Phychology - Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Emotion -- a state of arousal involving facial and bodily changes, brain activation, cognitive appraisals, subjective feelings, and tendencies toward action, all shaped by cultural rules
primary emotions -- emotions considered to be universal and biologically based; they generally include fear, anger, sadness, joy, surprise, disgust, and contempt
secondary emotions -- emotions that develop with cognitive maturity and vary across individuals and cultures
facial feedback -- the process by which the facial muscles send messages to the brain about the basic emotion being expressed
display rules -- social and cultural rules that regulate when, how, and where a person may express (or must suppress) emotions
emotion work -- expression of an emotion that the person does not really feel, often because of a role requirement

Summary

Emotion and cognition are not "opposites" with one being "irrational" and the other "rational." Emotions find people together, regulate relationships, motivate people to achieve their goals, and help them make plans and decisions. The experience of emotion and bolts psychological changes in the brain, face, and autonomic nervous system; cognitive processes; and cultural norms and regulations.

Elements of emotion 1: the body

Primary emotions are those that appear to be inborn and universal; they have corresponding psychological patterns and facial expressions. Secondary emotions include all the variations and lens of emissions and may vary across cultures.
Some basic facial expressions -- anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise, contempt -- are widely recognized across cultures. They probably evolved to foster communications with others, enhance infant survival, and signal our intentions to others. As studies of facial feedback shadow, they also help us to identify our own emotional state. Facial expressions can also generate emissions and others and produced unconscious mimickry, which can create mood contagion.

Certain facial expressions may be universal, but all of them take place in social context, which is why people don't always agree, across and within cultures, on what a given expression conveys. Familiarity affects the ability to read facial expressions accurately; cultures differ in the attention they pay to the social context of emotion; facial expressions may have different meanings in different contexts; and people often use facial expressions to lie about their real emotions.

Many aspects of emotion are associated with specific parts of the brain. Damage to certain areas, for example, may affect a person's ability to feel disgust. The right side of the brain is important for processing emotional feeling whereas the left is active in processing emotional meaning. The amygdala is responsible for initially evaluating the emotional importance of incoming sensory information, and is especially involved in fear. The pre-frontal cortex provides a cognitive ability to override this initial appraisal. He motions generally involve the motivation to approach or withdrawal: Regents of the left prefrontal cortex appear to be specialized for the motivation to approach others (as with happiness and anger), whereas Regents of the right prefrontal region are specialized for withdrawal or escape (as with disgust and fear). Parts of the prefrontal cortex are also involved in regulating emotions and keeping them on an even keel.

During the experience of any emotion, epinephrine and norepinephrine produce a state of psychological arousal to prepare the body for an output of energy. But differing emotions are associated with different biochemical responses and different patterns of autonomic nervous system activity.

Elements of emotion 2: the mind

Schachter and Singer's theory of emotion held that emotions result from arousal and the labeling or interpretation of that arousal. Research spurred by this there he has investigated the cognitive processes involved in emotion, such as the attributions people make a bow a year and the way people interpret and evaluate events. The cognitions involved in emotion range from immediate perceptions of a specific event to one's philosophy of life.

Thoughts and emotions operate reciprocally, each influencing the other. Some emotions, such as those that appear in infancy or that reflect conditioned responses to emotional symbols, involve simple, nonconscious reactions. Others, such a shame and guilt, require complex cognitive abilities and the emergence of a sense of self. In any emotional counter, cognitions and appraisals are constantly changing, affecting the emotions the participants feel.

Elements of emotion 3: the culture

Many psychologists believe that all human beings share the ability to experience primary emotions, where a secondary emotions made the call Pacific -- a view supported by research on emotion prototypes. But cultural psychologists believe that culture affects every aspect of emotional experience, including which emotions are considered basic. All researchers agree that cultural affects every aspect of emotional experience, including which emotions are considered basic. All researchers agree that culture affects the people feel emotional about.

Culture strongly influences the display rules that regulate how and whether people express their emotions. Emotion work is the effort a person makes to display an emotion he or she does not feel but feels obligated to convey. People also convey emotions through body language, and the ability to synchronize moods through nonverbal cues is important for establishing rapport and interacting smoothly.

Putting elements together: emotion and gender

Women and men are equally likely to feel all emissions, from love to anger. Many men seem to be more psychologically reactive to conflict that women are, however, and the sex is sometimes differ in the perceptions and attributions that generate you mentioned and emotional intensity. Although women are thought to be better than men at reading another person's emotional state, gender is less important than other factors: whether the two individuals are the same sex, how well they know each other, the senders expressiveness, which person has more power in the situation, and whether the two people hold stereotypes about gender.

Men and women differ primarily in expressiveness -- and the display rules they follow for expressing emotions, which vary across cultures. In North America, women or more likely than men to cry and to reveal feelings of fear, sadness, guilt, and loneliness; men are more likely to deny or mask such feelings of "weakness." North American Man express one emotion more freely than women: anger toward strangers. But gender differences in expressiveness depend on gender roles, cultural norms, and the specific situation. Both sexes are less expressive to a person of higher status than they, both sexes will the "emotion work" their job requires, and some situations foster expressiveness in everybody.

The example of gender and emotion shows that to understand the full experience an expression of emotion, we must understand biology, cognitive attributions and perceptions, and cultural rules. Examining just one component gives an incomplete picture.