Yale University PSYC131 Human Emotion

1.1: Introduction

1.2: What is an Emotion?

Theories of Emotion Timeline:

Schacter-Singer
Ancient Greek

William James

Cannon-Bard
James-Lange
Enlightment

Lazarus
Darwin

Ancient Greek:

Theories of emotions stretch back as far as the stoics of Greece.

Hippocrates said there were four humours. Emotional health consisted of a balance between these
four humours and when they were out of balance, both mental and physical health could be in
danger.

Aristotle advocated the principle of moderation. He said that part of what an emotion is and part of
what predicts emotional health is finding emotional balance, not having too little emotion or too
much. He stressed that this was a really important principle of emotional functioning.

Both of these theories still fall in conflict with both reason and rationality.

Enlightment:

During this period we see a flourishing of intelectual attention devoted to really trying to understand
what an emotion is.
Descartes provided an intricate taxonomy of emotions. A description of their bodily causes, their
affects and functions in his book The Passions Of The Soul.

Darwin, from an evolutionary perspective were considered to be serving an important role in our
lives and that they were not simply irrational. Emotions evolutionarily evolve, serve survival
purpose. They are not specific to humans. We see them in animals as well.

William James:

Physiological Approach: emotions are secondary to physiological phenomenon. He argued that the
essence of emotions is a physiological response and that each emotion has a profile in the body,
certain patterns of heart rate and muscle tension.

You have a stimulus in the environment(you see a snake), followed by a physiological

response(increased heart rate) => leads to an emotion called fear.

"The perception of bodily states, as they occur, is the emotion."

Cannon-Bard:

Emotions are not simply physiological phenomena. Physiological resonses alone cannot explaion
emotion experience. This theory argued that instead, physiological responses are too slow. It takes
too long for our heartrate to increase, and sometimes it's barely perceivable. So this cannot explain
relatively rapid and intense emotions that arise.

You see a stimulus(snake), followed by certain patterns of subcortical brain activation, followed by
simultaneous responses in your body and experience of fear.

Schacter-Singer:

They came along and proposed a 2-factor theory of emotion. In their view, the appraisal of the
physiological experience defines and determines the emotion experience. They suggested that
physiological responses contributed to the emotional experience by really facilitating a cognitive
appraisal, the way that you evaluate what's going on in your body, and that evaluation is what really
defines and gives rise to the emotion.

So, the 2-factor or 2-stages of this theory go like this:

STAGE 1: Physiological arousal in response to an evoking stimulus(snake).

STAGE 2: You have a cognitive elaboration or the way in which you're appraising the meaning of
your heart rate increasing. It's the way you think about what that heart rate means that
simultaneously gives rise to the experience of an emotion or fear.

If you interpret your heart rate as something threatening, you will most likely experience fear. If you
interpret it as something exciting happening in your environment, you are more likely to experience
joy or happiness.

Lazarus:

Cognitive Theory: Cognitive activity or cognitions, in the form of judgements, evaluations,

thoughts, is necessary for an emotion to occur.
Ex: You see a snake in the environment, you have a cognitive evaluation(the snake is dangerous),
you would see heart rate increasing, and that would lead to the fear experience.

Therefore, without being able to think, judge, and evaluate the stimulus, there is no emotion. There
is no emotion without cognition.

COMPONENTS OF EMOTION

Emotions are not a singular phenomena. They have multiple components, they are made of multiple
parts.

Valence (positive, negative, neutral)

About-ness(they are about something/eliciting or intentional object)
Purpose or Function(they are vital for survival; they enable pursuits of important goals)
Multiple component response(has 3 part) ->

-> When we think of an emotion it has 3 parts:

Subjective part: our internal representation of what the experience is, what it feels like to have an
emotion.

Behavioral part: this is the outward display of behavior(you show it in your face or in terms of
body language)

Physiological part: we can see the emotion taking place in our brain and autonomous nervous
system(heart rate, sweating, breathing).

