PSYA01H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8.1: Electrodermal Activity, Blood Sugar, Autonomic Nervous System
8.1 Emotional Experience: The feeling Machine
Leonardo is a 5 year old who experiences no emotions or feelings
You cant explain what love is, but you can explain what causes the feeling and its
consequences
8.2 What is Emotion?
By asking people to rate the similarity of dozens of emotional experiences,
psychologists have been able to use a technique know as multidimensional
scaling
Generate a map of the emotional landscape
Assigning smaller distances to those that feel similar and larger distances to those
that feel dissimilar
This map of emotional experience suggests that any definition of emotion
must include two things: first, the fact that emotional experiences are always
good or bad, and second, the fact that these experiences are associated with
characteristic levels of bodily arousal
Emotion: a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular
pattern or physiological activity
8.3 The Emotional Body
William James suggested that the events that produce an emotion might actually
happen in the opposite order: First you see the bear, then your heart starts
pounding and your leg muscles contract, and then you experience fear, which is
nothing more or less than your experience of your physiological response
James-Lange theory: stimuli trigger activity in the autonomic nervous system,
which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain
Emotional experience is the consequence—and not the cause—of our
physiological reactions to objects and events in the world
Cannon-Bard theory: stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the autonomic
nervous system and emotional experience in the brain
Canon favoured his own theory over the James-Lange theory
First, the autonomic nervous system reacts too slowly to account for the rapid
onset of emotional experience
Second, people often have difficulty accurately detecting changes in their own
autonomic activity, such as heart rate
Third, if non-emotional stimuli- such as temperature- can cause the same pattern
of autonomic activity that emotional stimuli do
James and Lange were right, they claimed, to equate emotion with the perception
of one’s bodily reactions
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Document Summary
Leonardo is a 5 year old who experiences no emotions or feelings. You cant explain what love is, but you can explain what causes the feeling and its consequences. By asking people to rate the similarity of dozens of emotional experiences, psychologists have been able to use a technique know as multidimensional scaling. Generate a map of the emotional landscape. Assigning smaller distances to those that feel similar and larger distances to those that feel dissimilar. Emotion: a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern or physiological activity. James-lange theory: stimuli trigger activity in the autonomic nervous system, which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain. Emotional experience is the consequence and not the cause of our physiological reactions to objects and events in the world. Cannon-bard theory: stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the autonomic nervous system and emotional experience in the brain. Canon favoured his own theory over the james-lange theory.
