How Do We Experience Emotions?

The terms emotion and mood are often used interchangeably in everyday language

_______________: feelings that involve subjective evaluation, physiological processes, and cognitive beliefs.
subjective experience: feelings that accompany an emotion

physical changes: increases in heart rate, in skin temperature, and in brain activation
cognitive appraisals: peoples beliefs and understandings about why they feel the way they do

____________: diffuse, long-lasting emotional states.

Emotions Have a Subjective Component

We experience emotions subjectively

The intensity of emotional reactions varies but people who are _____________ or _______________ tend to have psychological problems
________________: such as depression or panic attacks;

________________: causes people to not experience the subjective components of emotions, e.g. Elliot
One cause of alexithymia is that the physiological messages associated with emotions do not reach the brain centers that interpret emotion

Distinguishing Between Types of Emotions

________________: emotions that are evolutionarily adaptive, shared across cultures, and associated with specific physical states. They include anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, and possibly surprise and contempt. ________________: blends of primary emotions. They include remorse, guilt, submission, and anticipation At the center of the _________________ is the intersection of two core dimensions of affect: ______________ indicates how negative or positive emotions are; activation indicates how arousing they are ______________ is the physiological activation (such as increased brain activity) or increased autonomic responses (such as increased heart rate)

Negative Affect and Positive Affect

Neurochemical evidence supports the idea that positive affect and negative affect are independent ___________ activation states appear to be associated with an increase in dopamine ___________ activation states appear to be associated with an increase in norepinephrine

James-Lange Theory
In 1884, William James asserted that a persons interpretation of the physical changes in a situation leads that person to feel an emotion A similar theory was independently proposed by ____________________ __________________________________: we perceive specific patterns of bodily responses, and as a result of that perception we feel emotion

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

According to the James-Lange theory, _____________________ trigger the experience of emotions, not the other way around In 1963, __________________ proposed this idea as the facial feedback hypothesis In other words, putting on a smile can trigger a happy response

Cannon-Bard Theory
__________________, along with Philip Bard, proposed that the mind and body experience emotions independently The __________ is quick to experience emotions The ___________ is much slower The information from an emotion-producing stimulus is processed in subcortical structures As a result, we experience two separate things at the same time: an emotion and a physical reaction

The Amygdala and Prefrontal Cortices

People with damage to the amygdala show fear when confronted with dangerous objects, but they __________________________________________ to objects associated with dangerous objects The amygdala is associated with emotional learning, memory of emotional events, and the interpretation of ________________________________ The right prefrontal cortice is associated with ______________ The left prefrontal cortice is associated with ______________ People also can be dominant in one hemisphere of their frontal lobes, and that dominant hemisphere can bias their emotions

Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory

According to the two-factor theory of emotion, a situation evokes: ___________________, such as arousal ___________________, or an emotion label Physical states caused by a situation can be attributed to the ________________ When people misidentify the source of their arousal, it is called _________________________________ __________________ is a similar form of misattribution; residual physiological arousal caused by one event is transferred to a new stimulus

We Regulate Our Emotional States

In our daily lives, circumstances often require us to harness our emotional responses _______ outlined the ways we strategically place ourselves in certain situations in order to self-regulate Examples? Recent studies have found that engaging in reappraisal changes the activity of brain regions involved in the experience of emotion Not all strategies for regulating emotional states are equally successful

Humor
Humor increases positive affect and can be used to cope with a difficult situation Research shows that laughter stimulates ___________________, improves the immune system, and stimulates the release of hormones, dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins

Examples?

Thought Suppression and Rumination

Through ________________________, people attempt to not feel or respond to the emotion at all Thought suppression often leads to a rebound effect, in which people think more about something after suppression than before _______________ involves thinking about, elaborating, and focusing on undesired thoughts or feelings Prolongs the mood and impedes successful mood regulation __________________ involves doing something other than the troubling activity or thinking about something other than the troubling thought

How Are Emotions Adaptive?

Emotions are adaptive because they prepare and guide successful behaviors. Emotions provide information about the importance of stimuli to ______________, and then they prepare people for actions aimed at achieving those goals.