WHAT AN EMOTION IS NOT

1) Mood(more long-lasting state, can last days, weeks, months). It has no eliciting object, it's
more difuse.
2) Feeling. Though we use this word to refer to emotion (I feel ...), this actually refers to the
subjective representation of an emotion.
3) Affect(broader all-encompasing term; it refers to general topics of emotion, feelings, and
moods together).
4) Personality trait(these are stable individual differences across different situations).
5) Cognition(emotions are not cognitions or thoughts; although they can give rise to emotions,
cognitions are distinct. Cognitions do not have facial expressions and not always produce
physiological responses).
CLASSIFICATION SYSTEMS OF EMOTIONS:

1) BASIC/DISCRETE

Basic/Discrete Dimensional
THEORY Emotions as discrete categories, Emotions are thought of as a
biologically fixed, unviersal to combination of several
all humans and many animals. psychological dimensions.
EXAMPLE Basic Emotions: anger, disgust, Pleasant-unpleasant vs.
fear, happiness, sadness, Arousing-lethargic.
surprise.

Complex Emotions: guilt, pride,

shame, etc. These arise from
combination of basic emotions
or are culturally influenced and
constructed.
THEORISTS Paul Ekman, Rene Descartes, Wilhelm Wundt, James Russel,
Silvan Tomkins Lisa Feldman Barrett.
EXPERT INTERVIEW: LISA FELDMAN BARRET on What is an Emotion

Dr. Lisa Feldman Barret

Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University
Internationally recognized expert on emotions

Q: How did you decide to study human emotion?

A: (...) I started by studying something completely different, but somewhere along the way I noticed
that some people are very good at distinguishing between what we like to call distinct states: anger,
fear, sadness, disgust. They not only feel very different, but the look like they have very different
body manifestations and so on. Other people use words like angry, sad, disgusted, but they use
them in such a way as to indicate that they're not really experiencing distinct feelings. They're using
these words for what they have in common which is they indicate an unpleasant feeling.

So, in a very simplistic way I thoght, well, it would be really interesting to measure how well
people distinguish between different emotional states. Then, you could ask them about what they
experience and then you could figure out who's accurate and who is not. And from then you could
help people figure out more accurately how they feel.

So what are they ways to objectively measure when someone is angry or sad, and I started a
literature search in the scientific literature to find out what the markers were and didn't find them.
And I systematically thought that, well, everybody knows people make different facial expressions
when they're angry vs when they're sad. So, facial expressions would be a great way to measure
when someone is objectively in a certain emotional state. And I reviewed the literature. What I
found was that perceivers were good at judging under certain conditions facial expressions.
However, when you measure facial muscle movements, they don't actually indicate very well
whether someone's angry, happy, or afraid. They certainly indicate whether someone's feeling
pleasant or unpleasant.

So I thought, okay, maybe the face has a lot of muscles in it and we can only measure 6-7 at a time,
maybe 12 at best, so probably, there is a lack of precision for this type of measurement. So what
other way is there? What about the body? We all know that there are different cardiovascular states
for emotion, right? So your heart races in fear, your BP goes up in anger, that would maybe be a
good way to measure what emotional state someone's in. But then, when you look at the literature
you see there aren't cardiovascular markers for each emotion.

How is it that you can have feelings that are so clearly different, how is it you can look at someone
and make a pretty decent guess about whether they's angry, sad, or afraid, but scientists can't
objectively define when someone is angry, afraid or sad. I thought this was interesting and that is
what I spent studying.

Q: WHAT IS AN EMOTION, HOW DO WE DEFINE IT?

AND WHY IS IT THAT WE CAN TELL PRETTY ACCURATELY HOW OTHERS ARE
FEELING, BUT AS SCIENTISTS WE HAVE SUCH A HARD TIME DEFINING EMOTION?

In science, most sciences start with the idea that perceptions reveal the way things work. So, if you
look at astronomy, if you stand in one place and you watch the sun rise in the east, move across the
horizon to the west, it leads people to believe that in fact, the sun revolves around the earth because
that's what your perceptions reveal to us. So, the point is, we need a starting point for our research
and study. Clearly, today we know better than saying the sun revolves around us.

So, in the field of emotion we started off with the idea that anger is an element. It's an elemental
building block of the mind. We're born with an anger circuit in your brain, you make an expression,
you have a cardiovascular pattern when you're angry, so they're an individual causal mechanism that
produces this elemental, what we would call, psychologically primitive state, that is you can't break
it down into anything more basic.

