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Lecture 18:  ch. 10—Emotions II

How are you feeling?  Increasingly complex answers to a simple question.

Theories of Emotions

  • Bottom-up theories
    • Peripheralist theories (or somatic theories)
    • James-Lange
      • William James in 1884
      • Carl Lange in 1885
      • Independently proposed the first “scientific” theory of emotion
      • Emotion occurs are a result of our interpretation of  physiological reactions
      • reaction to events:  I see a bear, my heart beats fast, I am running away:  I am afraid [note the phrase “our interpretation” above]
    • facial-Feedback Theory of Emotion
      • Emotions tied to facial muscles
        • half smile
      • Hurley, Dennett, & Adams (2013) have proposed an interesting theory of humor, that it evolved as a mechanism uto allow or brain to reset in recognition that an error of cognitive processing had occurred (Pieget’s accommodation)
    • Antonio Damasio sees affect (“feelings”) arrising from three causes:
      • a) “the background flow of life processes in our organisms, which are experiened as spontaneous or homeostatic feelings”
      • b) “the emotive responses triggered by processing myriad sensory stimuli such as tastes, smells, tactile, auditory, and visual stimuli, the experience of which is one of the sources of qualia”
      • c) “the emotive respones resulting from engaging drives (such as hunger or thirst) or motivations (such as lust or play) or emotions, in the more conventional sense of the term which are action programs activated by confrontation with numerous and sometimes complex situations; examples of emotions include joy, sadness, fear, anger, envy, jealousy, contenmpt, compassion, and admiration.” (2018, pp99-100)
      • for Damasio feelings always are always conscious: “Feelings are mental experiences, and by definition they are conscious”, “Feelings protray the organism’s interior–the sate of internal organs and internal operations” inbued with a special trait called valence” “inevitably reveals the condition as good, bad, or somewhere inbetween.” (p. 102)
    • These types of theories are consistent with “basic emotions” views
  • Centralist theories
    • Cannon-Bard Theory
    • Walter Cannon objected to several features of the James-Lange model”
      • I We can experience physiological reactions without emotion
        • my heart rate is up because I’ve been exercising
      • II. Emotional responses occur to rapidly to be byproducts of physical state
    • Cannon proposed in the 1920s and Philip Bard expanded in the 1930s that we feel emotions and experience physiological reactions simultaneously
    • LeDoux similarly identifies emotions as our concious expereince of feelings (and views these as independent of the unconsious survival circuits that drive behavior).
    • These types of view are consistent with “contructed emotions” views
  • Basic Emotion theories
    • Tracy & Randles (2011) Argue that all basic emotion theories agree that 1) a basic emotion should be discrete, have a fixed set of neural and bodily expressed components, fixed feeling or motivational component; 2) cross-species generalization is an indicator (but not necessary); 3) show neurons dedicated to the emotion’s activation.  That there is general agreement that basic emotions are psychologically primitive (this may be seen as originating in subcortical brain structures, or as occurring with minimal cognitive or behavioral regulation, or being most clearly seen in early development or immediate crisis).
    • Izard: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust, Interest, Contempt?
    • Ekman & Cordaro:  Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Surprise     
    • Levenson: Enjoyment, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Disgust, Interest?, Love?, Relief?
    • Panksepp and Watt:  PLAY, PANIC/GRIEF, FEAR, RAGE, SEEKING, LUST, CARE
    • Evolutionary theories (beginning with Charles Darwin)
      • Emotions evolved because they facilitated successful adaptation
      • Emotions cause us to react quickly to stimuli in the environment, improving out changes of survival (and passing on our genes)
        • Understanding the emotions of others can increases our safety and survival
          Love/affection promotes social binding, promotes breeding; fear promotes avoidance of dangerous situations
      • Neuropsychological theories
        • Affective Neuroscience (Panksepp)
  • Top-down theories (cognitive theories of emotion)
    • Two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter-Singer theory, bi-factorial theory)
      • Physiological arousal occurs first, then our brain tries to understand the arousal; crucial is the situation and the cognitive interpretation used to label the emotion
    • Appraisal theories/cognitive theories: thoughts/images/mental activity plays an essential role in forming emotions
      • Richard Lazarus proposed cognitive appraisal theory: thinking occurs before experiencing emotion  
        • Stimulus              
        • Perception         
        • Emotion experience & physical reactions
    • bi-dimensional theories
      • valence and arousal
    • theory of constructed emotions (Lisa Feldman-Barrett)
      • Dr. Feldman-Barrett argues against “essentialism”: reification of an abstraction or statistical summary (average American family has 2.5 children, know any families with half a child?), the wonderful and troublesome capacity of our mind to categorize and treat as real generalizations.  She believes that the “classical view of emotions” (and the view portrayed in the Disney movie Inside Out)  is a myth.

