsection of the chapter focuses on social and cultural aspects of emotion. Under this subsection are the topics of social interaction, emotional socialization, and managing emotions. During social interaction we expose ourselves to emotional contagion effects and we put ourselves into a conversational context that provides an opportunity to reexperience and relive past emotional experiences (p.359). Emotional socialization happens when adults tell children what they should know about emotion. Managing emotions revolve around a theme of coping with aversive feelings in ways that are both socially desirable and personally adaptive (p.361). People learn to do this as they grow up and live through different situations and experiences that evoke emotion.
From the reading, the most surprising thing that I learned was that people actually fight over whether emotions initially arise biologically or cognitively. This was interesting to me because the textbook actually stated that it is likely that both biological aspects and cognitive aspects play a huge role in emotion. They both play such a large role that we are not able to differentiate between them and figure out which one emotions first stem from. I liked that the textbook provided a section on the chicken and the egg debate. It provided a nice analogy to what is going on with the biological perspective and the cognitive perspective in the realm of emotion.
All of this information from Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 has a lot to do with motivation. Emotions are motives. They energize and direct our behavior to cope and react. If you take away emotion, you take away motivation. Emotions push us to learn how to cope with aversive situations and feelings. They allow us to grow from what we experience. They function to protect, destroy, reproduce, reunite, affiliate, reject, explore, and orient ourselves so that we can handle the life events that we go through. Without emotion, we would not have motivation to push through the hardships, as well as the good times, in life.
Terms: emotion, motivation, motive, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, two-systems view, primary emotions, secondary emotions, emotion families, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, coping, mood, antecedent, positive affect, negative affect, feeling, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits, neural firing, facial feedback, James-Lange theory, contemporary perspective, differential emotions theory, facial musculature, appraisals, attributions, emotion differentiation, emotion knowledge, social interaction, emotional socialization
Chapters 11 & 12 give an explanation of what emotion is, a way to define it, and the biological, cognitive, and social/cultural aspects of emotion. First, chapter 11 discusses what emotion is. Emotion is difficult to define because there are so many facets that combine to create emotion. As state in the text, “emotion is multidimensional.” It is made up of four components: subjective, biological, purposive, and social. In the chapter, emotions are defined as “short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events.”
This chapter goes on to explain that emotion is related to motivation in that emotions serve as motives and emotions allow us to see how well, or how poorly, we are adapting. There has been a great deal of discussion as to what causes emotion and it comes down to biology and/or cognition. The biological perspective of emotion suggests that emotions cannot occur without a prior biological event and they often occur automatically because of brain circuits, whereas the cognitive perspective argues that life situations must first be appraised for meaning before an emotion is expressed.
The number of emotions expressed by humans is also a cause for debate amongst biological and cognitive theorists. The biological perspective focuses on primary, innate emotions, while the cognitive perspective focuses on the secondary, learned emotions.
Although biological theorists disagree on the total number of primary emotions, they do agree that there are a small number of basic emotions, that these basic emotions are universal amongst all human beings, and that emotions are influenced by the interaction of biology and evolution. Cognitive theorists, on the other hand, argue that there are an infinite number of emotions. They suggest that situational context and individual appraisal of situations allows for a boundless number of emotional responses.
The chapter points out five basic and fundamental families of emotion. These families are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy. These five categories are recognized as families because each category has a range of other similar emotions. Many have asked why emotions are valuable. Psychologists have determined two main functions of emotions and they include coping, dealing with fundamental life situations, and social, communicating feelings in relationships.
Chapter 12 discusses more in-depth about the theories and aspects of both the biological perspective and the cognitive perspective. According to the biological perspective, when we encounter various life events, our body physiologically reacts by activating the autonomic nervous system (heart, lungs, and muscles), the endocrine system (glands and hormones), neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing, and facial feedback.
The first biological theory of emotion, the James-Lange Theory, proposed that there are unique bodily reactions associated with different emotions. However, critics argued that physiological changes played a supplemental and rather unimportant role in emotions. Although the James-Lange theory lost strength because of critics, it still contributed to contemporary perspectives, which suggest that “emotions recruit biological and physiological support to enable adaptive behaviors such as fighting, fleeing, and nurturing.” Contemporary theorists look at specific neural circuits, brain areas, and neural activation to determine the brains role in emotions.
The next biological theory discussed in chapter 12 was the Differential-Emotions Theory. This theory suggests that there are 10 discrete, unique emotions that coincide with 5 postulates endorsed by the theory. This theory argues that the 10 discrete emotions provide motivation to adapt to and effectively with various life situations.
The last biological theory addressed in the chapter was the facial feedback theory. This theory emphasizes the faces role in the subjective aspect of emotion. It argues that emotion is essentially facial feedback information. This information is seen in movements of the facial musculature, changes in facial temperature, and changes in glandular activity in facial skin. According to this theory, facial feedback activates emotion.
Appraisal is at the center of the cognitive aspects of emotion. Appraisal is defined as “an estimate of the personal significance of an event.” In other words, how important or unimportant is this situation to and individual’s life. Cognitive theorists all agree that “without an antecedent cognitive appraisal of the event, emotions do not occur and the appraisal, not the event itself, causes the emotion.” According to this perspective, appraisals are what bring about emotions, not biological factors. Theorists see appraisal as a process. The stimulus/life situation must first be perceived before it becomes an appraisal. The appraisal then elicits emotion, which, in turn, brings about motivation.
Lastly, the social and cultural aspects of emotion contribute to an individuals understanding of emotion in a social context. From our environment, we gain emotional knowledge from our interaction with other people (social interaction). We encounter a larger number and variety of emotions when we interact with others. We also gain emotional knowledge from the way in which we are socialized as children, as well as adults, and learn from those around us (emotional socialization). Finally, we learn to manage our emotions, coping with aversive feelings in life situations, through both our social interactions and emotional socialization.
Terms: Emotion, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, primary emotions, coping functions, social functions, James-Lange Theory, contemporary theory, Differential-Emotions theory, Facial feedback theory, appraisal, social interaction, emotional socialization, manage emotions.
Chapter eleven and twelve discuss emotions and the biological and cognitive aspects of emotion. Chapter eleven begins by defining what an emotion is. “Emotions are short lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events (pg. 301).” Emotions allow us to react and respond to our environment. For example, when we feel sadness, we sometimes respond by weeping.
Chapter eleven says that emotions arise from significant events in our life. Whenever we encounter an event that engages us emotionally, our body gets activated to convey specific emotions. Our body acts on biological and cognitive processes in order to display emotions. Biological representative Paul Ekman, who also devised the website for FACE Training, says that emotions are short in duration, and happen involuntarily. That means that we have no control over our emotions, they just automatically occur unconsciously. Our emotions happen so spontaneously that we don’t actually realize our emotion when it begins. This supports the James-Lange Theory. This suggests that we have bodily responses to a stimulus before we actually feel an emotion. For example, the other day I accidently put my hand on the hot frying pan when I made dinner. I didn’t stop and think, “This is really hot, and I’m going to move my hand off of it.” I instantly, and quickly, removed my hand from the pan and realized that it was really hot. Other representatives believe that genetics influence the neural circuits in the brain, thus controlling our emotion. Chapter twelve discusses the biological component of neural activation. From the biological perspective, emotions occur due to the neural firing in our brain, or the electrical impulse that is passed on from neuron to neuron. Neural firing gives us emotions in three ways. If the firing increases, decreases, or remains the same, specific emotions are displayed. For example, if neural firing is dramatically increased, an individual may experience a stimulus that evokes the feeling of fear.
The theorists who believe that emotions are cognitive believe that some, not all, events in one’s life trigger emotion. If the person see’s the significance of the event, or appraisal, then an emotion will occur. The actual external stimulus does not produce the emotion though, one’s appraisal does. For example, if you saw the President of the United States one day when you were walking down the street, you have a good appraisal for this situation. Meeting the president would evoke a surprised and exciting feeling for someone. On the other hand, seeing the president might evoke a negative emotion if that person dislikes the president. This is an example of emotion differentiation because the same stimulus generates different emotional responses. Both cognitive and biological perspectives complete the full emotional experience. The origin of emotion is a complex process that stems from both biological and cognitive components.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to me while reading the text was figure 12.3 on page 339. This picture showed you and described the facial muscle movements for some of the basic emotions. I find it amazing that different emotions have their own muscle movements. I also liked reading the section on the Facial Feedback Hypothesis. This states that if we try and manipulate our facial reactions, like raising our lip and cheeks while wrinkling our nose, the emotion of disgust will be activated in our brain. I find this very fascinating, but I don’t know if I completely believe this hypothesis. Maybe manipulating emotions can work biologically, but I would have to disagree from a cognitive standpoint on the experience of that emotion.
One thing emotions do is motivate individuals. They work to direct and energize specific behaviors. For example, if one feels disgusted with their performance on the science exam, then perhaps they will gain extra motivation to study and get a good grade. The disgusted emotion energizes the person’s behavior to work harder at something. Often emotions can give feedback to a person on where they stand. For example, a coach making a frowning face after you lose a game would relay a message that he is angry, and gives you an indication of your performance. After you have received feedback, you may be motivated to try even harder to achieve a particular goal, or you may avoid that situation from occurring again by withdrawing. According to the differential emotions theory, each of the basic emotions (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest) has its own motivational purpose. Each emotion has a unique feeling, facial expression, neural activity, and motivation. If someone is angry, then they draw the eyebrows inward and down, tense the lower eyelid upward, and press the lips together tightly. There would be a certain area of the brain that triggers these muscle movements and feeling, and they angry feeling may cause the person to make an aggressive move.
Terms: Facial Feedback Hypothesis, Differential Emotions Theory, neural activation, neural circuits, James-Lange Theory, appraisal, emotion differentiation, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, basic emotions, facial musculature, facial expressions
Now we’re finally into the emotion side of this class. Chapter 11 is a chapter full of the questions that will hopefully be answered in this second section of the book. The first question is probably the most predictable question of them all: What is an emotion? Everyone knows that emotions are feelings. Emotions are also biological reactions that prepare the body to adapt to the situations they are about to face. The emotion joy will have the biological reaction of the person continuing what is bringing them joy while anger will motivate the person to correct what is bringing them anger. What causes an emotion? It is a significant situational causes a cognitive process or a biological process. This causes there to be feelings, a sense of purpose, bodily arousal, and social-expressive. How many emotions are there? The biological perspective says a lower limit of two to an upper limit of ten. What good are emotions? Emotions provide coping functions when certain situations arise; they also act as social functions.
