Human Emotion: What is an emotion?

1. Emotions motivate behaviors

• Push us towards achieving goals
• Help us shy away from dangers & threats

2. Emotions are a social glue

• Bring us towards others
• Keep us in lifelong bonds 

3. Emotions are critical to our health

• Underlie our mental well-being
• Promote physical well-being

Theories of emotion

ANCIENT GREECE- sees emotion in conflict w reason & rationality
Hippocrates: 4 humors (need a balance of all 4)

1. Black bile 
2. Yellow bile
3. Phlegm
4. Blood

Aristotle: Moderation principles
    Finding a balance, not having too much or too little emotion


ENLIGHTENMENT- thought more about what an emotion really is
Decartes

• taxonomy of emotions
• text: Passions of the soul- description of bodily causes, effects, functions

Spinoza
Hume
Darwin

• evolutionary approach
• emotions weren’t irrational but served a survival purpose
• emotions evolved & were not specific to humans

William James: father of psychology

• emotions are secondary to physiological phenomenon
• Stimulus —> physiological response —> emotion
• Ex. Snake —> heart racing —> fear

Cannon-Bard:

• Physiological responses alone cannot explain emotion, they’re too slow
• Stimulus (snake)—> subcortical brain interaction (registering what's happening)—> simultaneous of physiological response & experience/subjective quality of fear

Schacter-Singer: 2 factor theory of emotion

• Appraisal of physiological experiences defines & determines emotional response
• Physiological reaction —> Cognitive evaluation —> Emotion
• Ex. Stage 1: Snake —> Physiological —> Stage 2: Cognitive Elaboration (way you think about what the physiological approach means) —> fear

Lazarus: Cognitive theory: cognition necessary for emotions to occur

• Ex. Snake —> Cognitive thoughts about it —> Physiological —> Emotion
• no emotion w/o cognition

Components of Emotion

• Emotions have a valence (flavor: positive, negative, neutral)
• Have an aboutness (about something, eliciting or intentional object, trigger)
• Serve a purpose or function: vital to our survival, enables pursuit of goals
• Multi-component response

-Subjective experience
-Outward display of behavior (bodily action)
-Physiological aspects (autonomic system)

What an emotion is not

Mood: long lasting state (days, weeks, months); no eliciting object (aboutness)
Feeling: subjective representation of emotion, private experience to individual
Affect: broad, all encompassing umbrella term; refers to general topic of mood, feeling, emotion
Personality trait: stable individual difference
Cognition: do not have facial expressions, not always physiological arousal

Categories of emotion

Basic/Discrete:

• Emotions as discrete categories
• Biologically fixed, universal
• Basic emotions: anger, fear, happiness
• Complex emotions: combination of basic emotions, culturally influenced & constructed
• Theorists: Paul Ekman, Decartes, Silvan Tomkins

Dimensional:

• Combination of several psychological dimensions
• Emotional landscape map: Pleasant, Unpleasant, Anxiety, Boredom
• Wilhelm Wundt, James Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett