Psychology of Emotion

Paula M. Niedenthal, François Ric

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351995719
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the psychology of emotion has grown to become its own field of study. Because the study of emotion draws inspiration from areas of science outside of psychology, including neuroscience, psychiatry, biology, genetics, computer science, zoology, and behavioral economics, the field is now often called emotion science or affective science. A subfield of affective science is affective neuroscience, the study of the emotional brain.

This revised second edition of Psychology of Emotion reviews both theory and methods in emotion science, discussing findings about the brain; the function, expression, and regulation of emotion; similarities and differences due to gender and culture; the relationship between emotion and cognition; and emotion processes in groups.

Comprehensive in its scope yet eminently readable, Psychology of Emotion serves as an ideal introduction for undergraduate students to the scientific study of emotion. It features effective learning devices such as bolded key terms, developmental details boxes, learning links, tables, graphs, and illustrations. In addition, a robust companion website offers instructor resources.

1 Theories of Emotion

Contents at a Glance

• Definitions of Emotion
• Theories of Emotion
• Evolutionary Theories
  • Causes of Emotion: Adaptive Challenges and Opportunities
  • Biological Givens: Basic Emotions
  • The Integration of Experience: Affect Programs
• Appraisal Theories
  • Causes of Emotion: Specific Appraisal Patterns
  • Biological Givens: Valence and Novelty Appraisals
  • The Integration of Experience: Independent Components
• Psychological Constructionism
  • Causes of Emotion: Categorizing Affect Responses
  • Biological Givens: Core Affect
  • The Integration of Experience
• Summary

Imagine what your life would be like if you could not experience emotion. What if you felt no joy at seeing a newborn baby and no pride upon receiving a long worked-for diploma? What if you felt no anger and no fear when you heard that a terrorist attack had occurred in your country? What if you felt no jealousy at seeing a boyfriend or girlfriend flirt with someone else at a party, and you felt no awe when standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon? What would your life be like then? Would we even call it human life? And could human life indeed exist if we felt no emotion?

Perhaps life without emotion would still seem human if you believed that emotions were undesirable states, reflecting animalistic vestiges of our evolutionary past. A theme in philosophy for many hundreds of years was that emotions, or passions as they were sometimes called, were at odds with the more desirable and lofty processes of reason (Solomon, 1976, 1993). A wide range of philosophers, including Plato, the Stoics (Zeno de Citium, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, among others), and Descartes, argued that reasoning and having emotions were antithetical to each other. They viewed reason as a uniquely human achievement and a virtue. In contrast, they viewed emotions as the province of animals (and sometimes women and children!), as primitive drives that interfered with reason. Even in today’s world, people in some cultures consider displays of emotion, particularly in public places, as undesirable and as casting doubt on the psychological health of the person expressing emotions. Of course, in other cultures, public expression of emotion is so commonplace it attracts no attention at all.

These days most emotion scientists believe that emotions are absolutely essential to human life and we could not survive without them (Barrett & Salovey, 2002; Damasio, 1999; Fredrickson, 2001; Keltner & Haidt, 2001; Mehu & Dunbar, 2008; Niedenthal & Brauer, 2012). As you will see throughout this book, emotions hold people together in relationships and social groups; help to determine priorities within relationships; signal to the person experiencing the emotion the state of her relation to the environment; and are an important part of the functional evolution of our nervous systems, attentional processes, decision making, communication, and behavioral regulation.

This textbook introduces you to the psychology of emotion. Because our aim is to show you how hypotheses and predictions about emotion are tested with the tools of science, we will also refer to the science of emotion. In the present chapter you will learn how emotion scientists define emotions as well as the principles of the major theoretical approaches to the topic of emotion. Chapter 2 introduces you to the tools of the science of emotion. You will learn how to induce emotions and measure their occurrence. Part of having emotion involves events that take place in the brain. After learning about methods for imaging the brain, Chapter 3 then introduces you to the main neural circuitry and chemistry that support our emotional responding. We have already noted that emotion scientists believe that emotions are functional, and Chapter 4 shows you how that is so. One of the functions of emotions is to communicate to others, and Chapter 5 discusses the expression of emotion on the face as well as through the body and voice. In Chapters 6 and 7 you will learn about the more complex self-conscious emotions and the very popular emotion of happiness, respectively. Chapter 8 details the many relationships between emotion and other mental processes such as attention, memory, and decision making. Some of the relationships are related to the strategies that people use to control or regulate their emotions, which are summarized in Chapter 9. Lest you think that emotions are a personal affair, Chapter 10 reviews research on how people share emotions in groups and have emotions due to the fact that they are members of groups. And speaking of groups, there is variation in how people express and to some degree experience their emotions as a function of gender (Chapter 11) and culture (Chapter 12) as well.