Chapter 12 is about the different aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive, and social. Emotions have a lot of biology involved in them. Emotions are biological reactions to life events. The body can change certain things (like heartbeat) when certain situations arise. Emotions also are created through cognitive functions. We learn how to react to certain situations by experiencing them. When a similar situation happens in the future, we have the knowledge on how to react. Social and cultural aspects on emotion are how our upbringing and how this shapes our emotions.
The most surprising thing I learned in this chapter was how emotions are created through biology. It shows that reactions to specific events are things that are implanted in our brains from birth. When the bully comes up to a child on the school playground, their heartbeat will increase and they will be ready to run. This is because the brain already knows that this is a fearful situation and a flight situation and they should do whatever to get away.
Emotions relate to motivation because they are what precede motivation. A fearful situation causes the person to be motivated to fight or run. A joyful emotion causes the person to laugh and run around. It’s amazing how our day-to-day emotions are what cause us to act in the way we do.
Terms: emotion, biological, cognitive, social, cultural
Chapter eleven was all about emotions. It talked about how emotions have four different dimensions: feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. It also talks about what causes emotion. There are arguments on whether emotions are a biological process or a cognitive process. Like most things in psychology, I’m sure it is a bit of both. Finally, the chapter addresses why emotions are important. Emotions help us adapt to changes in our environment, including threats for survival purposes. Emotions also serve as motivators by being goal-directive purposes. This is how emotion ties in with motivation.
Chapter twelve analyzes emotions from three different perspectives. Just as we learned in chapter eleven, emotions are thought to be biological, cognitive, and now we learn as well as social-cultural. We learn different functions of emotions, including that they are coping mechanisms. Coping mechanisms are broken down in this chapter physiologically (e.g. our autonomic nervous system and our fight or flight response). Finally, one of the more interesting concepts we learned about in chapter twelve was the facial feedback hypothesis. The strong version of this hypothesis states that our facial expressions create the emotions. The weaker version explains that over exaggerated facial expressions heighten our emotions.
The most surprising thing I learned, as I just stated, was the facial feedback hypothesis. I’m unsure if I agree with this concept of creating our own emotions, but the book brings up some seriously convincing points. The different tests they conduct, especially the empirical tests, show evidence that this is the case. I realize that the effects of this hypothesis, especially the stronger version, are minimal. However I still find it fascinating that moving your facial muscles a certain way affects your emotions at all.
Another thing I found really surprising and interesting in chapter twelve that kind of goes along with the facial feedback hypothesis is the question of can we voluntarily control our emotions? Because we learned in chapter eleven that there are four different dimensions to emotions, this question becomes difficult to answer. I believe that the answer is no – we cannot voluntarily control our emotions. In order to feel a certain emotion, we need to be exposed to that certain emotion-generating event. Though I’m working on a blog right now that isn’t giving me joy (sorry, but let’s be honest here…) I can’t just tell myself to “Be happy!” and am automatically happy. I need to experience a emotion generating, or in this case a happy-generating, event that will cause me to feel the joyful emotion. When I have finished this blog and hit submit, that will be a happy-generating event that will cause me joy.
According to the text, emotions are a type of motive. An example of this would be in chapter eleven when it talks about the functional view of emotional behavior. When we experience a certain emotion from a stimulus situation, an emotional behavior comes with that. This is a coping function. The emotion motivates us to cope by emitting an emotional behavior. The book has an entire table that has examples of emotions, the stimulus situation they arise from, the emotional behavior that follows, and the function of the emotion. Therefore we can conclude that we emitted this emotional behavior from the MOTIVATION the emotion brought to us.
Terms:
Facial feedback hypothesis, emotion-generating event, stimulus situation, emotional behavior
Chapter 11 and 12 were discussion of the nature of emotion and the different aspects of emotion. Starting in chapter 11, the book discusses what emotion are. Emotions are defined as being multidimensional. Emotions are subjective feelings that make us feel a certain way, are biological reactions responses that energize the body for adaptation, and are social signals use to communicate our internal state to others. Emotions arise during different life events and generate feelings that generate motivational states within the individual. Emotions consist of four different components including feelings, a subjective experience, bodily arousal, physiological arousal, social-expression, communication in a social setting, and sense of purpose, goal directed motivational state. Emotions generate motivation in the fact that emotions energize a direct behavior. Positive emotions reflect on a satisfied motivational state, and negative emotions reflect frustration with our motivational states. Emotions are biological in the fact that emotions happen before we can consciously be aware of our emotionality. Although there is much debate on different theories involving emotion and how many emotions humans are capable of possessing, the book talks about six basic emotions including fear, a perceived vulnerability to a threat or danger, anger, the most passionate emotion when the interpretation that ones plans, goals, or well-being have been interfered with by an outside source, disgust, the desire to get away from a spoiled object, sadness, the most negative emotion coming from the experience of separation or failure, joy, the accomplishments of desirable outcomes, and interest, a shifting of interest from one event, thought, or action to another. All of these emotions create motivation within the individual.
Emotions also serve as a social function in the fact that they communicate our feelings to others, influence how others interact with us, invite social interactions, and create, maintain, and dissolve relationships. Emotional displays, these nonverbal messages we send to others, paly a huge role in everyday social interactions. Emotions are solutions to the everyday life challenges we face and create motivation to power though lives happenings.
Chapter 12, the discussion of aspects of emotions, starts off with the discussion of multiple theories on the biological aspects of emotion from the James-Lang theory to more contemporary outlooks. The more contemporary outlook says that there is a pattern of neural firing within the brain as activity increases and decrease. When a neural firing decreases or increases, individuals will experience different types of emotions. Another hypothesis that goes along with emotion is the facial feedback theory. This theory says that emotions are sets of muscle and glandular activity and responses in the face and emotions are the awareness of ‘proprioceptive feedback from facial behavior’ (Reeve 336). Patterns of facial expression produce emotions which are the same across different cultures.
Cognitive aspects of emotion argue that along with being a biological happening, emotions emerge from social interactions and cultural contexts. Appraisal are the interpretations of different situations and outcomes. Once an object has be appraised as good or bad, and experience then forms creating an emotion tied to that event. This emotion then generates motivational tendencies to approach the emotion-generating object or event.
The final aspect of emotions discussed in this chapter are that of social and cultural origins. Social and cultural interactions create better understanding of emotions. Emotions play a key role in creating, maintain and terminating interpersonal relationships by drawing us together or pushing us apart. Emotional socialization can take place when adults tell children what they should know about a specific emotion, which can be detrimental to children. On the other hand, it is these socializations that are used in managing emotions in areas such as high stress job and service industry jobs.
The most surprising thing I learned in these readings was how much emotions affect our motivation. Emotion are so intricate and being able to learn more about them is extremely interesting for myself. Both chapters emphasizes on how emotions relate to motivation. Emotions influence motivation in numerous different ways and are a huge reason we do what we do as humans and individuals.
Terms: Emotion, Feelings, Bodily Arousal, Social-Expression, Sense of Purpose, Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, Joy, Interest, Facial Feedback Theory, Appraisal, Emotional Socialization
Chapter 11 begins with the four components of emotion as shown in Figure 11.1. It then explains both biological and cognitive aspects of emotion. Then the emotion families and the basic emotions follow. The chapter presents six basic emotions, and they are then further simplified as the negative theme of threat and harm and the positive theme of motive involvement and satisfaction. A section explains that emotion helps us to cope and socialize. Finally the terms mood, positive affect, and negative affect are introduced.
An important biological theory in Chapter 12 is the differential emotions theory. It indicates ten emotions as human motivation. Then the chapter describes the facial feedback hypothesis. Some researches found that intensity of emotion is affected by facial pattern. The cognitive aspect of emotion is appraisal. During primary appraisal people estimate possible benefit, harm and threat. Then in secondary appraisal people evaluate their abilities to cope with the situation. Theoretical development of the process leads to emotion differentiation, which is illustrated in Figure 12.10. Attribution, or the reason used to explain the outcome, also affects the appraisal process.
The third section of Chapter 12 demonstrates some cultural differences in emotion. One interesting phenomenon is emotional contagion. This concept explains how emotion is transferred in social interaction, but I think it is oversimplified and misses some cultural factors. The section also describes how emotion can be learned and managed.
I was not really surprised, but maybe intrigued by the term positive affect. This concept seems to be similar to the term vitality mentioned in Chapter 6. The researches on mood are really interesting. I realized that sometimes when I thought about emotion I was thinking about mood instead. There is really not enough knowledge in this area.
From the biological perspective, differential emotions theory states that emotion constitutes a human motivation system. Different emotions have different motivational purposes and serve different adaptations. The theory basically asserts that emotion is the foundation of motivation. From the cognitive perspective, emotion is the product of appraisal. Emotion provides feedback for people to confirm the characteristic of motivation. So in this theory, the motivation generated by evaluation elicits emotion.
Terms: emotion family, basic emotion, mood, positive affect, negative affect, differential emotions theory, facial feedback hypothesis, appraisal, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, attribution, emotional contagion
I find the books views on western coping mechanisms to be unique. It talks about the use of pills and various drugs to deal with depression and anxiety. It really makes the western world sound like the stereotypical pill popper. Conversely, the book talks about meditation as an eastern practice as the equivalent coping mechanism. It shows a marked bias toward the culture of meditation rather than medication. It's a strange stance for a textbook to take. There's a huge difference between proper medication usage and over-medication. Meditation is not the end all be all, but it can be useful for some people under normal circumstances. Both are useful, when properly applied. It doesn't have to be a one or another. With all things, there should be a balance.
