Chapter 11: Emotion, Stress and Health
The Nature of Emotion
Emotion: a state of arousal involving facial and bodily changes (face, brain, body), brain
activation, cognitive appraisals (such as interpretation of events), subjective feelings and
tendencies toward actions
Emotion as a tree: biological capacity for emotion is the trunk & root system;
thoughts and explanations create the many branches; and culture is the gardener
that shapes the tree
Emotion & The Body
Primary emotions: emotions that are considered to be universal and biologically-based –
fear, sadness, joy, anger, surprise, disgust & contempt
These emotions have distinctive physiological patterns & corresponding facial
expressions & situations that evoke them are the same everywhere
Secondary emotions: emotions that are specific to certain cultures
Facial Expressions
Charles Darwin said that human facial expressions are innate & were develop because they
allowed our ancestors to tell between a friendly stranger & a hostile one
Some researchers have argued that pride is a basic human emotion; its adaptive
function is to motivate people to achieve and excel thereby increasing their
attractiveness
Facial feedback: the process by which the facial muscles send messages to the brain about
the basic emotion being expressed – facial expressions influence our feelings
Babies (at the end of their first year) begin to alter their own behaviour in reaction to
their parents’ facial expressions e.g. In visual cliff study, if the parents looked
scared, no baby would cross the cliff, but if they had a happy expression, 74% did
People are better at identifying emotions expressed by others in their own
ethnic/national/regional group than of foreigners
The Brain Various parts involved with recognizing a person’s emotion, feeling a specific
emotion, expressing an emotion & acting on an emotion
People who’ve had a stroke & damaged brain are unable to feel some emotions
Emotions motivate a response: to embrace person that makes you happy, attack a
person who makes you angry, withdraw from food that disgusts you, etc
o Prefrontal regions involved in these impulses
RIGHT prefrontal region specialized to withdraw or escape (disgust or
fear)
LEFT specialized for the motivation to approach others (happiness, and
anger)
People with greater-than-avg activation of left areas have more
positive feelings, quicker ability to recover from and suppress negative
emotions
Prefrontal cortex also involved in regulation of emotion, helping us
modify & control feelings & responding appropriately to others –
damage in this area blunts the sufferers ability to respond to emotions
of others
o Amygdala: responsible for evaluating sensory info, determining emotional
importance & making decision to approach/withdraw from a person/situation
(e.g. getting startled when you feel a hand on your back in a dark alley)
o Cerebral cortex generates more complete picture – can override signals sent
by amygdala (e.g. fear evaporates when you realize its your friend)
o If damaged, people can’t recognize fear in others & may have difficulty
turning off their own fear responses
Neurons
Mirror neurons: brain cells that fire when a person or animal observes others carrying out an
action; they are involved in empathy, imitation & reading emotions – respond only when
action is intentional
Enable us to identify with what others are feeling, understand others’ intentions &
imitate actions/gestures (e.g. feeling empathy when you see someone in pain)
Mirror neurons are the underlying mechanism for human empathy, nonverbal rapport
& mood contagion
Happiness is like a collective phenomenon The Energy of Emotion
Once brain areas associated with emotions are activated, next stage is the release of
hormones to enable you to respond quickly
When under stress/feeling intense emotion sympathetic division of autonomic
nervous system tells adrenal glands to release epinephrine & norepinephrine
(produce arousal & alertness) pupils dilate, blood pressure increases, breathing
speeds up
Different emotions account for different physiological patterns of brain activity &
autonomic nervous system activity (heart rate, electrical conductivity of the skin &
finger temperature)
Lie Detecting: invalid
No physiological patterns of autonomic arousal are specific to lying – can only sense
things that identify an emotion of fear, anger, excitement, other signs of stress
Lie detector MRIs: not accurate because part of brain that lights up when lying also
light up in memory, self-awareness and self-monitoring
Emotion & The Brain
“people do not become angry or sad or ecstatic because of actual events, but because of
their explanations of those events” – Stoic philosophers
We often think ourselves into an emotional state
Schachter-Singer theory: males crossed a scary bridge & a stable not-scary bridge –
males on scary bridge found the woman more attractive & more of them called her
for a second date they associated the arousal with the woman, but if she wasn’t
there, they would’ve associated it with fear
Third place medalists are happier than silver medalists because they think “Wow look
at how many people I beat! I’m glad I got a medal” whereas silver medalists think “I
could’ve gotten first”
Cognitions & physiology are inextricably linked to the experience of emotion.
Thoughts affect emotion emotions influence thoughts Emotion & Culture
How Culture Shapes Emotions
Difference between primary emotions & more complex cultural variations is reflected
in language all over the world
Primary emotions are prototypes of “emotion”, they are what children first learn
when they learn of emotions
Other psychologists say there is NO aspect of any emotion that is not influenced by
culture or context, that clearly separates one emotion from another
o Anger may be universal, but the way it is experienced (good or bad, useful or
destructive) varies from culture to culture
Cultures determine what people feel emotional ABOUT
Communicating Emotions
Display rules: social and cultural rules that regulate when, how and where a person may
express or suppress emotions (e.g. Germans smile less than Americans in business meetings)
Display rules govern body language: nonverbal signals of body movement, posture,
gesture
They tells us how and when to show an emotion we do not feel (e.g. sadness at
funerals, happiness at weddings, affection with relatives)
Emotion work: acting out an emotion we do not really feel because we believe it is socially
appropriate (e.g. flight attendants must seem happy even when annoyed)
Gender and Emotion
No evidence to suggest that one sex feels any of the everyday emotions more often
than the other
Major difference between sexes has to do with how and when their emotions are
expressed & how they are perceived by others
Males associated with anger; females associated with happy affects how they are
perceived in business situations
Females on average smile more than men, gaze at listeners more, have more
emotionally expressive faces, touch others more, etc
Females are more likely to express emotions that reveal vulnerability and weakness
(e.g. fear, sadness, loneliness, shame, guilt) Both sexes do similar emotional work when the situation requires it
Which sex is more emotional? Sometimes men, sometimes women, and sometimes
neither, depending on the circumstances & cultural context
The Nature of Stress
Stress and The Body
General adaptation syndrome: according to Hans Selye, a series of physiological reactions
to stress occ
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