PSY336H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Communication, Parasympathetic Nervous System, Motivation
PSY336 Lec 04
Tuesday October 4, 2016
• Low Energy Negative emotion = feeling of worthlessness, you feel negative but not
enough to drive you to do something about it, not like high energy negative emotions
where you want to punch somebody.
• Why do we have these negative emotions?
o They are adaptive: negativity signals us that the stuff is not good.
o Social interactions: tells other people how we are feeling. Social communication
function.
o Not all negative emotions are dysfunctional. They serve some functions in one
way or another.
o There are emotions we like and emotions we don’t like. Ex. Anger is an emotion
we don’t like. Even though sometimes it feels good to have anger because you
feel empowered.
• Functional relationship between physiological arousal and complexity: there will be an
optimal level of arousal, but where that optimal level of arousal is depends on the
complexity of the task. The task looks like a hyperbola facing down. As task complexity
increases, optimal arousal level decreases. Negative emotions are capable of increasing
arousal, so in simple tasks, it’s good.
• Imagine you have 2 tribes. Tribe A doesn’t have negative emotional system. Tribe B has
negative emotions, so they fight and argue etc. The environment has good and bad things.
In terms of functionality, with regards to resources and good stuff, the two tribes are
similar. Both should be able to extract resources from the environment. But in bad
environment, ex. When a tiger runs out, Tribe A looks at the tiger and thinks, oh it’s
interesting, but it’s trying to eat me, so I should leave. Tribe B however, negative
emotions kick up arousal and helps the person to run away. When you have a system
to kick up your arousal in response to need of simple tasks, it’s good.
• Psychologists came up with models of emotions based on their knowledge of negative
emotions. Most of these models are based on the fact that negative emotions trigger
physio reactions which then trigger Specific Action Tendencies (SAT). Ex. Fear,
arousal, run. Anger, arousal, punch. Different emotions also activate different physio
reactions: anger activates your hands for punching/fight, fear activates your legs to run.
This series of activations have to be short and kind of automatic and just take over all of
you. Ex. When you face a tiger and get scared, you better run as fast as you can, instead
of thinking about other stuff.
• Negative Emotions: fast, automatic, interfere with metacognition, use all of your energy
for action.
• But NEs can be bad when there are no tigers around. It’s not fun to get aroused all the
time and feel scared or sad all the time. NE is only appropriate for dangerous
environments. That’s the problem with our Age of Anxiety, because we live in a
relatively safe environment. ex. People are worried about exams. But even if you bomb a
test, you still gonna live; no tiger will come to eat you.
• Imagine how much it would suck for Tribe B if NE system was all that they had. There
should be another system that controls people when environment is safe.
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• In hunter-gatherer societies, 99% of time they should be chilling instead of running away
from tigers.
• Now lets imagine 2 tribes again. Tribe C has a Positive Emotion system, they can be
happy, experience joy, creativity etc. Tribe D doesn’t have a PE system.
• For Tribe C, when he wakes up and no tiger is chasing him, he decides to bang rocks
together and find sharp edges. So they are happy and show other people and more people
bang rocks. Or another person gets curious about berries and goes to discover stuff. So
this tribe will be exploring, creating, inventing, and doing stuff in general.
• For Tribe D, on any day when there’s no danger, they don’t have much to do. If they
happen to discover something, they don’t care anyway. They probably not going to
discover or explore things. When there are no bad things to run away from, they probably
will be couch potatoes.
• In 20 years, obviously Tribe C will win over Tribe D because they’ve been doing stuff,
moving around and thus have physical edge. They also have better social functions,
including compassion, joy, gratitude, love, trust, reciprocity, excitement, sharing, cultural
rituals etc. They also have discoveries and explorations.
• So one psychologist called Frederickson came along and went through these thought
experiments and found that NE SAT theory is good, but can’t explain PE. She found
that PE doesn’t drive specific actions. PE just energizes some kind of overall diverse
tendency.
• Frederickson proposed: PE (physiological reactions) Non Specific Action
Tendencies (NSAT). They weren’t sure about the physiological reactions yet; that’s
something they will explore.
• Frederickson went into some Creativity literature, and found that people with NE has
lower creativity than PE. When you feel frustrated when you can’t open a door, you don’t
sit down to have a brainstorm session, you just jam the key in and turn harder.
• There are many ways to measure creativity. One way is flexibility in thinking. You can
design an experiment to measure effect of emotions (happy song /give candy = happy,
sad song = NE) on creativity. They found that PE not only diversifies Action
Tendencies, it also diversifies thinking tendencies.
• Dual Process Model of Creativity: PE helps you to develop a skill, and modes of
expression, but once you have developed an expression, ex. Art, then NE helps you to
persevere. This explains why artists draw better when they are a little sad. Or it could be
that it’s because NE narrows attention to one thing, and then you attend to that thing, ex.
Drawing, better.
• You would expect NE to lead to narrowing of attention and then lead to SAT, and PE to
broaden horizon and attention.
• But PE and NE systems exist within the same person. They should be able to be
activated/deactivated in appropriate situations. Frederickson Hypothesis: NE and PE
systems have some independence, they are not tied up to each other.
• “Undoing Hypothesis” = NE and PE systems counter each other. Ex. NE drives you to
kill the tiger, then you want PE. Hypothesis: NE is easily triggered, and then PE helps
you to shut down NE. NE is your danger system, and PE is your safety system.
Maslow: wants to know why people grow, and why people do not want to grow?
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