Emotions are pretty interesting. Chemicals generating positive or negative affect and completely change behavior. Feeling bad about an action decentivizes you from doing it it in the future. Positive feelings provide incentive to do it again. It boils down to biology though there is some argument as far as the cognitive perspective. Since the sum of interactions boil down to an exchange of chemicals and series of chemical reactions, even thought falls into that category.
The debate over the number of emotions is also interesting. If we focus heavily on the biochemical reaction angle, then each different instance of a feeling would be a different emotion. We could divide it up by the parts per million per each hormone generating astronomical numbers of different emotions and that wouldn't be incorrect.
Even when doing that, those combinations would fit into broader categories and in attempting to do that, we would need broader categories to appropriately sort them. Because of this, while nobody is truly wrong in the argument over how many emotions there are, the simplest solution would be the best one. The least amount of categories that accurately portray the majority of human emotion would be the best solution. It kind of becomes a qualitative factoring for the ones that exist in the in between states. Would wrath from the loss of a child fall into the anger of the sadness category? Is it more anger, or more sadness?
Figure 12.11 on page 354 is by far the best diagram in the book that I could find to represent how I think emotions work. It would probably be better represented three dimensionally but as far as putting it down on paper it's pretty good.
The question of whether we can voluntarily control our emotions is also interesting. In my experience, you can't. The only thing you can really control is the behaviors they cause and your reactions to them. If something makes you angry, it makes you angry in that instant and you can't stop that instant from happening, you aren't choosing to be angry. You don't have to express that anger, and you can choose how you express it, or you can choose not to express it. Interestingly enough, as far as the world is concerned, if you're good enough at hiding that emotion to happen, unless you're literally hooked up to a machine at that time that could catch the emotion flashing across your brain, to the world it can be as if it never happened.
Social context changes the expression of emotion. While the components of the emotion tend to be similar, the social context makes all the difference. It affects which ways we think it is appropriate to express the emotion, which naturally affects the way we tend to express the biological process of emotions.
Terms
Emotion
Affect
Mood
Social Context
Chapter 11 addresses five questions in regards to emotion. The first questions asked “what is emotion?” Emotion has four characteristics: feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Emotion is the psychological construct that coordinates these four aspects into a synchronized, adaptive pattern. The second questions asked “what causes an emotion?” According to the biological perspective, emotions arise from bodily influences such as neural pathways in the brains limbic system. According to the cognitive perspective, emotions arise from mental events such as appraisals of the personal meaning of the emotion-causing event. Both biological and cognitive perspectives play important roles in the activation and regulation of emotion. The third questions asked “how many emotions are there?” This depends on the individual’s perspective. For instance, the biological perspective claims human beings possess somewhere between 2 and 10 basic emotions. However, the cognitive perspective suggests that human emotions go far beyond basic emotions. The fourth question asked “what good are emotions?” Our emotions help us adapt to life tasks and also motivate us to accomplish goals. This highlights the fact that emotions serve a purpose. The final question asked “what is the difference between emotion and mood?” According to the text, emotions arise in response to a specific event, motivate specific behaviors, and are short-lived. Moods, however, arise from ill-defined sources, affect cognitive processes, and are long-lived.
Chapter 12 discusses the aspects of emotion. According to the text, three central aspects of emotion exist: biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. The biological aspect of emotion serves as a coping function that allows us to adapt effectively to important life circumstances. Biologically, emotions energize bodily functions by affecting the autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system, mental brain circuits, the rate of neural firing, and facial feedback. The cognitive aspect of emotion can be understood using two types of appraisals: primary and secondary. Primary appraisals evaluate whether or not anything important is at stake in situation (e.g. a goal or your well-being). Secondary appraisals allow us to cope with a potential benefit, harm, or threat. The social-cultural aspect of emotion refers to how we observe other people’s emotions or share our own emotions with those around us. Therefore, other people and cultures instruct us about the causes of our emotions, how we should express our emotions, and when to control our emotions.
The most surprising thing I learned was that emotions and moods arise from different causes. Before reading this section I had always associated emotions with mood and never really thought to separate the two. However, emotions mostly influence behavior and direct specific courses of action and moods mostly influence cognition and direct what we think about. Also, emotions are short-lived events that occur during certain situations, whereas moods are mental events that are long-lived. This is why moods are more enduring than are emotions.
Without emotion there would be no motivation. Our emotions act as motives and fuel our behavior. For instance, when certain situations arise (e.g. your goal is threatened) our emotions take over and allow us to cope with the threat and eventually adapt, which in turn keeps us motivated to accomplish our goal. All in all, our emotions are responsible for causing us to act the way we do in given situations. Therefore, it only makes sense to conclude that our emotions that stem from biological, cognitive, and social-cultural aspects have an impact on our motivation.
Terms: emotion, feeling, arousal, purpose, expression, biological perspective, cognitive perspective basic emotions, mood, social-cultural, brain circuits, neural firing, facial feedback, primary appraisals, secondary appraisals, coping
This section of the textbook we are reading is about emotion. Chapter 11 discusses the five perennial questions about the nature of emotion. One of the five questions asked in this chapter is “What is an emotion” and basically this section discusses how emotion has no permanent definition. Emotions have a four-part character in which they feature feelings, arousal, purpose, and expression. In order to define emotion we have to take these four components of emotion in consideration and study how they interact with one another. The next question is “what causes behavior” this section simply suggests the debate whether emotion is primarily a biological or a cognitive phenomenon. The third question is “How many emotions are there,” six emotions were discussed in depth, fear, anger, distrust, sadness, joy and interest. Depending on which perspective one follow that has an impact on this question. The fourth question is “what good are the emotions,” this section describes how emotions are goal-directed. The fifth question is “what is the difference between emotion and mood” this section happened to be the most surprising to me. The book states that emotions arise in response to a specific event, while mood exist as a positive or negative state. This was most surprising to me because I never really thought of mood and emotion as two different things; I always thought they meant the same thing just a synonym for one another. And that emotion was something you expressed, while mood was something you felt. Like I would express anger and I was in a bad mood. Chapter 12 covers the aspects of emotion. There are three aspects of emotion, biological, cognitive, and social and cultural. Biological aspects of emotion sever coping functions that allow the individual to prepare themselves to adapt to important life events. Cognitive aspects of emotion arise from appraisals and emotions emerge from information processing, social interaction and cultural context. I think that emotions relate to motivation because they are what direct our motivation. The choices we make are influenced by our emotions.
Terms: Emotion, Cognitive, Biological, Social and Cultural, Appraisals, Feelings, Arousal, Purpose, Expression, Goal-directed
Chapter 11 taught us that emotions have a four-parts to them; feeling, arousal, purpose and expression. Feelings give emotions components that have personal meaning. Arousal includes heart rate and other things that make the body able to adapt to coping. Purpose is a goal-directed sense of motivation to take a different course of action. Expression is communicating the emotion to others. Chapter 11 also discussed whether emotion was biologically or cognitively made. Biological theory states that emotions come from bodily things, such as neural pathways in the brain. Cognitive theory states that emotions come from mental events like appraisals of the event. Biological perspective states that people have between 2 and 10 basic emotions. The coginitive perspective says that people have many more than just the basic ten emotions, and there are limitless secondary emotions. Evolutionary theory says that emotions were made a biological reactions to help us successfully complete life tasks. Emotions are different than moods because emotions go from a specific event, and motivate adaptive behaviors and are short lived. Moods are a positive or negative state. Positive affect is everyday, low-level general state of feeling good, while negative affect is the opposite. People who have greater access to happy thoughts typically behave in ways that show an easy access to happy thoughts.
Chapter 12 taught us that the three central aspects of emotion are cognitive, biological and social cultural. Emotions energize and direct actions by affecting the autonomic nervous system and how it regulates our heart, lungs and muscles, our endocrine system with the hormones and glands and organs, the neural brain circuits like the limbic system, the rate of neural firing, and facial feedback and the discrete patterns of facial musculature. Research has identified that ten emotions can be understood from a biological perspective: interest, joy, fear, disgust, distress, contempt, shame, guilt, and surprise. These emotions have a unique, cross-cultural facial expression. The facial feedback hypothesis says that the subjective aspect of emotion is actually the feedback from movements in the face, and can appear weak or strong. Facial management controls emotional experience, as people can increase or decrease their ongoing emotional experience by how they use their facial expressions. There are two types of appraisal cognitively, primary which evaluates whether or not something is at stake in a situation, and secondary which comes after reflection and involves how to cope with benefit or harm. Emotional knowledge is about learning fine distinctions between basic emotions and learning when those emotions occur, for example, being distraught when someone you love passes.
The difference between emotions and mood were the most interesting thing I read about in these chapters to me. I always thought that they were pretty much one and the same. I thought they were fairly interchangeable. But the book says that emotions come from life events, and that moods are not known as far as a source goes. Emotions are not as long lasting as moods, which can last for hours or days. So I can feel sad for a specific moment and that would be an emotion, or sad for a few days, which would be a mood. I didn’t realize that.
Terms: Emotion, facial feedback hypothesis, mood, feeling, arousal, purpose, expression, motivation, adapt, life tasks, biological reaction, positive affect, negative affect, cognitive, biological, social-cultural, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, limbic system, facial management, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, emotional knowledge
Chapter 11 discusses the nature of emotion. Emotion has four important aspects: subjective feeling, bodily arousal, goal-driven purpose, and outward expression. Emotions arise from important life events and they help us adapt to opportunities and challenges we face. Emotions are caused by both cognitive processes and biological processes, though there is some debate as to which is the more primary process. Those that argue that cognition is the primary aspect contend that people cannot respond emotionally unless they first cognitively assess the meaning and personal significance of an event. Without understanding of an event's personal relevance, there is no reason to respond emotionally. Those that argue on the other side, the biological aspect, contend that emotional reactions do not require such cognitive evaluations. Infants lack cognitive processes, yet they respond emotionally to certain events, proving that the biological aspect may be more primary. Emotional experience can be induced by electrical stimulation as well, which also supports the biological side.
