Negative Emotions

7 Key excerpts on "Negative Emotions"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Encyclopedia of Social Psychology

  • Roy F. Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs, Roy Baumeister, Kathleen D. Vohs(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  Researchers who prefer to think about positive and negative affect as superfactors are in this camp. An interesting finding is that there are many more Negative Emotions than there are positive emotions. It seems humans are constructed in such a way that there are only a few ways to feel positive but many ways to feel negative. For example, negative affect includes such emotions as anxiety, anger, fear, distress, guilt, embarrassment, sadness, disgust, and shame. All of these Negative Emotions may have distinguishable feeling states; anger feels different from anxiety, for example. Nevertheless, anger and anxiety are both negative. Plus, the empirical finding is that at a trait level, these Negative Emotions tend to correlate with each other. Researchers who believe in the dimen-sional approach find it useful to consider all Negative Emotions under the single dimension of negative affect and all positive emotions under the single dimension of positive affect. Background and History During the early parts of psychology’s history, emo-tion was a topic that received very little attention. When it was considered at all, emotion was thought of as disregulated cognition, as dysfunctional forms of mental activity. Starting in the late 1970s, psychology began a fresh consideration of emotion. At this time, positive and negative affect were thought of as sepa-rate ends of a single bipolar continuum. That is, it was thought that the more a person had of one emotion type, the less they had of the other. In fact, measures of positive and negative affect at this time were con-structed in such a way that they ensured positive and negative affect would not be independent. It was sim-ply felt at the time that positive and negative affect were the opposite sides of the same coin. In the mid-1980s researchers began to question this view.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Emotional Imprints of War

  A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Emotions in Dutch Parliamentary Debates, 1945-1989

  • Milan van Lange(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bielefeld University Press

    (Publisher)

  2. Emotions 2.1 Defining Emotion ‘Emotion’ is like ‘language’ or ‘freedom’: These concepts are supposedly well known to the extent that their everyday use is often taken for granted. 1 As human beings, we are quite familiar with emotional states, ranging from negative ones associated with anger, fear, disgust, and sadness to positive states like joy, trust, and love. Yet what is emotion? Some people say that football is emotion. Defining emotion more precisely is however difficult. If there is one thing that the many attempts to arrive at a definition of emotion in various academic disciplines show, it is that definitions of the words ‘emotion’, ‘emotions’, and ‘emotionality’ are subject to disagreement, changing perspectives, and cultural and linguistic differences. Debates about emo- tions are complex and filled with ambiguities and diverging nuances. In addition, it remains difficult to distinguish between emotion and feeling, or between emotion and mood, affect, passion, or sentiment. These distinctions are discussed within a wide range of disciplines, and show how difficult it is to provide a fixed definition. 2 Before investigating the role of emotions in historical sources, this chapter explores the definition of emotion as an object of research in more detail. Emotions are triggered by external or internal stimuli. On the individual level, emotional responses and expressions result from appraisals of these stimuli. 3 Per- sonal emotions are a complex of neuro-physical, social, and cultural actions and re- actions. 4 In psychology,‘affect’ is often considered as unconscious and embodied (in facial expressions, for example), whereas ‘emotion’ is more consciously anchored in 1 Lucia Omondi, ‘Dholuo Emotional Language: An Overview’, in The Language of Emotions, ed. Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997), 88; Gregory and Åhäll, ‘Introduction: Mapping Emotions, Politics and War’, 3.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  The Science and Application of Positive Psychology