We've taken the approach to think that emotions are not basci in this elemental way, that they
themselves are act product of a set of more basic operations so to use another analogy we would
say, for ex you can take a bunch of ingredients flour water salt, sugar and you can make something
out of them like bread or something else like a sauce. The ingredients you wouldn't say flour is an
ingredient that is specific for bread, cause you can do a lot of things with flour. You wouldn't say
that an oven is a mechanism for baking bread. It is a mechanism for cooking a lot of things. And so
very similarly we used behavioral methods and also brain imaging methods to try to identify what
are the basic ingredients of the mind, what are the basic operations in the brain, how to they construt
what you and I feel as very elemental experiences but actually from a causal standpoint they emerge
from these more basic elements, and maybe emotions are not so different from say cognitions and
perceptions of the world. Maybe the same ingredients or very similar ones are being engaged every
time we have an emotional state it's the configuration or the recipe that differs.

Q: HOW DO YOU THINK THIS PARTICULAR APPROACH DIFFERS FROM OTHER

PERSPECTIVES ON WHAT AN EMOTIONS IS THAT ARE OUT IN THE FIELD RIGHT
NOW?

I think you can group together maybe... there are a lot of different perspectives, approaches. But i
think you can group them together. You can say there are a group of theoretical perspectives that say
emotions are elemental. Each emotion has its own mechanism. So there's a mechanism for anger
and when it's triggered, anger errupts and you anchor every instance of anger. It might not look
identical but it kind of looks similar because they are all caused by a single common cause. That's
really what is called basic emotion approach. You can find differences in different approaches that
are basic emotion approaches but they all kind of have that flavor.

Then you have appraisal approaches that say these elemental states don't just errupt like a reflux.
Actually, you as the perceiver have to impart meaning to the situation, to the stimulus in order for
the emotion to occur. So, really, it's not so much that emotions are triggered as much as you engage
in a menaning analasys of the world, you figure out what the world means, what the stimulation
means and then you might respond with an emotion.

I'm really glossing over a lot of variation models and it turns out even in the appraisal domains there
are some meaningful distinctions I'm not talking about. But in both of these views, emotions are
still considered to be very distinct states from one another, anger and sadness and fear feel very
different. It's assumed that the responses are similar within a category, so not every isntance of
sadness it the same but they are more similar to each other maybe than an instance of sadness and
an instance of anger. The assumption is also that the mechanism are domain-specific. Whatever the
mechanism are for emotions, they are only for emotions and not so much for cognitions or
perceptions. I think from our perspective we'd say emotions are perceptions. You are either, you as
the perceiver.... every waking moment of your life, right now for example, we are talking to each
other and you are tracking exteroceptively what's going on for you right now. You're listening to my
voice, seeing my face move in certain ways and so on, unbeknowsnt to you you also cause you're
not probably paying attention to it but there's your body is a certain temperature, you can probably
feel the chair against the bottom of your legs if you pay attention to it, and your brain is also
receording interoceptively everything going on in your body even if you aren't aware of every little
details of those sensations. You can think of it as you have a moment of sensation coming partly
from your body, partyl from your world, and you, as a perceiver have to make sense of those
sensations and you do. You sometimes creates percetions of the world, sometimes perceptions of
your body which is typically what we refer to as emotion in a colloquial sense. And when you make
sense of those sensations you're drawing on info you've got stored from the past. It's well known
that without such info from the past you cannot make sense of sensations in the present and so from
our perspetive emotions are not special they';re just mental states that are caused pretty much like
any other mental state using a set of basic operations that are not special for emotion.

Q: HOW ARE EMOTIONS DIFFERENT FROM THIS CONSTRUCT OF EMOTION

REGULATION? HOW DIFFERENT IS THAT FROM AN EMOTION ITSELF AND THE
EXPERIENCE OF IT?

I think the concept of emotion regulation is yoked very much to the concept of emotion so you have
to have an idea of what you think an emotion is in order to be able to regulate it or control it or
modify it in some way so I think if your view is that an emotion is a special kind of state that is
produced by a special mechanism then you have other mechanisms that come in after the emotion is
manifest or maybe slighly just before to control its expression.

But if you believe that emotions are perceptions of a sensory array and that you're always
constructing those perceptions in a moement-to-moments sense, then modifying your emotional
state really has something to do with modifying how you're constructing meaning of those
sensations and so emotion generation and emotion regulation becomes a subjective distinction
instea of a mechanistic distinction, so really it would be the same mechanisms you would be
interested in not different ones.