Though there is much debate on which emotions are considered to be basic, there seem to be six that are common in all: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. Fear is an emotional reaction that arises from a person's interpretation of a dangerous situation or perceived threat to their well-being. Fear motivates defense and functions as a warming signal for the harm that may come. Anger arises from restraint, such as when our plans, goals, or well-being have been interfered with by an outside force. The essence of anger is the belief that the situation is not what it should be. Disgust involves getting rid of or getting away from a contaminated, deteriorated, or spoiled object. Disgust is aversive, as functions as rejection. Sadness is the most negative emotion and arises from separation or failure. Sadness motivates us to initiate behavior that will alleviate this distress. Desirable outcomes of events produce joy and make us feel enthusiastic, outgoing, and optimistic. We always experience some level of interest, but it increases/decreases and shifts to different events/thoughts/actions. Interest creates the desire to explore the objections around us.
Chapter 12 analyzes emotion from three different perspectives: cognitive, biological, and social-cultural. Biologically, we can look at how our body prepares itself to cope. Our autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, and limbic structures are all activated. The facial feedback hypothesis was also discussed. This says that the subjective aspect of emotions stems from feelings engendered by movements of the facial musculature, changes in facial temperature, and changes in glandular activity in the facial skin. The main part of the cognitive perspective of emotion is appraisal. An appraisal is an estimate of the personal significance of an event. Once an event has been appraised as beneficial or harmful, an experience of liking or disliking (the subjective feeling of emotion) follows immediately. In the social and cultural analysis of emotion, other people are our richest sources of emotional experiences. We can easily experience other people’s emotions through emotion contagion, and we can relive our emotional experiences as we talk about them.
The most surprising thing I learned was how powerfully motivating emotions can be. Some researchers have even argued that emotions constitute the primary motivational system. Silvan Tompkins stated that physiological drives produce emotions, and it is the emotion that causes the motivated action. For example, when we experience deprivation of air, a physiological drive is generated as we learned about in chapter 4. However, Tompkins argues that the loss of air produces strong emotional reactions of fear and terror. It is this emotional reaction that causes the motivated action to get the air that is lacking. This surprises me because it basically contradicts all of chapter 4.
Emotions relate to motivation in two ways. Emotions are motives; they energize and direct behavior to achieve a goal. Emotions also serve as a read-out for our ever-changing motivational states and personal adaptation status. They reflect the satisfied vs. frustrated status of other our other motives. Positive emotions signal that all is well, and negative emotions send a warning signal that all is not well.
Terms: emotion, feelings, bodily arousal, goal-driven purpose, expression, motives, read-outs, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, facial feedback hypothesis, facial musculature, appraisal, emotion contagion, physiological drive
Chapter 11 covers what emotion is all about, there are five questions often associated with understand emotion and those five questions are as follows. 1. What is emotion; emotions consist of 4 dimensions of feelings (personal meaning), arousal (biological), purpose (goals) and expression (communication). Along with all four of these dimensions, emotions seem to be the glue that holds them all together. The second question looks at the aspect of what causes our emotions and if these emotions are biological or cognitive. The biological perspective our emotions come from within our brain and the limbic systems. The cognitive perspective comes from events in our lives. The third question looks at how many emotions there are, and that really the answer to that question is based on individual perspectives. Again the biological and cognitive perspectives have different opinions; biological says humans possess 2-10 different emotions whereas t cognitive side says humans have a much more emotion then what we can believe there to actually be and that through personal experiences we gain more emotions throughout our lifetime. The fourth question asks what good are our emotions, do they serve a purpose and what purpose might that be. Emotions can be seen as something that we have adapted throughout life tasks. This emotion, during an important life task, serves as a goal-directed purpose with coping and social purposes. The main point here is that our emotions can serve us well and poorly based on if we experience regulation of emotion rather than regulation by emotion. The last question is what is the difference between emotion and mood, given a certain event we can expect it to draw out a particular emotion. Emotions come from a specific event and are short-live. Whereas moods come from ill-defined sources and are long-lived. Moods are positive or negative feelings. Positive effects are those that are every day, low-level good feeling.
Chapter 12 looks at the three aspects of emotion which are 1. Biological 2. Cognitive 3. Social-cultural. The chapter makes the point that emotions aren’t only cognitive but also biological because emotions are reactions to important life events and they produce coping functions that allow an individual to adapt to important life events. Emotions energize and direct bodily actions by affecting 5 parts; The autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits and limbic system, pace of information processing and facial feedback. The facial feedback hypothesis says that the subjective aspect of emotion is actually the awareness of proprioceptive feedback from facial action. The chapter then continues on to the central construct in a cognitive understanding of emotion which is appraisal. There are two types of appraisal, primary and secondary that regulate the emotion process. Primary evaluates whether or not anything important is at stake in a situation, secondary occurs after some reflection and revolves around an assessment of how to cope with a potential benefit, harm or threat. The chapter then continues that emotions can in fact be very social, and that you can catch other people’s emotions through emotion contagion involving mimicry, feedback, and contagion.
The most surprising thing I learned was just that, the fact that in a social situation we can actually “catch” other people’s emotions, I feel as if this is almost a natural thing and something that we aren’t necessarily aware of that we are doing. If you sit back and think about certain situations, and on a personal level, if someone around me is crying then I often to will start crying or have the urge to cry with them and sometimes you’ll even look at each other and be like; “why are you crying” and then both start laughing. This is considered to be emotional mimicry. I just found this interesting because I’ve noticed this a lot with myself and other people; it doesn’t even have to be the emotion of crying but other emotions. Have you ever been around someone who was in a bad mood, and then you realize you’re in a bad mood; for no reason and then you get even more pissed off because you don’t know why.
Emotions can motivate us biologically and cognitively, when emotions ( anger and fear) change our bodies (heart rate, pulse) it motivates us to react in ways our body is telling us to react. If our heart rate increases from a negative emotion it may cause us to get angry (this is arousal). Emotions can create these physiological reactions which may make us want to change how we are feeling. Emotions motivate us to want to change the situation if it is negative, we don’t want to be unhappy or angry. If we are feeling happy or excited, our emotions make us want to behave in a certain way, like smiling at a complete stranger, meaning different aspects of emotion create motivation in our everyday lives.
Terms: feelings, arousal, purpose, expression, five questions, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, mood, short and long lived, positive effects, biological, cognitive, social-cultural, facial feedback hypothesis, appraisal, primary, secondary, emotion contagion Emotional mimcry
Chapter 11 goes into what emotion really is and how it has 4parts, dimensions of feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. It also discusses the things that cause emotion to occur. The biological perspective says that emotions arise from bodily influences such as neural pathways to the brains limbic system. If you look at the cognitive perspective, emotions arise from mental events such as appraisals. Whatever causes the emotion we know that there are 2 to 10 basic ones that we can experience. These emotions aren’t for nothing, each one serves a purpose. Without emotions we wouldn’t be able to relay messages in social environments or react to threats in a successful manner. The end of the chapter talks about the difference between emotion and mood. Emotion are brought out in response to an event, mood is long lived and from ill-defined sources.
Chapter 12 discusses the aspects of emotion and how there are three of them, biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. The biological aspect helps individuals adapt efficiently to life circumstances. This chapter also discusses the 2 to 10 basic emotions and how 10 of them have cross cultural facial expressions in which we can identify what emotion they are relaying. It talks about the facial feedback hypothesis in which it reveals itself in two forms, weak and strong. Strong consists of frowning meaning your said and weak is an exaggerated, augmented, natural occurring emotion. The cognitive aspect of emotion is appraisal. It determines whether your self-esteem, well-being, financial state, respect, etc. is at risk in a situation. The social cultural aspect of emotion implies we catch others emotions. This could happen through feedback, mimicry, and given enough time, contagion. You essentially learn the emotions from the culture you are in.
What was surprising to me is how we can catch each other’s emotions. I thought of it like a cold, if somebody has it and their around you enough you’re going to catch it. It was also interesting to me how some cultures expressions can differ from ours for certain emotions. This can be bad since we could misinterpret something and do something wrong. Whether we interpret something wrong or right, we are still motivated to act on it as well as express our own emotions to it. Motivation plays a key part in this scheme considering it is the underlining force that allows us to express ourselves through emotion.
Terms: motivation, expression, biological, cognitive, social-cultural, feeling, arousal, limbic system, neural pathways, self-esteem, appraisal, mood
Chapters 11 and 12 are all about emotion. There are five big questions that chapter 11 addresses about emotion, which are: (1) What is an emotion?, (2) What causes an emotion?, (3) How many emotions are there?, (4) What good are the emotions?, and (5) What is the difference between emotion and mood? Each of these questions is answered in the text. The first question asks what emotion is. Emotions have four parts, which are feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Feelings give emotions the subjective component that has personal meaning. Arousal is the biological activity that prepares the body for adaptive coping behavior. Purpose gives emotion a goal-oriented sense of motivation. Finally, the social component of emotion is the communicative effect. Emotion coordinates all four of these aspects into a synchronized pattern. The second question asks what are the causes of emotion. There is a debate whether emotion is cognitive or biological. Neither is the right answer, because both cognition and biology play a role in emotion. There are two ways that researchers have identified ways that biology and cognition cause emotion. The first way is that there are two parallel emotion systems, an innate, spontaneous, and primitive biological emotion system and an acquired, interpretive, and social-cognitive emotion system. The second says that emotions occur as a dynamic process rather than a linear output. The third question asks how many emotions there are. This answer all depends on your perspective. The biological perspective says that humans have somewhere between 2 and 10 basic emotions. Cognitive perspective says that emotions are more diverse. The most common human emotions are fear, anger, distrust, sadness, joy, and interest. The fourth question asks what good are emotions. Emotions serve a purpose. Emotions evolved as a biological reaction that help us adapt to our fundamental life tasks. The final question is what id the difference between emotion and mood. Emotions arise in response to specific events, motivate adaptive behaviors, and are short-lived. Mood arise from ill-defined sources, affect cognitive processes, and are long-lived.