  • Jennifer S. Cheavens, David B. Feldman(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  This suggests that someone could be high on both positive and negative affectivity (i.e., the person tends to frequently experience both positive and Negative Emotions), low on both positive and negative affectivity (i.e., the person does not tend to frequently experience either positive or negative emo- tions), or anywhere in between. The Broaden and Build Theory of Positive Emotions One primary question in the study of positive affective experiences is whether posi- tive emotions have different functions than do “negative” emotions, such as sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and shame. At the most global level, theorists have hypothesized that positive affective experiences (including positive sensations, emotions, moods, and affectivity) function to increase approach behavior in a given environment or Think about a time in your life when you had a high- arousal, positively valenced emotional experience. Now, think about a time in your life when you had a low- arousal, positively valenced emotional experience. Would you describe yourself as “happy” during both of those times? How does the arousal level of our typical emotional experience relate to how we judge whether we are happy? Source: Hector Christiaen / Alamy Stock Photo 52 POSITIVE FEELINGS AND STATES reinforce a particular behavior. In other words, positive affective experiences help to ensure that an organism or person will approach, explore, and engage with the environment, including its novel aspects, as well as ensure that we engage in behav- iors that are good for us. In this way, we are likely to eat food that we find pleas- urable, try to solve problems that we find interesting, and engage with people we enjoy. Alternatively, negative affective experiences are believed to lead to avoidance behaviors. For example, you are likely to decline foods that have made you ill, limit your time with people who hurt you, and avoid places that are threatening.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning

  • Sanna Jarvela(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier

    (Publisher)

  Not all these aspects of emotion are uncontested, of course, but they fall under the common sense notion of emotion and the emotional lives of persons. Emotions are generally thought to be organized in that they are discrete (particu-larly in childhood) and they have their own natural his-tory: certain situations and thoughts, as well as expressions and states of the body, are universally constitutive of Cognition and Emotion 71 specific emotions presumably because of our evolutionary origins (Darwin, 1872/1899; Ekman, 1999 in Dalgleish and Power, 1999; Lazarus, 1991). Finally, emotions are interrelated states and processes of the mind (e.g., subjec-tive experience of happiness about or of something), of the body (heart rate changes, respiration rate, muscle tension, pupil dilatation, etc.), and of the culture (e.g., the social and cultural norms related to the feeling of anger). In the foregoing discussion, we have provided a sketch of emotion that is clearly cognitive in some sense: That is, the inherent aboutness of emotion entails that an emotion has cognitive content. For example, we are scared of the ferocious dog or happy about recent political events. The object of an emotion (e.g., the ferocious dog) and the beliefs on which an emotion is founded (e.g., that ferocious dogs may do us an injury) have a conceptual rather than a causal relation to the emotion (see Solomon, 2000 in Lewis and Haviland-Jones (2000) for a discus-sion). In the following sections, however, we take as a starting point the historical assumption that emotion and cognition may be treated as separable phenomena that may stand in a cause or effect relations to one another – an assumption that may ultimately unravel. Before we embark on this discussion, however, consider some research that suggests that emotional responses can occur before there is time for any cognitive processing (even unconscious).

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Positive Psychology

  Exploring the Best in People [4 volumes]

  • Shane J. Lopez(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  STUDY OF POSITIVE EMOTION AS AN EMERGING FIELD An explanation of how positive emotion can improve health and add years to one’s life is relatively simple. Negative emotion, stress, and anxiety elevate cardiovascular activity and reduce immune responses. Positive emo- tion hastens the return to baseline for these functions. An appreciation of the historical perspective on the study of emotion is helpful in understand- ing why the study of positive emotion is now emerging and allows recom- mendations to be made as to where future study in the field is needed. The study of basic emotions had virtually disappeared from social scien- ces by the early 1940s. Darwin (1872) had proposed that the facial expres- sion of basic emotions had evolved from functional facial actions which, in modern man, served to provide information about inner states of emotion. Those who first tested this theory assumed that facial expressions had evolved and that the link between elicitor and expression was innately wired, occurred automatically, and would be difficult or impossible to mod- ify or suppress. Further, they assumed that since the facial expressions of anger, fear, disgust, and sadness occurred spontaneously, they would be duplicated when performed deliberately or when a past emotional event was relived. Likewise, they assumed that observers would see universal facial expressions of emotion when a basic emotion was aroused. When these investigators failed to find uniformity between performed target emotional expressions and judgments of the intended emotional facial expressions, they concluded that there were neither universal facial expressions of emo- tion nor innate emotions. While the study of basic emotions virtually disappeared during this time, studies of non-specific negative emotional arousal continued by researchers in psychosomatic medicine.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  The Emotions