Q: YOU PUBLISHED AN INTERESTING PAPER ABOUT DARWIN BEING WRONG ABOUT

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION, AS HE THOUGHT OF THEM AS BIOLOGICALLY BASED
ANATOMICALLY FIXED ENTITIES THAT ARE READILY DETECTED IN THE FACE AND
INSTEAD YOU PROVIDE THIS NOVEL PERSPECTIVE THAT CENTRALLY FEATURES
THE ROLE OF CONTEXT BOTH IN EXPRESSING AND INTERPRETING EMOTIONS IN
OTHER PEOPLE. I WONDER IF YOU CAN EXPLAIN THIS IN A SENSE IN WHICH
DARWIN WASN'T QUITE RIGHT ABOUT THIS ONE.

There is a lot to say here. I ll just say this. Sometimes the view that emotions are these biologically
basic events with their own separate mechanism is considered to be an evolutionary view. Then the
construction view is somehow believed to be a cultural view that is not evolutionary and so not in
any.... I really believe in evolution, and I think what I'm suggesting is that there are different
processes that have evolved really, that certainly the architecture of the mind is subjected to
selection pressures but maybe what evolved is somewhat different. I think with Darwin, you have to
consider the context in which someone is writing. You look at On The Origin Of Species. He's made
this remarkable proposition which is that before him, there was this view that species were platonic.
That there was a form, a perfect form for each species that was handed down by god, basically, and
tha variations that you'd see in an isntance of a species were errors, like mistakes, because there was
a pure form. That's very similar to the idea that there are pure forms of emotions and that any
variantion that you see has something to do with something other than emotion. So Darwin had this
view that actually the variation across instances within a category are meaningful. They are
meaningfully tied to the context. That's why you get variations of a species. So then you have to ask
yourself why would he write a book later that essentially reverts back to what looks like a pre-
darwininan view of emotion because his model of species and their the meaningfulness of the
variation doesn't really match this book that he wrote. And I think you have to understand why he
wrote the book. He was trying to make the point, not that expressions are functional. He was trying
to make the point that emotions are like tailbones, they are vestigial, they are evidence of evolution.
Because here we have evidence of these expressions that are not useful anymore but yet we still see
evidence of them so isn't this just evidence that we evolved from other creatures because we have
these vestigial things: tailbone, emotional expression, etc. And I mean that's a bit of a caricature of
Darwin in a sense because he also said some interesting things. But he also said stupid things. He
thought anxios people had frizzy hair etc. But in his defense, we must remember that at the begining
of a science, scientists use their perceptions as evidence of how the world works, only later on as it
evolves, we move on to actual objective science. Like I said before, in the beginning we believed
the sun revolved around us because we based our understanding on our perceptions. Now we know
better than to say something as stupid as that.

Modern researchers always look back to historical figures and they pull what's useful to them from
those historical texts and so certain people have written about Darwin as if he had to see saying that
expressions are these functional movements that are tightly linked to a person's internal state and I
think that the research..... so my point is that Darwin said a lot of things, but the research shows
clearly that although we as perceivers pay attention to faces, we are also taking in extra info about
context, body position, etc that we are not aware of. Turns out that that extra info we're not aware of
influences our perception of emotions. So the context influences in ways that are mostly unaware to
the perceiver how we experience and what.

But emotions are also used for communicative purposes. If you watch a movie by yourself you do
make facial expressions, but if you watch it with someone else, then you will make more facial
expressions, there will be laughing, etc.

I think that perceptions of emotions, it feels to us that all we're doing is watching an expression but
that ease with which we construct perceptions betrays the complexity of what's really going on.

Q: I remember about work you've done on the importance of social factors that are relevant to
emotions.

If you look at the regions of the brain that people traditioanlly think of as being important for
emotion some turn out to be imporant for many many kinds of mental states. For example, the
amygdala is one of these structures where first people thought this gland was for fear. Neurons in
the amygdala fire and you feel/perceive fear in yourself and others. Then research showed that in
fact amygdala responds to all kinds of negative states and then they discovered it also responds to
positive ones, and later that it also responds to novelty.
2.1: Emotion Elicitation I