PSYC1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Ontogeny, Emotion Classification, Antithesis
19 May 2018
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Built for emotion - evolutionary perspective of emotion
(Lecture 1)
Emotions - made up of how you feel and what they make you do
3 components
• Cognitive - subjective conscious experience
• Physiological - bodily arousal
• Behavioural - overt expression
Different theories compared
• Common sense
o Stimulus -> conscious feeling -> autonomic arousal
• James-Lange
o Stimulus -> autonomic arousal -> conscious feeling
• Cannon-Bond
o Stimulus -> subcortical activity -> conscious feeling/autonomic arousal
• Schachter (context based)
o Stimulus -> autonomic arousal -> appraisal -> conscious feeling
Evolutionary perspective of emotion - Darwin
• Charles Darwin and role of emotion in evolution and natural selection
• Innate emotions - enable survival and reproduction
• Expression of emotions in man and animals
• Emotions have evolved
• Ontogeny - development of individual organisms
• Phylogeny - evolution of a species
• Shared evolutionary process could extend to emotion
• Part of inheritance
• Emotions = good object for natural selection
• Emotional processes inherited from ancestors
• Ideas radical, not received well
• Most thought emotion was influenced by context
• Emphasised continuity between humans and non-human primate
• Basic emotional expressions are innate, produced and recognised automatically
• Pioneered careful observation of facial expressions of emotion especially in human infants and
blind children, as they are not influenced by context
• Changed way in which emotion was conceptualised
• Observational research
o When infants cry are eyes open or shut? And mouth open or closed?
o Results
• Eyes closed
• Mouth open
• Young/old/different races all express same state of mind by same movement
• Expressions recognised by others
o Emphasised connection between feeling and expressing emotion
o Humans recgonise emotion, have a response
o Production of emotion - wired to express emotion
o Emotions automatically produced, expressed and recognised
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