  A Philosophical Introduction

  • Julien Deonna, Fabrice Teroni(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2    The diversity and unity of emotions

  In the previous chapter, we highlighted the diversity of the affective domain by drawing attention to some important differences between the emotions and other affective phenomena. In the present chapter, we turn to an examination of the diversity within the category of emotion. We shall inquire whether there are important differences amongst the phenomena that we call emotions, and, if so, whether this casts doubts on the fundamental unity of this category. To do so, we have to examine more closely some of the important distinctions that can be made within the narrower domain of emotions. We shall start by considering some distinctions, primarily those between positive and Negative Emotions and between conscious and unconscious emotions, contrasts within the domain that in our opinion do not threaten the unity of the category as a whole. Next, we shall turn our attention to another distinction, that between basic and nonbasic emotions, which structures many current debates about the emotions. Since it has been argued that this distinction puts into question the unity and theoretical interest of the common-sense category of emotion, our discussion culminates with an evaluation of this suggestion.

  Positive and Negative Emotions

  A first distinction that structures our intuitive grasp of the emotional domain is that between positive and Negative Emotions. Intuitively, sadness, fear, disgust, shame, and regret count as negative, while joy, admiration, pride, and amusement count as positive. In this context philosophers and psychologists speak of the ‘polarity’ or ‘valence’ of emotions. Accounting for this central aspect of emotional phenomena has typically taken one of two forms: we may approach valence in hedonic or in conative terms.

  The hedonic approach has it that the various kinds of emotions are to be classed as positive or negative in virtue of ‘what it is like’ to experience them. The idea here, one that already surfaced in our brief discussion of the phenomenology of the emotions in Chapter 1 , is that each kind of emotion is among other things essentially a kind of pleasure or displeasure, pleasure and displeasure being considered as irreducible, phenomenological qualities (hence the talk in terms of the positive or negative hedonic quality of an emotion). This is perfectly compatible with the idea that certain kinds of emotions are hedonically ambivalent (e.g., nostalgia and scorn). A strong version of this view would then consist in claiming that each emotion-type

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Adolescent psychosocial development in Brno

  An ELSPAC Study 2005–2011

  • Stanislav Ježek, Lenka Lacinová, Petr Macek, Stanislav Ježek, Lenka Lacinová, Petr Macek(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Masarykova univerzita

    (Publisher)

  This prevalence of Negative Emotions is accompanied by the higher visibility of Negative Emotions to adults, especially to the parents. With some generalization we can hypothesize that the negative moods will more probably keep the adolescent home whereas positive moods give him or her more energy 114 to go out. Also, considering the regulation and expression of affect are under development, the displays of uncontrolled Negative Emotions are much more visible and memorable than is the case with uncontrolled positive emotions. The prevalence and visibility of Negative Emotions in adolescence had established Negative Emotions as normal development in adolescence, which, according to Petersen et al. (1993, p. 155) had two major effects on research and practice: „Difficulties during adolescence were not considered as an important developmental variation, and (b) adolescent problems were often not treated because of the belief that the adolescent would grow out of them.”. This means the generally perceived ubiquity of emotion and especially negative emotion in adolescence has been taken for granted and obscures our perception of problems associated with emotions. To start to discriminate properly between normal levels of negative emotionality in adolescence we need to know just how much negative affect there is and what is the inter-individual variability in negative affect. This chapter aims to statistically describe the development of two types of Negative Emotions: depressed mood and fear. Using longitudinal data allows us to also describe the development of the levels of Negative Emotions over the period of middle and late adolescence (ages 13 to 19). Adolescents themselves often like to talk about being depressed and with the rise of the „Emo” scene providing visual symbols of depression it may appear that being depressed is actually a normative part of this life period.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book