Chapter 12 was about three central aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. The biological research has identified that the activation and maintenance of about 10 different emotions can be understood from a biological perspective. These are fear, interest, joy, anger, disgust, distress, contempt, shame, guilt, and surprise. Cognitive understanding of emotion has a central construct of appraisal. There are two types of appraisal, primary and secondary. Primary appraisal evaluates whether or not there is anything important at stake in a situation. Secondary appraisal occurs after some reflection. The social and cultural idea of emotion says that other people are our best source of emotional experiences. Other people and cultures instruct us about the causes of our own emotions.
Emotion relates to motivation in two different ways. The first thing is that emotions are one type of motive. This means that emotions energize and direct behavior. Emotions constitute the primary motivational system. When you take away emotion, you can take away motivation. The second thing is that emotions serve as a readout system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going. Positive emotions signal that everything is going well, reflect the involvement and satisfaction of our motivational states, and are evidence of our successful adaptation to what is going on around us. Negative emotions act as warning signals, telling us that not everything is going well. They also reflect the neglect and frustration of our motivational states, and are evidence of our unsuccessful adaptation to what is going on around us.
Terms: emotion, arousal, feeling, purpose, expression, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, appraisal, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, social-cultural perspective
Both chapters 11 and 12 discussed the general topic of emotions. Chapter 11 examined five perennial questions pertaining to emotion that have been debated for years. These questions are as follows: 1) what is an emotion? 2) What causes an emotion 3) how many emotions are there? 4) What good are emotions? 5) What is the difference between emotion and mood? These are all questions that, on the surface, seem pretty simple to answer but, in reality, they are nearly impossible to answer. The first question is the most general and there is not quality answer for it. To come up with a sufficient definition of emotion is almost a hindrance because it almost certainly will leave out an important aspect of emotion. The book states emotions are short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. This definition is about as good as one could hope to get while keeping it short and focused. Emotions aren’t just the four previously mentioned concepts combined, but they interact heavily as well. This interaction creates motivation to accomplish goals and also broadcasts how well or how poorly one is doing (aka a readout system). Motivation does not occur without emotion. The cause of this emotion is the subject to much debate. There are two main schools of thought: the cognitive perspective and the biological perspective. The latter group says emotions happen automatically and the former group argues one must realize what just happened and only after that realization can one experience emotion. Both sides present evidence and logical arguments to support their respective sides and it is most likely a combination of both sides of the argument. Some even argue there are specific emotions that are innate and specific emotions that are learned. There are seemingly infinite opinions about the number of emotions humans are able to experience. The biological perspective argues that anywhere from two to ten emotions can be experienced by humans. They do not think the learned emotions are as important, unlike champions of the cognitive perspective. The cognitive group argues that the learned emotions are just as significant as the emotions that the biological camp calls innate emotions. The cognitive perspective says there is almost an infinite amount of emotions because, since the emotions are learned, they all differ slightly depending on the situation.
Emotions are often not pleasant, so why do we experience them? One reason humans experience emotion is as a coping function when faced with threatening or challenging situations. The emotions that help us cope do so by motivating us to flee the situation or fight back (fight or flight). Even though being angry or sad is not pleasant, it assists in dealing with situations and determines what behavior one is preparing to take part in. They also serve social functions in letting other individuals how one is feeling. People alter their behavior based on social cues found in others’ facial expressions. Emotion is a reaction to everyday, identifiable events while moods’ sources are not clearly identifiable.
One thing that surprised me was the fact that people who express anger get more respect and status when compared to people who express guilt following a mistake. To me, the angry people seem hostile and lacking competence while the guilty person appears to be remorseful and regret that they didn’t do better
Chapter 12 had much of the same information as chapter 11 had but it focused on three main aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. . Biological aspects of emotion include the autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing, and facial feedback. These five aspects are activated when one is faced with a situation that requires coping of some kind. These systems are required to be activated to experience emotion. The James-Lange theory is a biological theory that was found to be incorrect that stated we experience emotion and feel it shortly after. Another thought, the facial feedback hypothesis, is that a person can change their emotion based on the feedback their facial muscles are giving them. In the cognitive section, appraisal was a big concept that describes the estimate of how much one has at stake in the given situation. As discussed before, emotions allow us to communicate non-verbally which is very important socially.
Terms: cognitive perspective, biological perspective, emotion, motivation, readout system, innate emotions, anger, sadness, competence, autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing, and facial feedback, appraisal
Chapter 11 focused on what is emotion, what causes an emotion, how many emotions are there, and what good are emotions. This chapter is important because we all feel several different emotions every day. I always thought emotions were a simpler concept than they actually are. Emotions are multidimensional and they exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena. They are subjective feelings that make us feel a certain way, for example happy, sad, or angry. There are four components of emotion; feeling, bodily arousal, purposive component, and social expressive. Feelings are involved in cognition, subjective experience, and phenomenological awareness. So basically feelings help our experience have meaning and significance. For example feeling happy during a specific event allows for us to feel like the experience was meaningful. The bodily arousal component involves motor responses, bodily preparation for action, and physiological activation. When we become emotionally involved in an experience our body prepare us for what is to come. The purposive component helps us direct our goal motivational state, it is the functional aspect. This explains why people want to do what they do and why people benefit from their emotions. The last of the four is social-expressive component; which is facial expressions, vocal expressions, and social communication.
The overall definition of an emotion is, short lived feeling arousal purposive expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. Emotions relate to motivation in two ways; they are one type of motive and they serve as an ongoing system to indicate how well or poorly personal adaptation is going. It becomes challenging why trying to decide what causes emotion. There is a debate on if it is biology or cognition. If emotions are biological they should emanate from a causal biological core, such as brain circuits. However if they are cognitive they should emanate from causal mental events, such as subjective appraisals of what the situation means.
Basic emotions are at a more general level and they meet the following four criteria. They are innate or learned through experience, they arise from the same circumstances for all people; they are expressed uniquely and distinctively, and lastly evoke a distinctive and highly predictable physiological patterned response. The six basic emotions are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. We all experience these emotions at different times and for different reasons. So why do we have emotions? Emotions serve as coping and social functions. The coping function of emotion occurs because they help direct a task as well as direct behavior in an adaptive way. While the social aspect is used through expressions whether they are verbal or nonverbal. This allows us to communicate how we feel to others directly or indirectly.
In chapter 12 we looked at different aspects of emotion such as, biological, cognitive, and social. This is important because we need to be able to understand emotion though different aspects of life. The biological aspect is very important because it prepare the body for what is to come, such as a negative event that will cause a sad feeling. The body will prepare itself to cope with any situation. During this process the heart, lungs, muscles, glands, hormones, and limbic structures all prepare for and emotional event.
The James-Lange theory is based on two assumptions; the body reacts uniquely to different emotion events, and the body does not react to non-emotional events. The main idea of his theory is that is bodily changes did not occur then the future emotion would not occur. The differential emotions theory focuses on emotions that serve as unique or different motivational purposes. It states that ten discrete emotions act as motivation systems that prepare the individual for acting in adaptive ways.
The central aspect of the cognitive side of emotions is appraisal. An appraisal is an estimate of the personal significance of an event. For example if a person I do not know is approaching me I begin to decide if this experience will be good or bad, I basically decide if I need to prepare myself for a negative or positive emotion. A primary appraisal involves an estimate of whether on has anything at stake in the encounter. These are at stake during this time health, self-esteem, goal, financial state, respect, and well-being. While a secondary appraisal occurs after some reflection occurs this involves an assessment for coping with possible benefit, harm, or threat.
The social and cultural aspects of emotion contribute to how we view emotions. We basically have a way to socially construct emotions based on our experiences by selection that we interact with. Emotion socialization occurs when adults tell children what they should know about emotion. This allows children to know and understand how to act in particular situations. Also different societies socialize their children’s emotions different through several general ways of socialization that occur every day.
The surprising aspect to me was the idea of how complex emotions are. It was interesting to read how they are involved in so many of our day to day activities and interactions. As well as how they function within us in terms of biological and cognitive strategies. These two chapters relate to motivation because how we feel and how we prepare ourselves for different situations impacts what we do and how we are motivated to do something. Our emotions impact what we decide to do in a particular situation. They motivate us to cope with a negative or positive experience. Overall these two chapters were very interesting because our emotions impact every aspect of our lives as well as our decisions.
Terms: emotion, feeling, bodily arousal, purposive component, social expressive, motive, biological, cognition, basic emotions, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, coping functions, social functions, biological aspect, James-Lange theory, differential emotions theory, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, social & cultural aspects, social interaction, socialization.
According to the book emotion is a short lived feeling of arousal, purpose, expressive phenomena to help us adapt to opportunities and challenges we face during life events.
Chapter 11 is about emotion. It talks about the different aspects of emotion. There are four different aspects: feeling, arousal, purpose and expression. Feelings give emotions a subjective component that has personal meaning. Arousal includes biological activity such as heart rate that prepares the body for adaptive coping behavior. Purpose gives emotion a goal- directed sense of motivation for a specific course of action that may be needed. Expression is the social component and relates to communication.
There is a debate between biology and cognitive and what causes emotions. The biological perspective states that emotions are innate while cognitive perspective states that they are learned through socialization. Because of the on-going debate it is impossible to determine the number of emotions that exist.
The biological perspective argues that there are six basic emotions: fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy and interest. The cognitive perspective argues that there are unlimited learned emotions. Emotions play an important factor in our lives regardless to what side we take on the issue. They help us communicate with others as well as cope with life tasks.
Chapter 12 talks about three central aspects of emotion. These are biological, cognitive, and social cultural. When dealing with the biological aspect, emotions direct actions by affecting the nervous system, the endocrine system, neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing and facial feedback. The cognitive aspect deals with emotion as an appraisal. And lastly, social cultural deals with the social aspects of the culture around us. (Others are our richest source of emotional experiences).
The most interesting thing I learned was that if one were to be in a happy state and to smile, they would then be even happier. I found it surprising that one little facial expression could promote feelings. I found it interesting because everyone always tells me I look mad. This is something I need to start incorporating into my daily life.
Emotions relate to motivation because emotions are a type of motive. Emotions energize and direct behavior. Another way they relate is because emotions serve as an output system to indicate how well or how poorly something is going. Emotions act as a primary motivator.