The Function of Emotions:  Why do we feel?

Feelings, huh, what are they good for?

[hum tune from The Temptations’ War]

Your text author, Dr. Reeve, likes to use popular culture references, such as Star Trek.  He points out the Vulcans (the first of a series of “others” used in this series of television and movies to play off against [Data in Next Generation,  Constable Odo in Deep Space Nine, 7-of-9 in Voyager, etc.] have rejected feelings because their strong emotions had contributed to a history of violent, internecine conflict in their past and had elected to pursue logic (reasoning) as the only stable basis for a productive life.  The various stories usually portrayed the advantage of irrational (emotion) humans’ coping with challenges.  But the Vulcans have point—sometimes our feeling do get us into trouble.  So, why do we have emotions anyway?

Plato, in The Republic, gives us the classical view of reason and emotion in Western civilization.  He uses the analogy of a charioteer.  The houses are the emotions pulling us along; the driver is reason, directing out path toward desired outcomes.  Emotions may provide the energy, the drive, the pulls but, unguided and directed by reason, can’t be relied upon to get us to our destination.  [Reality check:  Plato does not suggest that emotions are bad and dysfunctional and should be eliminated, they do provide the passion, the motivation; he does give top status to reason]. 

Emotion does seem to often get a bad rep in Western culture.  So, again, why do we feel?  It turns out that emotions/feelings/affect plays a pretty big role (and usually a positive one) in much of our behavior. 

  • Adaptive (coping) functions:
    • Emotions provide rapid motivation to respond to crisis situations. [Good and bad here, your text is correct: very few saber tooth tigers to contend with in 21st century central Illinois but the enduring stress response of worrying about your grades/number of Facebook likes/student debt can have serious health consequences.]  
    • All emotions serve us because they focus attention and behavior on events/situations that need attention.  [Typically, mild to moderate emotions are more adaptive than strong emotions, but that depends on the situation.]  (As an aside, while the Dali Lima and other Buddhist philosophers and scientists do speak of “destructive emotions”, the real culprit for human suffering from this system of thought is “attachment.”  There is no problem with any emotion as long as we experience [not necessarily act on] it and let it go.  Problem arise when we want the good feelings to stay and the bad feeling not to occur and try to manifest this.)
  • Motivational functions:
    • Emotions provide the much of the basic passion/drive for our life.  [Good for most of us most of the time but can go awry in mood and anxiety disorder and perversions and addictions of all types.]
  • Communication functions:
    • The emotions we perceive in others help us anticipate and adjust to their behavior [Helpful if our perceptions are accurate, less so if we misread.].
    • Emotional behavior can influence how others react to us [both positively and negatively]. 
    • The emotions were express help others understand us and anticipate our needs and behavior [Can help us fit into our social group but, like language, can be misread and misunderstood; also, sometimes we do not wish to communicate (playing poker) and sometimes we wish to deceive (seduction, lying)].
  • One current champion of feeling is the neuroscientist Antonia Damasio. 
    • Dr. Damasio sees emotions as our experience of the state of our organism:  “Feelings are the mental expression of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems.” (2018, p. 6).  “Feelings are the very revelation to each individual mind of the status of life within the respective organism, a status expressed along a range that runs from positive to negative.” (p. 25).  Dr. Damasio believes that feeling provided the basis for, among other things, for consciousness and for human culture. 

Emotional Regulation

  • Emotional regulation refers to trying to affect our emotions
  • Situation selection:  Your text is correct: one of the most powerful way of influencing our feelings is choosing carefully the situations we place ourselves in. 
  • Situation modification: coping more effectively with a stressful situation:
    • Problem solving
    • Assertiveness training, interpersonal effectiveness, social skill training
  • Attentional Focus
    • Distraction
    • Positive stimulus cues: focusing object in Lamaze, worry stones, lucky pen
  • Acceptance
    • Naming
    • Mindfulness
  • Reappraisal
    • Cognitive reevaluation:  “bad not awful”, “unpleasant not unbearable”
    • Stress inoculation training
  • Suppression (yeah, doesn’t work well)
    • Don’t think of a white bear.  Daniel Wegner’s research on thought suppression. 
      I have observed clinically that it is possible to make yourself not feel, what is not possible is to only make yourself not feel bad emotions; if you effectively suppressive emotional responses you lose joy, excitement, love, happiness, calmness along with the negative feelings.

