PSYC 2012 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Hypothalamus, Facial Motor Nucleus, Sense
Emotions and Stress 4/17/18
Emotion: A mental state of subjective feeling that arises spontaneously rather than
through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes and
behaviors
Key Aspects of Emotion:
●Physiological Reactions: Arousal
●Subjective Feeling: Conscious experience and cognitive experience and
cognitive evaluation that allows us to name the emotion we’re feeling
●Behaviors: Facial expressions, verbal behavior, expressive behaviors
Evaluation of Emotion Feeling Depends Upon
●Physiological responses
●Environmental context → social and other cues
●Prior experience/history/memory
●**Emotion evaluation depends on perception
Facial Expressions
●People in different parts of the world make and interpret facial expressions
similarly
●Six Primary Emotions: Anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness and sadness
●Facial expressions can be produced voluntarily by the primary motor cortex of
involuntarily by the facial motor nucleus of the pons (brainstem)
●Facial expressions can be identified by the fusiform face area (FFA)
●Smiling, or even just activating the muscles involved, can cause us to feel happier
●Fake/voluntary/cortical smiles can be distinguished from
real/involuntary/brainstem ones → Duchenne Smiles
●Emotions aren’t always accompanies by facial expressions, so facial expressions
are not an automatic or necessary part of the emotional response
Expressive Behaviors
●Expressive Behaviors: Behaviors of individuals that express or reflect their
internal psychological states
●Can include actions, gestures, body language
●Examples: Running away (fear), hugging someone else or laughing (happiness,
punching (anger), wrapping arms around self (depression)
Document Summary
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