___________: a desired outcome, usually associated with some specific object (tasty food) or some future behavioral intention (getting into a doctoral program in psychology)

Facial Expressions Communicate Emotion

__________________ argued that expressive aspects of emotion are adaptive because they communicate how we are feeling Facial expressions provide many clues about whether our behavior is pleasing to others or whether it is likely to make them reject, attack, or cheat us ____________ demonstrated that the mouth better conveys emotion than the eyes, especially for positive affect Researchers showed identical facial expressions in different contexts and found that the ___________ profoundly altered how people interpreted the emotion

Facial Expressions Across Cultures

Research has found general support for cross-cultural congruence in identifying some facial expressions; support is __________________________________________________ Research suggests that ______________responses are innate rather than learned by observing them in others

In studies of athletes, both sighted and blind winners display similar expressions

Display Rules Differ across Cultures and between the Sexes

_________________: rules learned through socialization that dictate which emotions are suitable to given situations
Differences in display rules help explain cultural stereotypes From culture to culture, display rules tend to be different for women and men The emotions most closely associated with ______________are related to care-giving, nurturance, and interpersonal relationships

The emotions associated with _______________ are related to dominance, defensiveness, and competitiveness

Decision Making
Emotions influence our decision making in different ways

In the face of complex, multifaceted situations, emotions serve as heuristic guides: They provide feedback for making quick decisions
According to the _______________________, posited by Schwarz and Clore, we use our current moods to make judgments and appraisals, even if we do not know the sources of our moods If people are made aware of the sources of their moods (as when the researcher suggests that a good mood might be caused by the bright sunshine), their feelings have ____________ influence over their judgments

Recognizing and Correcting for Belief Persistence in Your Own Thinking and in That of Others
_____________________________: tendency to hold on to previous ideas even when presented with evidence that the belief is questionable or just plain wrong People tend to believe information consistent with the side of an issue they already believe is true You can be more open to examining all sides of an issue fairly and altering your beliefs when the evidence supports the change To reduce the effects of belief persistence, you should deliberately seek evidence that disconfirms your belief

Somatic Markers
__________________________, most self-regulatory actions and decisions are affected by bodily reactions called ______________________ Bodily reactions that arise from the emotional evaluation of an actions consequences Expectation is influenced by your history of performing either that action or similar actions Somatic markers may guide us to engage in adaptive behaviors by using past outcomes to regulate future behavior

Emotions Strengthen Interpersonal Relations

In interacting with others, we use emotional expressions as powerful nonverbal communications

Nonverbal displays of emotions signal ___________________________________________

Evolutionary perspective: need to belong to social groups Survival was enhanced for those who lived in groups; those who were expelled would have been less likely to survive and pass along their genes The fundamental need to belong indicates that people will be sensitive to anything that might lead them to be kicked out of the group, and social emotions may reflect reactions to this possibility

Guilt Strengthens Social Bonds

_____________________________ contend that guilt strengthens interpersonal relationships in three ways: Feelings of guilt discourage people from doing things that would harm their relationships

Displays of guilt demonstrate that people care about their relationship partners, thereby affirming social bonds
Guilt is a tactic that can be used to manipulate others Evidence indicates that socialization is more important than biology in determining specifically how children experience guilt As children grow, they _______________________and they subsequently experience feelings of guilt

Embarrassment and Blushing

A person is likely to feel embarrassed after ___________________________________________ being teased, or experiencing a threat to his or her self-image Like guilt, embarrassment may reaffirm close relationships after wrongdoing _____________ occurs when people believe others view them negatively This nonverbal apology is an appeasement that elicits forgiveness in others, thereby repairing and maintaining relationships

How Does Motivation Energize, Direct, and Sustain Behavior?

Emotions are a primary source of ______________.
Factors that energize, direct, or sustain behavior

Most of the general theories of motivation emphasize four essential qualities of motivational states:
___________________________________________________

are directive; they guide behaviors toward satisfying specific goals or specific needs;
help animals persist in their behavior until they achieve their goals or satisfy their needs; differ in strength, ______________________________________

Multiple Factors Motivate Behavior

Needs lead to goal-directed behaviors; failure to satisfy a particular need leads to psychosocial or physical impairment ____________: a state of biological or social deficiency ________________: basic survival needs must be met before people can satisfy higher needs A state of ______________________ occurs when someone achieves his or her personal dreams and aspirations Maslows hierarchy is more useful as an indicator of what might be true about peoples behaviors than of what actually is true about them