11-14-22

Positive affect

  • Being happy feels good to most people.  Your text defines positive affect as:  “the everyday, low-level, general state of feeling good.”  (p. 308) and suggests that positive affect is subtle, “It affects neither attention nor behavior.” (p. 308) but does affect cognitive processing and behavior (p. 309).  The behavior affected include helping others, increased social interaction, increased generosity, liking others more, taking more risks, and behaving more cooperatively (p. 309).  The cognitive effect reported with positive mood are creative problem solving, persistence in the face of failure, more effective decision making, and greater intrinsic motivation (p. 309).  [reality check: some of these results reflect research with college students who are not a typical sample of the general population and analogue situations versus natural environmental studies.  Nevertheless, a positive affect appears to benefit us.]  This leads to the question:
  • Is happiness a good goal to have?    
  • Sonja Lyubomirsky has conducted research on happiness and concludes that happiness is a reasonable goal to work toward. 
  • Based on her research, Dr. Lyubomirsky has conclude that the following factors determine happiness, with the associated effect sizes:
    • Set Point: 50%
    • Intentional Activity: 40%
    • Circumstances: 10%      
    • Set Point:  some people are generally happier, some people are generally less happy.  Her studies and review of the literature led Dr. Lyubomirsky to conclude that approximately 50% of the differences among people’s happiness levels could be account for by their genetically determined set points. 
    • Circumstances:  She conclude that only about 10% of the variance in our happiness is explained by difference in life circumstance or situations (how much money we have, where we live, our health, our physical beauty, our relationship status).
    • Intentional Activities:  Finally, Dr. Lyubomirsky and her co-researchers found that 40% of the variance in our happiness ratings were determined by daily activities. 
    • Characteristics of the happiest people studied by Lyubomirsky (2007, p. 23):
      • The practice optimism when imaging their futures
      • They savor life’s pleasures and try to live in the present moment
      • They make physical exercise a weekly and even daily habit
      • They are deeply committed to lifelong goals and ambitions
      • Based on this, she recommends practical actions to increase our happiness:
        • Practicing gratitude and positive thinking
        • Investing in social connections
        • Managing stress, hardship, and trauma (Her happiness people had all these too)
        • Living in the present
        • Committing to goals
        • Taking care of the body and soul
    • The other side if the coin suggests that happiness in itself may not be the best (or even most possible) goal to pursue.
    • Both Buddhist thought and the psychotherapy of ACT suggest that life inevitably involves distress and happiness is always temporary.  Further they believe that struggling to make the world different than it is (attachment to a preferred state) is the fundamental source of all human suffering. 
      • Steven Hayes, one of the developers of ACT, stresses acceptance (the A in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) as a fundamental step in mental health and the starting point of any potentially successful change effort.  [By acceptance neither group means passive resignation to negative states or treatment or conditions; but, rather, simple recognition of the reality of our current situation.  We can still work to make the world a better place and work to make our own life as meaningful as possible.  Both groups would heartily endorse all of Dr. Lyubomirsky’s recommendations, they just would not think of “happiness” as the goal.]
      • Although some of the language of Dr. Lyubomirsky and Dr. Hayes might seem diametrically opposed, I’m not sure there is really that much difference in what they are suggesting, based both on research and clinical outcomes. 
      • Happiness might be most usefully be considered as a byproduct or side effect of living a good life.  Dr. Hayes would absolutely agree with Dr. Lyubomirsky that living a good life has less to do with our circumstances then we often believe.
  • An alternative to seeking happiness might be seeking to live a life with high eudaimonic well-being: ” term that describes striving for a noble, meaningful purpose.” (Harding, 2020, p. 74). She reports a significant decrease in stress and inflammatory markers and significantly reduced risk of death from all causes. A sense of purpose, a focus on meaning and self-realization, usefulness to others (ikigai in Okinawa)is associated with multiple health benefits.
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