Terms used: motivator, emotions, facial expression, biological, cognitive, feeling, social-cultural
Chapter 11 focused on what is emotion, what causes an emotion, how many emotions are there, and what good are emotions. This chapter is important because we all feel several different emotions every day. I always thought emotions were a simpler concept than they actually are. Emotions are multidimensional and they exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena. They are subjective feelings that make us feel a certain way, for example happy, sad, or angry. There are four components of emotion; feeling, bodily arousal, purposive component, and social expressive. Feelings are involved in cognition, subjective experience, and phenomenological awareness. So basically feelings help our experience have meaning and significance. For example feeling happy during a specific event allows for us to feel like the experience was meaningful. The bodily arousal component involves motor responses, bodily preparation for action, and physiological activation. When we become emotionally involved in an experience our body prepare us for what is to come. The purposive component helps us direct our goal motivational state, it is the functional aspect. This explains why people want to do what they do and why people benefit from their emotions. The last of the four is social-expressive component; which is facial expressions, vocal expressions, and social communication.
The overall definition of an emotion is, short lived feeling arousal purposive expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. Emotions relate to motivation in two ways; they are one type of motive and they serve as an ongoing system to indicate how well or poorly personal adaptation is going. It becomes challenging why trying to decide what causes emotion. There is a debate on if it is biology or cognition. If emotions are biological they should emanate from a causal biological core, such as brain circuits. However if they are cognitive they should emanate from causal mental events, such as subjective appraisals of what the situation means.
Basic emotions are at a more general level and they meet the following four criteria. They are innate or learned through experience, they arise from the same circumstances for all people; they are expressed uniquely and distinctively, and lastly evoke a distinctive and highly predictable physiological patterned response. The six basic emotions are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, and interest. We all experience these emotions at different times and for different reasons. So why do we have emotions? Emotions serve as coping and social functions. The coping function of emotion occurs because they help direct a task as well as direct behavior in an adaptive way. While the social aspect is used through expressions whether they are verbal or nonverbal. This allows us to communicate how we feel to others directly or indirectly.
In chapter 12 we looked at different aspects of emotion such as, biological, cognitive, and social. This is important because we need to be able to understand emotion though different aspects of life. The biological aspect is very important because it prepare the body for what is to come, such as a negative event that will cause a sad feeling. The body will prepare itself to cope with any situation. During this process the heart, lungs, muscles, glands, hormones, and limbic structures all prepare for and emotional event.
The James-Lange theory is based on two assumptions; the body reacts uniquely to different emotion events, and the body does not react to non-emotional events. The main idea of his theory is that is bodily changes did not occur then the future emotion would not occur. The differential emotions theory focuses on emotions that serve as unique or different motivational purposes. It states that ten discrete emotions act as motivation systems that prepare the individual for acting in adaptive ways.
The central aspect of the cognitive side of emotions is appraisal. An appraisal is an estimate of the personal significance of an event. For example if a person I do not know is approaching me I begin to decide if this experience will be good or bad, I basically decide if I need to prepare myself for a negative or positive emotion. A primary appraisal involves an estimate of whether on has anything at stake in the encounter. These are at stake during this time health, self-esteem, goal, financial state, respect, and well-being. While a secondary appraisal occurs after some reflection occurs this involves an assessment for coping with possible benefit, harm, or threat.
The social and cultural aspects of emotion contribute to how we view emotions. We basically have a way to socially construct emotions based on our experiences by selection that we interact with. Emotion socialization occurs when adults tell children what they should know about emotion. This allows children to know and understand how to act in particular situations. Also different societies socialize their children’s emotions different through several general ways of socialization that occur every day.
The surprising aspect to me was the idea of how complex emotions are. It was interesting to read how they are involved in so many of our day to day activities and interactions. As well as how they function within us in terms of biological and cognitive strategies. These two chapters relate to motivation because how we feel and how we prepare ourselves for different situations impacts what we do and how we are motivated to do something. Our emotions impact what we decide to do in a particular situation. They motivate us to cope with a negative or positive experience. Overall these two chapters were very interesting because our emotions impact every aspect of our lives as well as our decisions.
Terms: emotion, feeling, bodily arousal, purposive component, social expressive, motive, biological, cognition, basic emotions, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, coping functions, social functions, biological aspect, James-Lange theory, differential emotions theory, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, social & cultural aspects, social interaction, socialization.
Chapter 11 was all about emotions and what they are. Emotions have 4 parts. The first part is feelings, which give emotions personal meaning, or subjectivity. The second part is arousal, which is a set of biological actions that prepare the body for behavior that reacts to the given situation. Increased breathing and heart rate are a good example of biological arousal. The third part is purpose, which gives emotions a motivational aspect and pushes us towards a specific course of action. The fourth part is social, which means we use emotions to communicate with each other through means such as facial expression, which can communicate a wide range of emotions to others. Biological psychologists believe that emotions rise from the limbic system, a set of primitive brain structures in the center of the brain. Cognitive psychologists believe that emotion arises from mental events, such as how a person perceives an emotion-causing situation. There is a lot of debate about how many emotions there really are, but there are 6 primary emotions that everyone can agree on: fear, sadness, joy, interest, and disgust. However, it is believed that many secondary emotions can be acquired through observation of others and personal experience. Mood is slightly different from emotion, in that emotions are responses to specific events in a person's life, such as a threat or something happy, and are typically short in duration. Moods are long-lasting, and can affect cognitive and social processes depending on whether the individual's mood is positive or negative. For example, a positive affective mood can give a boost to socialization, cooperation, creativity, and easier access to mood-boosting thoughts and memories, which can keep the good mood going.
Chapter 12 is about the aspects of emotion, of which there are three: biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. The biological aspect is very important because emotions are biological reactions to external stimuli, and they allow us to adapt to those external stimuli effectively. Facial expressions allow us to interact with the outside world, but according to facial feedback theory, our expressions can also affect our emotions. Facial expressions can moderate our emotional experience, and those emotional experiences can be intensified or reduced by suppressing or exaggerating their facial expressions. The most important concept to know about the cognitive aspect of emotion is appraisal, of which there are two parts: primary and secondary. Primary appraisal helps us decide if anything important is at risk in the current situation. This could include health, a goal, a loved one, or anything else the person feels is important. Secondary appraisal occurs after the initial reaction to a situation and involves the person reflecting on how they should react to a potential threat, benefit, or something else. Emotional knowledge is also tied into cognition, and involves learning distinctions between emotions and what situations cause what emotion. The social aspect of emotion involves interacting with others through a process of mimicking them, giving them feedback, and eventually contagion, which means you have caused others to feel the emotion you do. The social aspect of emotion is important because it teaches us about emotion knowledge (the causes of our emotions), expression management (how we should express our emotions), and emotion management (when to control our emotions).
I would say that the most surprising thing I learned was that facial expressions can actually change your mood, such as smiling and becoming happy. It is really interesting how our biology is all tied together, and how something that is supposed to be a result of emotions can actually cause them. Emotions are very important for motivation, as a negative affective state can be a huge motivator to change. Emotions can also provide energy behind our actions, such as anger providing the motivation to punch someone in the face.]
Terms: Feelings, Arousal, Purpose, Limbic system, Facial feedback theory, Primary appraisal, Secondary appraisal, Emotional knowledge, Contagion, Expression management, Emotion management.
Chapter 11 and 12
Chapter eleven first started talking about how people who practice meditation turn their negative emotions into positive ones. Also, anger can be focused into compassion and resentment can be turned into love. Emotions are reactions to important life events. When emotions are present, they will generate feelings, arouse the body to act, motivate, and cause facial expressions. Emotions are very complex. Emotions are more than feelings. They exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and social phenomena. Emotions make us feel a particular way, create energy-mobilizing responses for adapting to environments. There is purpose to emotions. Emotions are also social phenomena’s. There are four dimensions of emotion mentioned in the book and they all interact with one another. The four dimensions of emotion are feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, and social-expressions. The feelings dimension of emotion is rooted in the cognitive and mental processes. The bodily arousal demotion of emotion includes our neural or autonomic activation and our physiological or hormonal activation. The purposive dimension of emotion is goal-directed and takes the necessary actions to cope with circumstances in the environments. The social-expression dimensions of emotion maker our private experiences public through posture, gestures, vocalization, and facial expressions. The book gives a definition of emotion which says that emotions are short lived, feeling arousal, purposive, expressed phenomena that helps us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. The chapter also talks about the relationship between emotion and motivation. These two relate in two ways. One, emotions are one type of motive in that emotions energize an direct behaviors. Second, emotions serve as an ongoing system to indicate how well and not well personal adaptions are going. Emotions read out motivational states and personal adaptions. Cognitive and biological perspectives provide comprehensive pictures of the emotional processes. The chapter also talks about how even as babies we show emotion to many different stimuli. I thought it was surprising how the answer to “how many emotions is there?”, depends on whether one favors a biological orientation or a cognitive orientation. I also thought it was interesting how biologically there can be about ten emotions and if you look at it from a cognitive aspect, there can be a limitless amount of emotions. The chapter then talks about the basic emotions which are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, acceptance, anticipation, and surprise. Some emotions serve social functions such as, communicating out feelings to others, how others interact with us, how we invite and facilitate social interactions, and how we create and maintain relationships.
