How are you feeling? Increasingly complex answers to a simple question.
What is an emotion?
- In your text, Dr. Reeve, lays out a framework for considering emotions:
- “Emotions are multidimensional. They exist as subjective, biological, purposive, and expressive phenomena” (p. 287)
- EMOTION (A Distinct Pattern of Neural [Brain] Activity) with four components:
- Feelings
- Subjective experience
- Phenomenological Awareness
- Cognitive Interpretation
- Bodily Responses
- Bodily Preparation for Action
- Physiological Activation
- Changes in Hormonal Activity
- Expressive Behaviors
- Social Signals and Communication
- Facial Expression
- Voice Tone
- Sense of Purpose
- Impulse to Action
- Goal-Directed Motivational State
- Functional Aspect to Coping
- These components interact and influence each other
- Dr. Reeve defines emotion as: “Emotions are short-lived, feeling-purposive-expressive-bodily responses that help us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events.” (p. 288)
- And later elaborates: “Emotion is not any of its individual components but is, instead, what choreographs the feeling, bodily response, purposive, and expressive components into a coherent reaction to an eliciting event.”
- Feelings
- Contrast this with the framework for understanding emotions in Dr. Deckers (2018) discussion:
- “First, an emotion is a functional reaction to a stimulus event or change, such as an actual or anticipated loss or gain” . . . .
- “Second, an emotional reaction is channeled along psychological, physiological, and behavioral dimensions, . . . .
- “Third, these channels operate in synchrony for the purpose of coping and adapting to these stimulus changes”,
- “These channels, however, are external signs of emotion, as shown in Figure 13.1. Emotion is a psychological construct that represents the coherent relationship among these channels as they react and adapt to stimulus change.” (p. 408)
- Emotion: a psychological construct
- Affect (subjective experience): “the private subjective experience that floods consciousness”
- Facial Expression: “another channel for emotions and are associated with affect”
- Physiological arousal: “a salient channel for emotions and occur as changes in electrodermal responses, blood pressure, heart rate, respiration range, skin temperature, and muscle activity”
- Action readiness and behavior: “being prepared to engage in behaviors that will satisfy the aim of the emotion” (p. 408)
- “psychologists view emotion as a psychological construct that serves as a label for the coherence among the various channels.” (p. 408)
- “According to the response coherence postulate (Mauss et al., 2005), the channels that underlie emotions are associated together; they do not act independently.” (p. 408)
- However, there are reasons the channels that represent emotion do not cohere tightly: 1) parts of the environment may affect each channel differently, 2) channels may react with different intensities, 3) coherence may be greater for some emotions than others.
- Emotion: a psychological construct
- Consider, in contract, the position of Dr. LeDoux:
- “For me, the subjective experience–the feeling–is the emotion. These are not hardwired states programmed into subcorical circuits by natural selection, but rather cognitive evaluations of situations that affect personal well-being. They thus require complex cognitive processes and self-awareness.”
- Finally, when I lecture on anxiety (or depression or anger) in other classes, I suggest that these experiences are multifaceted phenomenon with several aspects:
- Physiological, anxiety is usually seen as a state of physiological arousal
- Behavioral, anxiety is associated with escape and avoidance behavior
- Cognitive, anxiety interferes with problems solving, memory, and reason (Alternative, anxiety tends to focus on attention on perceived threat)
- Phenomenological (subjective), anxiety is an aversive (noxious) experience
- These aspects of anxiety (or some other emotion) provide the basis for an assessment of that feeling:
- physiological arousal has been assessed by multiple methods: Galvanic Skin Response, heart rate, perspiration, skin temperature, etc. (and these do not always show coherence: some of us sweat, some of us are more heart rate responders)
- behavioral approach or avoidance can be mesured
- cognitive interference can be evaluated in errors committed in easy items/items well within individual’s ability range
- verbal report or analogue representations of private experience can be obtained
- And, I will note that these aspects or dimensions of anxiety may covary to a greater or lesser degree
- Also, emotional experiences can be considered in terms of other aspects/dimensions
- Duration
- Affect or emotion is usually considered a relatively brief experience
- Fractions of a second to seconds to minutes
- No commonly accepted consensus
- The issue of secondary emotions (emotional reactions to emotions)
- Mood is usually defined as a more enduring or pervasive emotional experience
- Decker defines mood as: “low-intensity negative or positive affect that has no discernible stimulus.
