Emotion

1. Emotion • James-Lange Theory: Arousal comes before Emotion. We feel afraid because we tremble. • Cannon-Bard: Our bodies' responses--heart rate, perspiration,body temperature--are too similar, and change too slowly, so that we must experience bodily responses and emotions simultaneously. • Hohmann, 1966: Veterans with high spinal cord injuries found their emotional reactions much less intense than previous, but found an increase in emotional reactions above the injury, an example being a lump in the throat. • Schacter-Singer Two-Factor Theory: Arousal spills over from one emotional event to another, therefore there must be physical arousal and cognitive appraisal. • Sinclair et al. 1994: A stirred-up state can be experienced as one emotion or another, depending on how we interpret and label it. Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it. (m 476 c 462) • Fig. 35.1 The brain's pathways for emotions: Zajonc, LeDoux, Lazarus. (m 477 c f12.1 463)

2. Cognition and Emotion • Zajonc, 1984: We have many emotional reactions apart from, or even before, our interpretation of a situation. (m 476 c 462) • Zeelenberg et al., 2006: Automatic sensitivity radar for emotional situations. Subliminally flashed stimuli can prime us to feel better or worse about a follow-up stimulus.(m 476 c 462) • Ledoux, 2002: Fig. 35.1 Our brains have two pathways for emotions. Amygdala reactions may be so fast that we are unaware of what has happened.(m 477 c f 12.1 f 463) • Whalen et al., 2004: Fig. 35.2 Even when fearful eyes were flashed too briefly for subjects to consciously perceive them, fMRI scans revealed their hypervigilant amydalae were alerted.(m 477 c 463 f 12.2) • Memorize Fig. 35.3 (m 478 c 464) • Memorize Table 35.1 (m 478 c 464)

3. Embodied Emotion Fig. 35.4 : Like a crisis control centre, the autonomic nervous system arouses the body in a crisis and calms it when danger passes. (m 479 c f12.4 465) Fig. 35.5: Performance peaks at lower levels of difficult tasks, and at higher levels for easy or well-learned tasks. Compare different types of music--an improvised jazz solo to a choreographed pop performance. (m 480 c f 12.5 466) Barrett, 2006: Discerning physiological differences among fear, anger and sexual arousal are very difficult. Different emotions do not have sharply distinct biological signatures. (m 480 c 466) For example, the neural centre called the insula is activated when we experience social emotions such as lust, pride or disgust. (Sapolsky, 2010 m 480 c 466)). Finger temperatures and hormone secretions that accompany fear and rage do sometimes differ. Fear and joy stimulate different facial muscles. We will study this in depth when we attempt to artificially create a true or Duchenne smile.

4. Mood and Hemisphere Depression-prone people, and those with generally negative personalities, show more right frontal-lobe activity. Positive personalities, such as persistently goal-directed adults, show more activity in the left frontal lobe. Compared with observers watching angry faces, those watching and subtly mimicking fearful faces show more activity in their amygdala. (Whalen et al., 2001 m 480 c 467) Drake & Myers, 2006: The more a person's baseline frontal lobe activity tilts left, the more upbeat the personality.(m 481 c 467) Paul Ekman and Lie Detection (2003) Eyeblinks decrease during the cognitive demands of lying, and increase afterward. (m 482 c 469) Fig. 35.7 ( m 482 c f 12.7 469) Lying causes changes in the patterns of activity between the left frontal lobe and the anterior cingulate cortex (which becomes active when the brain exhibits truth-telling). This change does not mean that we have located a lie, but simply the wobbling between truth and fiction.