Emotion

Seen in PSYCH101. Also see Emotion. Emotions are affective experiences in response to stimuli that induce goal-directed behaviour.

I talk about some of these ideas in Should you Recycle? Here’s the provocative answer..

Why do emotions exist?

They make sense from an evolutionary perspective.

“Typically emotional responses are adaptive; that is, they promote survival and reproduction. Joy, for example, motivates us to sustain interactions with friends, family, and romantic partners, thereby maintaining close proximity with reproductively important individuals. Fear motivates us to avoid or escape threatening stimuli that could potentially injure or kill us”.

This is super interesting stuff, why humans do what we do.

• Drives are unpleasant internal states that typically result from deprivation (ex: when you’re hungry)
• Incentives are desirable stimuli that motivate us to pursue them (eating even though you’re not hungry because you see a delicious cake)

Drive:

Incentive:

Difference between Mood and Emotion?

Mood is more general, longer lasting, and less intense. You can find the trigger for a particular emotion. But moods are much harder to pin down. Moods are diffuse, longer-lasting emotional states.

Three Components of Emotion

1. Physiological: what is happening in the nervous system during an emotional experience
2. Cognitive Appraisal: participates in determining our emotional experience
3. Behaviour: describes what happens during our emotional expression

Universality of Emotions

I’ve always wondered about this. I’ve heard about how can we measure Pain on a scale?

Emotional experience seems to be universal as are the specific facial expressions associated with basic emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. See Plutchik Wheel of Emotions.

Nevertheless, Culture guides the display rules that determine when and how to express emotion, as well as providing the context that determines what people feel emotional about.

Theories of Emotion

1. Common Sense View
   • stimulus > emotion > arousal
2. James-Lange Theory
   • stimulus > arousal > emotion
3. Cannon-Bard Theory
   • stimulus > emotion & arousal
4. Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory
   • stimulus > arousal > cognition > emotion

Mood

When opportunities are good, we tend to have high mood, which motivates goal-directed behaviour (if things are going well, do more). Conversely, when opportunities are poor, we tend to have low mood, which reduces goal-directed behaviour and conserves resources for a future time when opportunities might be better (if things are going poorly, do less now and wait for things to turn around).

Also see Mood Swing.

What is the point of these low moods? Why can't we be happy all the time?

Often we experience low mood following a significant social setback, such as breaking up with a romantic partner, being dismissed from a job, or losing a significant investment. Rather than try to recover what likely cannot be regained, low mood helps us to disengage from lost goals, and eventually frees us to pursue new ones when opportunities present themselves.

Thus, although unpleasant, low mood serves an important function. Just as physical pain helps us avoid further physical injury, the Emotional Pain we experience with low mood helps us to avoid further social injury. Interestingly, both types of pain are located in the same region of the brain, and opioid painkillers reduce both physical and emotional suffering (Eisenberger, Lieberman, & Williams, 2003).