Chapter twelve first started by talking about the biological aspects of emotion and how they are important in life events. In an event, emotions will activate the heart, lungs, muscles, glands, hormones, brain structures, and direct patterns of the facial musculature. The chapter then went on to talk about how there are emotion-specific patterns in brain activity. It said that the amygdala generates negative emotions such as anger, fear, and anxiety. The left prefrontal cortex generates joy and positive feelings. The right prefrontal cortex generates fear. The activation of emotions in the brain causes it to fire at different rates. Silvan Tomkins said there are three different patterns of neural firing: it increases, it decreases, or the activity remains constant. The chapter then talked about the different theory’s and facial feedback. It said that facial feedback is the subjective aspect of emotion and stems from feelings engendered by movements of the facial muscles, changes in facial temperature, and changes in glandular activity in the facial skin. It then talked about how they tested these theories. I just want to say that the faces they used in the book to show different facial emotions were scary. The chapter then talked about cognitive aspects of emotion. The biggest part of this section was on appraisal. An appraisal is an estimate of the personal significance of an event. It then talked about complex and primary appraisals, secondary appraisals and the process of appraisals. This part of the chapter was somewhat confusing. It said that cognitive theorists believe each emotion can be described by a unique pattern of compound appraisals. A compound appraisal consists of interpreting multiple meanings within the environmental events, such that an event might be both pleasant and caused by the self. I didn’t get how to fully understand the 12.10 figure. The chapter talked about social interactions and how we experience a greater number of emotions when we interact with others then when we do alone. Emotional socialization occurs when adults tell children what they ought to know about emotions. This can very over cultures on how parents express emotions to children and how to manage emotions.
Terms: Emotions, feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, social-expressions, Cognitive and biological perspectives, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, acceptance, anticipation, and surprise, facial feedback, appraisal, primary and secondary appraisal and complex appraisals.
Chapter 11 discusses emotions specifically and identifies the four main components of emotions, which are sense of purpose, feelings, bodily arousal, and social-expressive. These all make perfect sense to me and when I think about an emotion I may have all of these components would certainly take place or be activated. This chapter also focuses on basic questions about emotions, such as what is an emotion, what causes emotions, how many emotions are there, what good are the emotions, and what is the difference between emotion and mood? It is interesting to think that we only have between 2 and 10 basic emotions, I feel like I probably go through all 10 every single day (hah). Chapter 12 discusses that emotions exist within biological, socio-cultural, and cognitive roles. The biological roles deal with activation our autonomic nervous system, the endocrine system, neural brain circuits, and the rate of our neurons firing. Once we get into the biology of our emotions is when I definitely begin to get lost, so I am hoping that this can be discussed in more detail in class. I think one of the most interesting parts from the chapter is learning how we use our emotions in a socio-cultural context. We share emotions with others through conversations and experiences. The idea that we pick up emotions from others is very interesting to me, considering that we must do it a lot of times without even realizing it. I think that the most interesting thing I learned between the two chapters was learning why we have emotions. The idea that they exist just because life throws things at us that are sometimes difficult to deal with is kind of hard for me to grasp. I wish there was more research being done on love. I can understand why that emotion would exist (to find a partner), but many years ago that wasn’t even the tool humans used to look for partners.
I think there are so many ways in which these two chapters deal with motivation. Emotions are in most cases one of the main things motivating and driving people to do anything. The motivation to lose weight is often caused by an emotion of not being happy with yourself, and so you strive to lose weight so you can feel the positive emotions that come with being healthy and looking good. It is hard to believe we only have a limited amount of emotions considering all of the crazy situations and events that take place in a person’s life. It would be fun to learn more about other cultures and see what emotions they might not have, and see if they possess any emotions that we don’t really use in our culture.
Chapters 11 and 12 are basically covering all aspects of emotion. Chapter 11 is asking five big questions about emotion, which are: what is an emotion?, what causes an emotion?, how many emotions are there?, what good are the emotions?, and what is the difference between emotion and mood? Chapter 11 answers all of these questions. Emotions have four parts, which are feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Feelings give emotions the subjective component that has personal meaning. Arousal is the biological activity that prepares our bodies for adaptive coping behavior. Purpose gives emotion a goal-oriented sense of motivation. Finally, the social component of emotion is the communicative effect. Emotion brings each of these parts together. This is an interesting question because it shows us how emotion can just be defined by a textbook definition. The second question asks what are the causes of emotion. The texts argues whether emotion is cognitive or biological. However, there is no set answer because emotion comes from both a cognitive perspective and a biological perspective. There are two ways that people researching emotion have identified ways that biology and cognition cause emotion. The first is that there are two parallel emotion systems, an innate, spontaneous, and primitive biological emotion system and an acquired, interpretive, and social-cognitive emotion system. The second says that emotions occur as a dynamic process rather than a linear output. The third question asks how many emotions there actually are. I would say that there are an unlimited number of emotions. If you think about it, you can be feeling a number of different emotions at any given time. However, according to the book, the answer to that question depends on your perspective. The biological perspective says that humans have somewhere between 2 and 10 basic emotions. The cognitive perspective says that emotions are more diverse. The most common human emotions are fear, anger, distrust, sadness, joy, and interest. I guess that makes sense. All of our emotions have underlying basic emotions that they can be pinpointed to. The fourth question asks what good are emotions. Emotions do serve a purpose. Emotions evolved as a biological reaction that help us adapt to our fundamental life tasks. The final question is what is the difference between emotion and mood. Emotions arise in response to specific events, motivate adaptive behaviors, and are short-lived. Moods come from ill-defined sources, affect cognitive processes, and are long-lived. Chapter 12 was about three central aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. The biological research has identified that the activation and maintenance of about 10 different emotions can be understood from a biological perspective. These are fear, interest, joy, anger, disgust, distress, contempt, shame, guilt, and surprise. Cognitive understanding of emotion has a central construct of appraisal. There are two types of appraisal, primary and secondary. Primary appraisal evaluates whether or not there is anything important at stake in a situation. Secondary appraisal occurs after reflection. The social and cultural idea of emotion says that other people are our best source of emotional experiences. Other people and cultures instruct us about the causes of our own emotions. Chapter 12 also had different theories about emotion, such as the James-Lange Theory, which says that we experience emotion and the felt emotion is quickly followed by a bodily change. There is also the differential emotions theory, which says that emotion serve different motivational purposes.
Emotion relates to motivation in various ways. The first thing is that emotions are one type of motive. This means that emotions energize and direct behavior, which we have discussed in class. Emotions constitute the primary motivational system. When you take away emotion, you take away motivation. The second thing is that emotions serve as a readout system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going. Positive emotions show that things are going well, Negative emotions act as warning signals, telling us that not everything is going well.
Terms: emotion, arousal, feeling, purpose, expression, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, appraisal, primary appraisal, secondary appraisal, social-cultural perspective, james-lange theory, differential emotions theory.
Let me just start by stating that that picture for this post is absolutely terrifying.
Chapter 11: The focus in this chapter was trying to understand what emotions are and where they come from. An emotion is made up of 4 different characteristics: feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose and social expressive. Feelings are made up of subjective experience and cognitions that are related to the emotion experienced itself. Bodily arousal is the body preparation for the action and the body reaction to the experienced emotion. Sense of purpose is the goal directed motivational state and has to do with motivating adaptive behaviors. Social expressive is the way we express the emotion being felt. An emotion is a fleeting and short lived feeling-arousal-expressive-psychological state that helps motivate adaptive behaviors according to specific, significant life events. Emotion leads to behavior because the emotion motivates behavior. Good emotions motivate us to experience life events that cause good emotions where as negative emotions motivate us to experience these life events less. Some argue that if you take away the emotion then you lose the motivation for the behavior. I’m not completely sold on this idea as it feels too black and white for a subject (emotions) that is definitely not black and white and is more complex..maybe rainbow colored is the best way to look at it.
Chapter 12: The focus in this chapter was trying to understand the relationship of emotion with motivation and behavior. The facial feedback hypothesis suggests that one’s facial expressions can have an effect on that emotional experience. Therefore, the facial expressions expressed can help nurture the emotion being felt, ultimately affecting our behavior. This relationship can be best viewed by the differential emotions theory. The differential emotions theory suggests that every emotion is unique with its own unique expression. These emotions are split up in to sub groups of positive, neutral and negative emotions. These emotions act to motivate the individual in adaptive ways; therefore, emotions motivate the behavior of the person. In summary, a person’s facial expression can affect the emotion itself, and in doing so, can affect the adaptive behaviors being motivated by the emotion being felt. The ability to read other’s expressions is something we do naturally. We have a natural tendency to imitate the facial expressions, vocal expressions and postures of others around them. Emotional mimicry is one of the ways we communicate and relate to one another. In doing the practice demo, I wondered if one could then control our emotions, or at least our expressions. Emotions involve four aspects: feelings, arousal, purpose and expression. All four have a hand in the emotion being felt and all four have an effect on each other. The book argues that if emotions are biological in nature then we will not be able to control it but if emotions are cognitive in nature then we should be able to control it. I argue that emotions are both biological and cognitive in nature and different emotions lean more towards the biological and some lean more towards the cognitive. The cognitive aspects of emotion have to deal with appraisal and attribution. Attribution has to do with the assumption that people want to explain why they experienced a particular life outcome. An example of a life outcome would be ‘why did I flunk out of school?’. In understanding why, it leads the individual to be motivated towards particular behaviors. Good outcomes leave them feeling happy so they try to replicate it, bad outcomes leave negative feelings and lead to avoidance of the associations leading to that outcome.
There wasn’t very much new information that I learned from these 2 chapters. I have a huge interest in emotions and am currently doing an honors thesis on the effects of personality on emotions. However, even though most of it was refresher, I still find it fascinating and found myself pouring over some of my notes from articles I had researched for my project and leading to new articles I hadn’t looked at. Instead of learning new things from the book, it motivated me to look up articles and subjects and acted as a ‘wetting of the appetite’ for me.
TERMS: feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, social expressive, facial feedback hypothesis, differential emotions theory, emotion, motivation, adaptive behavior, emotional mimicry, feelings, arousal, purpose, expression, biological, cognitive, appraisal, social interaction, appraisal, attribution
In chapter 11 and 12, we begin to talk about emotion. Chapter 11 discusses the five main questions about emotion: What is emotion? What causes emotion? How many emotions are there? What good are the emotions? and What is the difference between emotion and mood. "What is emotion?" Emotions have a four-part character in that they have feeling, arousal, purpose, and expression. Feelings give emotions subjective and personal meaning. Arousal is the biological activity (such as heart rate). Purpose gives the emotion a goal-directed sense of motivation. Expression is the social component. It communicates what emotion you are experiencing.
"What causes an emotion?" The question debates whether emotion is biological or cognitive. The biological perspective arises from bodily influences, such as neural pathways in the brain's limbic system. The cognitive perspective says that emotions arise from mental events such as appraisals of the personal meaning of the emotion-causing event. They both play a role in activation and regulation of emotion.