- However psychologists have observed that mood fluctuates with several environmental variable: time of day, day of week, seasons, weather, and sleep.” (p. 431)
- The analogy of weather and season is sometimes invoked
- The distinction parallels the distinction between state (affect) and trait (mood) characteristics
- Temperament and personality are constructs that can also can be seen has reflecting enduring emotional tendencies
- Temperament: easy, slow-to-warm-up, difficult
- Easy: moderate emotional reactions to stimuli, rapid adaptation to change, generally positive mood
- Difficulty: intense emotional reactions, slow adaptation, less consistency in positive mood
- Personality
- Dysthymic Disorder: mild chronic depression, chronically depressed
- Emotionally sensitive personality: hypersensitivity to precipitating stimuli, intense emotional reactions, slow to return to baseline
- Some Personality disorders: Avoidant PD, Borderline PD, Schizoid PD
- Temperament: easy, slow-to-warm-up, difficult
- Affect or emotion is usually considered a relatively brief experience
- Intensity
- mild to strong reactions
- mood ratings and questionnaires (100 mm lines, Beck Depession Inventory, State/Trait Anxiety Inventory, etc.)
- Quality or Valence
- Positive versus negative
- Negative affectivity
- Positive affectivity
- Adaptive versus destructive (nonadaptive)
- Positive versus negative
- Relationship to environmental conditions/life experiences
- Normal and pathological emotions and moods
- emotions are usually adaptive: they help us deal with our world and challenges
- “appropriate affect”: fits the context, a “suitable” reaction to present circumstances
- Pathological states, e.g., pseudobulbar affect: uncontrollable laughing or crying associated with damage to prefrontal cortex; clinical apathy associated with damage to prefrontal cortex
- Mood disorders are defined not only in terms of symptoms but consequences (causes negative impact or significant distress)
- Normal and pathological emotions and moods
- Expressiveness
- How much your emotional experience is communicated to others by gesture, voice tone, body posture, facial expression, speed of response, verbal content
- Deceit and emotional expression
- Primary and Secondary Emotions
- Primary emotions are usually conceptualized as primary or inherited or basic or neurological/physiological or fundamental
- Secondary emotions are conceptualized in different ways:
- As emotional reactions to emotions
- Feeling embarrassed about getting angry or sexually aroused
- As blends of primary emotions
- Subtle combinations of primary emotions
- Joy + surprise = delight
- As involving a cognitive interpretation component (cognitive appraisal)
- “I’m alert, my heart is racing, I can hardly sit still: ‘I am so ready to do this!’”
- As emotional reactions to emotions
- Duration
- Antonio Damasio has focused much of his research on understanding the nature of emotion and the role it plays in the individual and has played in the species. He offers an interesting perspective:
- “Feelings are the very revelation to each individual mind of the status of life with the respective organism, a status expressed along a range that runs from positive to negative. . . . . Feelings and homeostasis relate to each other closely and consistently. Feelings are the subjective experiences of the state of life—that is, of homeostasis—in all creatures endowed with a mind and conscious point of view. We can think of feelings as mental deputies of homeostasis.” (2018, p. 25).
And a final complication: the issue of Qualia
“It is the hardest thing in the world to put feelings, and deep feelings into words.”
Jack London, 1899.
- Philosophers and some cognitive scientists refer to the private, subjective experience as qualia. Emotion words represent affective experiences which are not fully describable by other words.
- How do you explain “red” to a blind individual?
- How do you explain “sweet” or “sour” or “salty”?
- How do you explain “anger” or “sadness” or “joy”?
- The philosopher Daniel Dennett has suggested four properties commonly ascribed to qualia:
- Ineffable: they cannot be communicated or apprehended by any means other than direct experience
- Intrinsic: they are non-relational properties—they do not change depending on the experience’s relation to other things
- Private: interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible
- Directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness: to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale
As we consider theories of emotions and how emotions relate to motivations over the next several classes, reflect on how differences in how emotions are conceptualized/defined may play into the different visions (and conflicts) we discuss.