Drives and Incentives

_______________: a psychological state that, by creating arousal, motivates an organism to satisfy a need ________________: the tendency for bodily functions to maintain equilibrium. The term homeostasis was coined by Walter Cannon Any behavior that satisfies a need is reinforced and therefore is more likely to recur; if a behavior consistently reduces a drive, it becomes a ______________ Drive states push us to reduce arousal, but we are also pulled toward certain things in our environments _________________: external objects or external goals, rather than internal drives, that motivate behaviors

Arousal and Performance

___________________: the psychological principle that performance increases with arousal up to an optimal point, after which it decreases with increasing arousal Motivation does not always lower tension and arousal; we are individually motivated to seek an optimal level of arousal Examples?

Pleasure
__________________: drives people to seek pleasure and avoid pain, Sigmund Freud From an evolutionary perspective, positive and negative motivations are ________________ For instance, the motivations to seek out food, sex, and companionship are typically associated with pleasure, whereas the avoidance of dangerous animals is negatively motivated because of the association with pain Animals prefer to eat sweets; sweetness usually indicates that food is safe to eat. By contrast, most poisons and toxins taste bitter, so it is not surprising that animals avoid bitter tastes

Some Behaviors Are Motivated for Their Own Sake

___________________: motivation to perform an activity because of the external goals toward which that activity is directed ___________________: motivation to perform an activity because of the value or pleasure associated with that activity, rather than for an apparent external goal or purpose ___________ helps us learn about the objects in an environment and has survival value, since knowing how things work allows us to use those objects for more serious tasks ____________ is the tendency to generate ideas or alternatives that may be useful in solving problems, communicating, and entertaining ourselves and others

Self-Determination Theory and Self-Perception Theory

Consistent evidence suggests that extrinsic rewards can undermine intrinsic motivation _______________________: People are motivated to satisfy needs for competence, relatedness to others, and autonomy, which is a sense of personal control. Extrinsic rewards may reduce intrinsic value because such rewards undermine peoples feeling that they are choosing to do something for themselves. (Deci & Ryan, 1987). _____________________: People are seldom aware of their specific motives; they draw inferences about their motives according to what seems to make the most sense (Bem, 1967).

We Set Goals to Achieve

People are especially motivated to achieve ____________________ ______________________________ is the process by which people change their behavior to attain personal goals Challenging, but not overly difficult and specific goals are best Challenging goals encourage effort, persistence, and concentration; goals that are too easy or too hard can undermine motivation and therefore lead to failure Dividing specific goals into concrete steps and focusing on ___________________ goals facilitates achieving __________________ goals

Self Efficacy and the Achievement Motive

________________ argued that peoples personal expectations for success play an important role in motivation

____________________ is the expectancy that your efforts will lead to success. Not believing your efforts will pay off may discourage you from trying
The ________________________ is the desire to do well relative to standards of excellence Individuals high in achievement need challenging but attainable personal goals, while those low in achievement need set extremely easy or impossibly high goals

Social Psychology

How Do We Form Our Impressions of Others?

Social psychology is concerned with how people influence other peoples thoughts, feelings, and actions We constantly make social judgments and automatically classify people into social categories Social psychologists have shown that our longterm evaluations of people are heavily influenced by our first impressions

We Make Attributions About Others

We constantly try to explain other peoples motives, traits, and preferences Attributions: explanations for events or actions, including other peoples behavior We are motivated to draw inferences in part by a basic need for both order and predictability Just World hypothesis: When bad things happen to people, we make sense of it by blaming the victimvictims must have done something to justify what happened to them

Attributional Dimensions
Fritz Heider distinguished between two types of attributions:
Personal/internal or dispositional attributions: refer to things within people, such as abilities, moods, or efforts Situational/external attributions: refer to outside events, such as luck, accidents, or the actions of other people

Bernard Weiner noted that attributions can vary on other dimensions:

They can be stable over time (permanent) or unstable (temporary) They can be controllable or uncontrollable

Attributions About the Self

We tend to have a self-serving bias in making attributions about our own behavior:
We attribute our failures to situational, unstable, or uncontrollable factors in a way that casts us in a positive light We attribute our successes to personal, permanent factors in a way that gives us credit for doing well Example: If you fail a test, you may blame your poor performance on your not getting enough sleep or on the professors creating a bad exam; if you do well on a test, you may attribute that good performance to your being smart