"How many emotions are there?" Biological perspective says humans have between 2 and 10 basic emotions. Although there is diversity between researchers, most lists of emotion include six emotions: fear, anger, distrust, sadness, joy, and interest.
"What good are the emotions?" This says that emotions serve a purpose. From a functional view, emotions evolved as biological reactions that helped us adapt to life. The emotions that arises serves as a goal-directed motivation.
"What is the difference between emotion and mood?" Emotions come from response to an event, motivate adaptive behaviors, and are short-lived. Moods arise from ill-defined sources, affect cognitive processes, and are long-lived.
Chapter 12 discusses the aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive, and social-cultural. The biological aspects gives an analysis of emotion because emotions are, in part, biological response to important life events. Emotions energize and direct bodily actions by affecting the autonomic nervous system (heart, lungs, muscles), the endocrine system (glands, hormones, and organs), neural brain circuits such as those in the limbic system, the rate of neural firing and the pace of information processing, and facial feedback (patterns of facial musculature).
The main idea in the cognitive perspective of emotion is appraisal. There is primary and secondary appraisal that regulate the emotion process. Primary appraisals looks whether or not anything important is at stake in a situation (physical well-being, self-esteem, a goal, etc.). Secondary occurs after some reflection and revolves around an assessment of how to cope with a potential benefit, harm, or threat. Emotion is in the cognition via emotion knowledge and attributions. Emotion knowledge involves learning fine distinctions among basic emotions and learning which situations cause which emotions. An attributional analysis focuses on post-outcome attributions to explain when and why people experience pride, gratitude, or hope following positive outcomes and guilt, shame, anger, and pity following negative outcomes.
Social and cultural analysis of emotion says that we often "catch" other people's emotions through a process of emotion contagion that involves mimicry, feedback, and eventually contagion. The culture socializes its members to experience and express emotions in particular ways. Other cultures in general instruct us about the causes of our emotions, how we should express our emotions, and when to control our emotions.
I thought the two chapters went well with each other. Nothing really surprised me. I do think that emotion is very interesting to learn about.
terms: feelings, arousal, motivation, emotion, social, biological, cognitive, mimicry, purpose, expression, appraisal (primary and secondary), attribution
Emotions are so important they tell us how we feel and how to react to a certain situation. Over time our bodies are programmed to respond a certain way to different events. Yet if you ask someone to describe emotions they have trouble. Chapter 11 tells us what emotions are and chapter 12 explains to us where they come from. In Chapter 11 it asks five questions about emotions. The first is what is emotion? Second is what causes it? Third is how many are there? What good are they is the four main question? Last is what are the differences between emotion and mood? Chapter 12 tells us that there are three different reasons for emotions, biological, cognitive, and social/cultural.
The first question is what is emotion? It is a feeling. A person feels something and then reacts a certain way. It is also bodily reaction. Our body responds to the situation. The next thing emotion is a sense of purpose. This means that it gives us a goal to strive for. Last is Social expression. It tells others what we are feeling by what we say and do. An example is if we feel in danger, we will have a scared expression. Our bodies will get ready to fight or flee. We have a goal protect our self or the people around us. Others can tell by our face, voice and body language.
The answer to what causes emotion is simple. The book says our reaction develop for past experiences. It is biased on what we have learned from different event, situations, people, and surrounding.
How many emotions are there? This is a big disagreement. Some people say there are lots others have a few simple ones. Even the web site we looked at only had a few. The book says that the basic emotions are; anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, threat, harm, satisfaction, surprise, and happy. Each emotion has different actions and facial expressions.
Emotions do so much for people. They help us communicate what we are thinking and feeling to others. Emotions influence us to interact with others what emotions we are giving them and what emotions they are reading from us dictates how two people interact. If both the people are happy and positive they are more likely to talk and become friends. If they are unwelcoming then they will not build a relationship. Emotions can build or break a relationship.
People often get emotions and moods mixed up. What is the difference? Emotions as said are biased on situations. Moods are what you are feeling at any one time. They are not biased on situations. Although moods can affect you just as much as emotions. Moods can change without warning and are unpredictable; there can be no reason behind them sometimes. Emotions are more predictable and stable.
So now that chapter 11 has told us what emotions are, we need to know where do they come from? This is what chapter 12 covers.
The first major place they come from is biological. People over the years have learned what to do and how to react to different situation. When faced with danger our bodies just respond and do not even take the time to think. The James-Lang theory is a good example. The researchers were interested in what come first the feeling or the reaction. Does a person see a bear, feel afraid and then runaway? Or does a person see a bear, react and run and away and then get afraid? When presented with a situation of danger our bodies how learned to either fight or flee. There is also the theory of emotion. It says that people have lots of feelings and the facial expressions are what tell others what they are felling.
Another influence is cognitive. People think ahead and about outcome. A person appraised, thinks of the possible positive and negative outcomes of their actions. They then choice what the best option is and follow the behavior that will get them to the outcome that they want. The book talks about Arnold’s appraisal Theory. This theory talks about the cognitive process to deciding and action. The theory starts with the situation arises. Then the person appraises the situation whether it is good or bad. Then the emotion arises, e.g. fear. Lastly the person them does an action.
The last thing emotions help with is social and cultural. Emotions are not private but are on display for all to see. Some of emotion comes for biology but it studies show that culture effects emotion. If a person changes to a different culture their emotions and behavior change. People learn their emotions from the people around them, especially their parents. This is called emotional socialization. Since humans are social creature emotions play a big role into how people interact.
I am really interested in emotions! So these two chapters were two of my favorites so far. What surprised me the most was actually the part at the end where it talked about how some people need to turn their emotions off? People can train themselves to not respond to their own emotions or the emotions of others. The book talked about doctors a lot. They have to be level headed and stay calm even if their patient is scared, and freaking out. Doctors also need to not judge other or react to appearance. No matter what a person looks like or what emotional state they are in a doctor needs to stay calm.
Emotion ties a lot into motivation. Some emotions we learn others are biological. Both of which influence what actions we do. Emotions and situations are the building blocks of motivation. They are the first thing we feel from there we decide what to do from there. I think that the Arnold’s Appraisal Theory was the most important concept in these two chapters. Motivation is build on emotion.
Terms: Emotion, relationships, motivation, goals, James-Lang Theory, Arnold’s appraisal theory,
Chapter 11 answered five main questions: what is an emotion? What causes an emotion? How many emotions are there? What good are emotions? And what is the difference between emotion and mood? An emotion is defined as short-lived, feeling-arousal-purposive,expressive phenomena that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events. Emotions consist of four components which are feelings, sense of purpose, bodily arousal, and social-expressive. Emotions happen when we encounter significant life events. These events activate the critical components of our emotions. Many argue what causes our emotions: biology versus cognition. I believe they are both. I think that in certain situations we respond unintentionally with our emotions but in other situations, we make ourselves feel an emotion because of the culture we live in. For example of a cognitive view, when our friend has a relative who dies, we feel sad for them because it's the right thing to feel. It is culturally accepted to feel saddened by this.
No matter if emotion is biological or cognitive, emotion is a process made up of a chain of events. As for the question as to how many emotions there are, many theorists have their own theories. They all agree that a small number of basic emotions exist, basic emotions are universal to all human beings, and basic emotions are produced of biology and evolution. The basic emotions discussed in the book are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, joy, interest, threat, harm, motive involvement and satisfaction. Emotions should not be confused with a mood. A mood occurs from processes that are ill-defined and often times unknown. They also affect our state of mind positively or negatively. I agree with this. I was always told that your suppose to study for a test or get things done when your in a positive mood and then when you actually go in to take your test, you should be in a positive mood and it will supposably improve your grade or your mind set.
Chapter 12 discusses the biological, cognitive, social and cultural aspects of emotion. The biological aspects include the autonomic nervous system, endocrine system, neural brain circuits, rate of neural firing, and facial feedback. the cognitive, social, and cultural aspects include appraisals, knowledge, attributions, socialization history, and cultural identities. This chapter examines facial feedback, appraisal, significant situations which cause emotions, and the 10 different emotions.
I found it interesting that there are 80 different facial muscles and ONLY 36 involve facial expression. 8 are only used for differentiating emotion. The emotions of anger, fear, disgust, distress, and joy are all recognizable expressions. Even though all of these emotions can be tied together and easily recognized in significant situations, the main construct to understanding emotions is appraisal. This is an estimate of personal significance of an event. Appraisals precede and elicit emotions. They are interpretations of situations. Once something has been appraised as either "good" or "bad" then we experience a liking or disliking following, which is our emotion we express. There are two types of appraisals: primary and secondary in which primary evaluates whether or not anything important is at stake: physical well-being, self-esteem, a goal, financial state, respect, or the well=being of a loved one. Secondary appraisal occurs after some reflection and revolved around an assessment of how to cope with a potential benefit, harm, or threat.
The thing that I was most surprised about was in chapter 11. Positive affect facilitates our willingness to help others. The study that the researchers conducted with the change and the telephone booth was the most surprising to me. Those who received spare change from the booth were more likely to help out the lady (14 out of 16) and those who didn't find any spare change almost never helped (1 out of 25). These statistics obviously show that being in a positive mood makes people more friendly, helpful and understanding. Whenever I find myself if a positive mood or really happy, I tend to want to make others happy and help out more than if I were in an angry or upset mood.
Emotion has everything to do with motivation because emotions are a type of motive. Emotions energize and direct our behavior. Whatever emotion that we are feeling at the time energizes subjective, physiological, hormonal, and muscular resources to achieve a particular goal or purpose that we have. They also serve as an ongoing "readout" system to indicate how well or how poorly personal adaptation is going. These two chapters over emotion were interesting to read and I really enjoyed learning about facial expressions and the muscles used.
Terms: Emotion, feelings, arousal, biological perspective, cognitive perspective, mood, social-cultural aspects, appraisal, basic emotions, biology vs evolution, biological and cognitive aspects, facial musculature, facial feedback primary and secondary appraisal