PSYC14H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 10: Natya Shastra, Anna Wierzbicka, Display Rules
CHAPTER 10 – Emotions
WHAT IS AN EMOTIONS?
Emotions are a focal part of our subjective world
THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTIONS
James proposed that emotions are the physiological response or bodily
reverberations to stimuli in the world
Lange proposed that those physiological responses were products of the autonomic
nervous system (ex. change in heart rate, breathing, pupil dilation etc)
James-Lange Theory of Emotions – maintains that our bodies respond to stimuli
in the world by preparing us to react in a survival facilitating way (ex. such as
running away from something scary)
James felt that each specific emotion word is the description of a different bodily
state
oEmbarrassment is the result of blood rushing to the face, fear is the sensation
of a beating heart etc
Since the theory was first proposed, there has been much research on it and the
James theory of emotion has been expanded in many ways so that emotions are not
only physiological experiences but also appraisals, non-verbal expressions, neural
patterns and subjective feelings
THE TWO FACTOR THEORY OF EMOTIONS
The James-Lange theory was criticized since apparently the ANS seemed to slow
and clumsy to be able to differentiate into all the emotional states that people
experience
Two-Factor Theory of Emotions – rather than seeing emotions as primarily
consisting of physiological responses, it was thought that emotions are mainly the
interpretations of the bodily responses – took the focus of emotions away from the
body and towards the mind
study was done and they found that the emotional experience came from participants
interpreting their arousal in light of their beliefs of the situation that they were in
if the same physiological information can be interpreted as either euphoria or anger
which are two very diff emotions, this suggests that people do not have fine tuned
awareness to their bodily sensations – research has shown that people look to cues
from the environment to help them label their physical sensation
James-Lange theory suggests an evolutionary origin to human emotions since
according to that theory our emotions are specific biological signals that alert ppl to
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events in the world and so overtime since these signals were adaptive, they were
retained in the genetic code
Two-factor theory of emotions suggest that in addition to a physiological basis,
emotions are grounded in belief systems that shape people’s interpretations. Because
belief systems are influenced a great deal by culture, the two factor theory suggests
that physiological signals in different ways across cultures
DOES EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE VARY ACROSS CULTURES?
EMOTIONS AND FACIAL EXPRESSIONS
Facial expressions are a means to communicate with others and many other ways of
communicating are dependent on what people learn in their cultures
Facial expressions are also very reflexive which suggests that its part of our
biological makeup since babies can make them as well and even blind people who
have never seen them before
Charles Darwin was one of the first ppl to consider whether emotional facial
expressions are common across all people of the world – if they are, this would suggest
that facial expression evolved as a product of natural selection – probably as a way to
communicate information before our species were capable of language
Did an experiment where they took images of 6 diff emotional facial expressions that
were easily recognized by Americans and showed it to ppl in Argentina, Brazil, Chile,
Japan and the US to see if they recognized the emotion correctly – did so about 80 –
90% of the time which provides support for emotion being a universal thing
oOne problem with this finding was that while these cultures were different,
they were all similar in the sense that they all learned to express emotions
with their faces in a very similar way
oso to test whether emotional facial expressions rlly is a universal thing, they
needed to do it across cultures that didn’t have much exposure to other
cultures
oChose a culture (Fore of the highlands of New Guinea) where they had
almost no exposure to the western world and investigated whether they
expressed similar emotional facial expressions – he found that they did
oThe researcher’s study provided strong evidence some facial expressions are
universally similar around the world
it was proposed that there is a set of basic emotions that are universally recognized
around the world – set includes at least six emotions: anger, fear, happiness,
sadness, surprise and disgust
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debate over whether other emotions such as contempt, shame, embarrassment and
interest are universally recognized and should be added to the list
pride is another emotion that is debated but pride expression involves the whole
body
Even with a basic emotion like happiness, there is SOME cultural variability
When shows pictures of posed facial expressions of the basic emotions, there are
some cultural differences – some cultures performed better than others – ex.
Americans that spoke English and were of Euro-American descent did better at
identifying emotions on American actors than Indo-European language speakers
(Greek, Swedish, Spanish etc) which did better than non-Indo-European speakers
(Fore and Dani of New Guinea)
Meta-analysis reveals that people are about 90% more accurate in judging the facial
expressions of people from their own culture than those of another culture
oIf you show someone a picture of a person’s eyes only, and ask them to
guess the person’s emotion, people tend to do better when that person is
from their own culture than if they were not
Brain imaging has been used with this kind of study as well and it
had been found that fear activation is greater when the person in the
picture is showing fear and they are from the same culture as the
participant
oIn general, people are better at predicting the emotional expressions of
people they have been exposed to more
oAnother ex. straight men were more accurate in judging the sexual
orientation of men just by looking at their faces if they had a lot of past
experience with gay men
Americans can identify is a person is from the US or Australia, Japanese or Japanese-
American, if the person is expressing an emotion.
People of lower socioeconomic background are more accurate at identifying facial
expressions of emotions. People of lower status attend more closely to what those of
relatively higher status might be thinking and feeling.
People do not express all of the feelings they are experiencing and modulate the feelings
shown on one’s face varies across cultures.
Japanese people are more likely to conceal emotions they feel are potentially
disruptive by presenting a more neutral or pleasant face than Americans.
The eye muscles are hard to control and so they are the most honest about how that
person is feeling.
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Document Summary
Emotions are a focal part of our subjective world. James proposed that emotions are the physiological response or bodily reverberations to stimuli in the world. Lange proposed that those physiological responses were products of the autonomic nervous system (ex. change in heart rate, breathing, pupil dilation etc) James-lange theory of emotions maintains that our bodies respond to stimuli in the world by preparing us to react in a survival facilitating way (ex. such as running away from something scary) James felt that each specific emotion word is the description of a different bodily state: embarrassment is the result of blood rushing to the face, fear is the sensation of a beating heart etc. Since the theory was first proposed, there has been much research on it and the. James theory of emotion has been expanded in many ways so that emotions are not only physiological experiences but also appraisals, non-verbal expressions, neural patterns and subjective feelings.