Attributional Bias
People tend to be systematically biased when they process social information Fundamental attribution error: pervasive tendency to overemphasize the importance of personality traits and underestimate the importance of a situation when explaining anothers behavior
Began as the correspondence bias: We expect others behavior to correspond with their beliefs and personalities

Actor/observer discrepancy: When interpreting our own behavior, we tend to focus on situations; when interpreting other peoples behavior, we tend to focus on dispositions

Stereotypes Are Based on Automatic Characterization

Stereotypes: cognitive schemas that help us organize information about people on the basis of their membership in certain groups
Allow for easy, fast processing of social information Occur automatically, largely outside of our awareness Affect impression formation

Stereotypes are self-maintaining: They direct our attention toward information that confirms them and away from disconfirming evidence
subtyping: When we encounter someone who does not fit a stereotype, we put that person in a special category rather than alter the stereotype

Self-Fulfilling Effects
Self-fulfilling prophecy: tendency to behave in ways that confirm our own or others expectations
Teachers expectations of students success/failure can impact those students performances (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968; McKown & Weinstein, 2008) Women performed more poorly on a math test when they were initially reminded of their sex (Shih, Pittinsky, & Ambady, 1999)

Effects of stereotype threat reflect three interrelated mechanisms:

physiological stress thinking about ones performance is distracting suppressing negative thoughts/emotions requires a great deal of effort

Stereotypes Can Lead to Prejudice

Stereotypes may be positive, neutral, or negative Negative stereotypes can lead to: prejudice: negative feelings, opinions, and beliefs associated with a stereotype; discrimination: inappropriate and unjustified treatment of people as a result of prejudice Why do stereotypes lead to prejudice and discrimination?
Personality factors People treat others as scapegoats to relieve stress People discriminate against others to protect their own selfesteem We favor our own groups and stigmatize those who pose threats to our groups

Ingroup/ Outgroup Bias

Groups to which we belong are ingroups; those to which we do not belong are outgroups
Outgroup homogeneity effect: Once we categorize others as ingroup or outgroup members, we tend to view outgroup members as less varied than ingroup members Ingroup favoritism: We are more likely to distribute resources to ingroup members than to outgroup members. We are more willing to do favors for ingroup members and to forgive their mistakes or errors.

Evolutionarily, personal survival has depended on group survival. Keeping resources within a group while denying resources to outgroup members may have provided a selective advantage.

Stereotypes and Perception

Stereotypes can influence basic perceptual processes:
White participants looked at pictures of either tools or guns and were asked to classify them as quickly as possible. Immediately before seeing a picture, participants were shown a picture of a white face or a black face; they were told that the face was being shown to signal that either a gun or a tool would appear next. Being shown a black face led the participants to identify guns more quickly and to mistake tools for guns (Payne, 2001). Priming people with pictures of weapons (e.g., guns and knives) leads them to pay greater attention to pictures of black faces than to pictures of white faces (Eberhardt, Goff, Purdie, & Davies, 2004)

Discrepancies Lead to Dissonance

Cognitive dissonance: an uncomfortable mental state due to a contradiction between two attitudes or between an attitude and a behavior
Example: People experience cognitive dissonance when they smoke even though they know that smoking might kill them

People reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes or behaviors; they sometimes also rationalize or trivialize the discrepancies

Postdecisional Dissonance
Dissonance arises when a person holds positive attitudes about different options but has to choose one of the options
Example: A person might have trouble deciding which college to attend; the person might narrow the choice to two or three alternatives and then have to choose

Postdecisional dissonance: motivates the person to focus on one schools the chosen schools positive aspects and the other schools negative aspects Effect occurs automatically, with minimal cognitive processing, and apparently without awareness

Insufficient Justification
One way to get people to change their attitudes is to change their behaviors first, using as few incentives as possible
Participants performed an extremely boring task and then reported to other participants on how enjoyable it was Participants who were paid more ($20) to lie about their experience reported enjoying it less than those paid less ($1) to lie (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959)

We Are Obedient to Authority

The Milgram studies in obedience Milgrams research demonstrated that ordinary people may do horrible things when ordered to do so by an authority A recent replication found that 70 percent of the participants were obedient up to the maximum voltage in the experiment (Burger, 2009)