Because most everyone has emotions, you might feel that you are already an expert on emotion. But scientific findings have a way of surprising you. When it comes to something as important and weighty as emotion, it helps to look at the findings of basic research; you might just learn something about yourself! In order to begin this discovery, though, we need to begin with a definition of our topic.

Definitions of Emotion

In psychology, we find it useful to distinguish between different types of mental states and their associated behaviors. For instance, some scientists study learning, or memory, or perception, or the focus of this book, emotions. In reality, all of these processes are occurring simultaneously and influencing one another so that it can be quite difficult to determine, for instance, where perception “ends” and cognition “begins,” or what behavior is driven by emotion versus some other mental state. It is impossible to truly isolate a single mental process, and most processes, from scratching your nose to falling in love, involve complex neural systems working in synchrony. Similarly, feeling an emotion like fear depends on the ability to perceive something in the world, remember it as a threat, and act to escape it. In turn, an emotion such as fear has powerful influences on the content and structure of other cognitive and behavioral processes. Given how intertwined emotions are with other mental and behavioral states, how do scientists even begin to define them?

A simple way to distinguish between emotions and other mental processes is to consider their function (see Chapter 4). We have big, wrinkly brains that allow us to compose sonnets, raise children, tell jokes, and invent wheels; but none of these cognitively complex tasks would be accomplished if we were not motivated—motivated to survive, have fun, explore, avoid danger, connect with one another, and all the other things we want in life. Emotions are the fire that fuels human behavior and the driving motivational forces in life.

The first step in the science of emotion is settling on a more specific definition of the term. Keltner and Gross define emotions as “episodic, relatively short-term, biologically-based patterns of perception, experience, physiology, action, and communication that occur in response to specific physical and social challenges and opportunities” (Keltner & Gross, 1999, p. 468). This definition is not simple, nor is it accepted by all scientists or interpreted by all scientists in the same way. It does, however, narrow our focus to relatively brief states that arise in response to an object or event. The important thing is that emotions are responses to things, people, and events we encounter in the world and to our own thoughts. They are not affective disorders, personality temperaments, or moods. In addition, this definition acknowledges that emotions can be functional. That is, emotions help people attract the right things and protect themselves from the wrong things. Put in another way, “Emotions are a kind of radar and rapid response system, constructing and carrying meaning across the flow of experience. Emotions are the tools by which we appraise experience and prepare to act on situations” (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004, p. 319).

Theories of Emotion

Before you can evaluate the scientific study of emotion and understand why researchers have conducted research as they have, you need to be familiar with the major theories of emotion. Theories of emotion are testable statements about exactly how emotions come about. To understand what we mean by this, let’s examine a theory that was famously proposed by Schachter and Singer (1962): the Two-Factor Theory of emotion. Schachter and Singer claimed that emotions come about through the combination of 1) autonomic arousal—caused by almost anything; and 2) a label that describes the experience in terms of the current situation. The theory is depicted in Figure 1.1.

As an example of how this theory explains emotions, imagine you and your friend both drink a highly caffeinated beverage that makes you both very aroused, causing your heart rate to increase and your palms to sweat. Now imagine that you are teleported to a wedding in a fun location. Meanwhile, your friend is teleported to the edge of a cliff. The Two-Factor Theory predicts that you would label yourself “happy” and enjoy the full experience of joy, whereas your friend would label herself as “afraid” and experience fear. Your arousal would get labeled by the nature of the circumstances you found yourself in, and an emotion would result. According to the Two-Factor Theory, this is all we need to know about emotions.

Figure 1.1 A schematic diagram of Schachter and Singer’s (1962) Two-Factor Theory of emotion.

Contemporary emotion scientists believe that there is more to emotions than arousal and labels, and we will discuss three other ways to explain how emotions happen. The theories we consider in this chapter are evolutionary theories, appraisal theories, and psychological constructionist theories. To compare the specific ideas and preoccupations of the distinct groups of theories, we need to understand each one’s claim about:

1. 1) The antecedents of an emotion (what causes them)
2. 2) The biological givens (innate emotional capacities)
3. 3) The integration of emotional experience (how components of emotion fit together)

As we investigate theories of emotion in this chapter, keep in mind that the various theories are not equally concerned about addressing each claim. In an oversimplification we could say that, that traditional appraisal theories are most focused on antecedents, evolutionary theories on biological givens, and psychological constructionists on how learning and experience cause the integration of emotional experience. Nonetheless, we will attempt to explain what roles emotion antecedents, biological givens, and integration play in each theory.

Developmental Detail

What Is a Developmental Theory of Emotion?

Developmental theories of emotion both acknowledge that emotional development is partly preprogrammed in the organism and recognize that all aspects of emotion are responsive to the context in which the child is developing. That is, our em...