ALHT106 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Expressive Suppression, Electrodermal Activity, Thalamus
Emotion
Lecture 1
• What are emotions
o Emotions are referred to in the context of 'feelings', evoking a tactile metaphor to
capture the sense that emotions aren't just experienced as ideas or concepts, but
are highly embodied
o Typically describe emotions as sensations that ingress on otherwise calm conscious
experience, in opposition to logic
o Emotions operate under a sound logic
o Spontaneous, involuntary evaluative responses to specific environmental
conditions, with physiological, cognitive and reflex behavioural aspects
o Emotions are the primary components of a control system for social organisms,
with each emotion priming animals for distinct motivated responses
o All social animals experience emotions
o Emotional states are the primary mechanisms controlling the vast majority of
reactive animal behaviour
o Emotions as a control system - processed in the limbic system (mammillary body)
• Animals with more extensively developed limbic systems (birds and
mammals) show greater emotional range and reactivity than those with less
o Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions
o Emotions
• Immediate sensations
• High intensity
• Short lived
• Profound influences on patterns of thought
o Moods
• Longer duration
• Lower intensity
• Diffuse feelings of positively or negatively
• Corresponding to a general state
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
• Designed to change your passive thinking and bias your plan for the future to
be either optimistic or pessimistic
o Can be broken down into the raw sensations of emotion (physiology and reflex
expression) and their evaluative thoughts
• Psychodynamic - emotions are bodily and emerge from the unconscious
• Cognitive - emotions both depend on and cause thoughts/judgements
• Physiological reactions
o We make reference to how emotions affect our bodies
o The triggering of almost all emotions involved the rapid activation of the Autonomic
Nervous System, specifically the Sympathetic subsystem (fight/flight)
o Emotions are a control system to direct action in real-time so they naturally involve
priming your body for action
o This is called the Autonomic Arousal - the visceral intensity of a particular emotion
is usually gauged by how intense this arousal is, and how it is felt in the body
• e.g. Galvanic skin conductance, pupil dilation
o Misattribution of arousal
• Residual fear of being afraid of the bridge can cause you to overestimate how
attracted you are to someone- measure attractiveness by how your body
feels
o Theories of emotional arousal
• James-Lange - we only infer emotion by feeling our physiological arousal
• Cannon-Bard - we feel emotions when the limbic system causes conscious
sensation and arousal simultaneously
• Schacter's Two-Factor theory - we experience simultaneous conscious
sensation and arousal, but attribute label from context
▪ Dual pathway - fast and slow
▪ When you're being distracted and the slow pathway is being relied on,
that’s hy judgeets o the eiroet a ause us to isattriute
our arousal
• Affect and emotion displays (behavioural)
o Involuntarily show facial expressions with every major emotion
o Communicative reflex
o Affect - the most fundamental characteristics of a 'feeling', intense or mild, pleasant
or unpleasant
o We communicate our affect
o Charles Darwin
• Social signalling so the group as a whole is more informed
• Predictions
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
▪ Because facial anatomy is shared across all humans, if emotive
expressions are evolved reflexes, they should present in the same way
across all cultures
• Mostly true
• 5 basic emotional expressions (anger, fear, disgust, joy, sadness)
• Darwin underestimated the degree to which emotional
expressions were modified by cultural context
• Many emotional displays for less primary emotions, and in
particular the highly social emotions (e.g. envy, shame, contempt)
have displays that are in large part learned - more cultural
expression
▪ We should be able to find similar expressions in apes and monkeys,
because they share recent common ancestors
• Mostly true
• That said, we now have good phylogenetic evidence for the
gradual gains and losses of emotive displays across related
species (all closely related species have similar displays)
• This is why we find chimps so relatable
▪ Even blind individuals should show the same facial expressions as
sighted people, despite never seeing them
• Extremely true
• Especially for the basic emotions
• The blind even develop similar complex displays with no models
o The relationship between emotional experience and displays is so ingrained, that
when in doubt humans often rely on feeling involuntary positions of their facial
muscles to infer what emotion they must be feeling - Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• Cognition and evaluative feelings (cognitive)
o The judgements we make that cause emotions to trigger in us vs how experiencing
an emotion causes your cognition to act in bias and change
o Focusses on the evaluative component of emotions
o Every emotion is triggered, and thus cognitively focused on, a particular object of
attention
o Although emotions seem to erupt out of nowhere without our permission, every
emotion is actually a reaction to specific cognitive evaluations
o Emotions bias our cognition in particular directions
o The particular cognitive and physiological changes that take place are typically
adaptive responses to the triggering stimuli
o Fast pathway - limbic
• Runs straight between the thalamus and amygdala
• Responsible for very rapid, automatic emotional reactions
• Prepares body
o Slow pathway - cerebral cortex
• Planning and reasoning centres of the frontal lobe
• Responsible for thoughtful evaluations and mental reframing
• What is the appropriate way in this situation - cognitive judgement
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Immediate sensations: high intensity, profound influences on patterns of thought. James-lange - we only infer emotion by feeling our physiological arousal: cannon-bard - we feel emotions when the limbic system causes conscious sensation and arousal simultaneously. Involuntarily show facial expressions with every major emotion: communicative reflex, affect - the most fundamental characteristics of a "feeling", intense or mild, pleasant or unpleasant, we communicate our affect, charles darwin. Fear - the emotion we feel when we judge we are in immediate danger - primes us to be highly vigilant and evasive. Little intensity in expression - flat affect: mood. Schachter"s two-factor theory - the physical arousal is not enough to inflict emotion, the cognitive label to that arousal triggers the emotional response. Limbic system (centre is amygdala: plays a crucial role in associating sensory and other information with pleasant and unpleasant feelings, the cortex, allows people to consider whether a stimulus is safe or harmful.
