theories of emotions

1. • AFFECT (emotion) AND BEHAVIOR ( the
result of motivation)

2. Your feelings are obviously
important to you but:
What is Affect?
• complex /many components :
» physiological responses (autonomic nervous system)
» cognitive events
» sensory input
» behavioral correlates

3. What is the Role of emotion?
1. Some theorist argue that; Feelings are mere epiphenomena of
motivation and may only serve as cues to facilitate social
communication ( Darwin)
consider that most people do not have a "poker face," and we
generally find a person's emotional response to be obvious.
-Knowing how someone feels will help us evaluate how
they will act.
2. To Motivate behavior; In contrast, other theorists argue that
affect is a primary motivator of behavior
Affective state primarily may serve to produce behavioral
responses and shape behavior (emotion may be reinforcing) ,
Consequently then affect may be motivational in nature.
(Although it may be overly simplistic, we will take the perspective
here that emotion and motivation are interlinked and consider
them as one general concept).

4. HOW MANY EMOTIONS ARE THERE?
A question that raises controversy and has no universally
agreed upon answer.
• Proposed Basic Emotions Basis for Inclusion
• Plutchik
• Acceptance, anger, anticipation, disgust, joy, fear, sadness, surprise
Relation to adaptive biological processes
• Arnold
• Anger, aversion, courage, dejection, desire, despair, fear, hate, hope, love, sadness
Relation to action tendencies
• Ekman, Friesen, and Ellsworth
• Anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise Universal facial expressions
• Frijda
• Desire, happiness, interest, surprise, wonder, sorrow Forms of action readiness
• Gray
• Rage and terror, anxiety, joy Hardwired
• Izard
• Anger, contempt, disgust, distress, fear, guilt,
• interest, joy, shame, surprise Hardwired
• James
• Fear, grief, love, rage Bodily involvement

5. • McDougall
• Anger, disgust, elation, fear, subjection, Relation to instincts
• tender-emotion, wonder
• Mowrer
• Pain, pleasure Unlearned emotional states
• Oatley and Johnson-Laird
• Anger, disgust, anxiety, happiness, sadness Do not require propositional content
• Panksepp
• Expectancy, fear, rage, panic Hardwired
• fear, joy, shame, surprise
• Tomkins
• Anger, interest, contempt, disgust, distress, Density of neural firing
• Watson
• Fear, love, rage Hardwired
• Weiner and Graham
• Happiness, sadness Attribution independent Basic
Emotions

6. Historical theories of emotion
vs common sense:

7. • James-Lange theory:
– A visceral experience (gut reaction) is labeled as an
emotional state.
» We have some autonomic reaction to stimuli. We
observe these physical sensations and label them
as feelings.

8. James thought that the body acted like a sounding board, struck by
neural impulses to create the waves of change that could then be
sensed by the brain as a quality of emotional feeling. Thus, the varieties
and shades of emotion are as infinite as the bodily patterns that neural
action can create.

9. • EXAMPLE: You are walking down a dark alley
late at night. You hear footsteps behind you and
you begin to tremble, your heart beats faster,
and your breathing deepens. You notice these
physiological changes and interpret them as
your body's preparation for a fearful
situation. You then experience fear.
•
•

10. Hohmann (1966) A Test Of the
James-Lange Theory?
• Hypothesis: You need the visceral body in order
to feel emotions.
• Test: Interview people with high vs. low spinal
cord injuries
High spinal cord injury:
“Sometimes I act angry... But it doesn’t have the heat to
it that it used to. It’s a mental kind of anger.”
Hohman, 1966, pp. 150-151 (Carlson)

11. Support for James-Lange
Theory

12. – The range of emotions is apparently much broader and more complex than the range of
visceral reactions.
• Nonetheless, recent advances in physiological measurements (eg, PET scans)
suggest the physiological correlates of emotional states are more specific
than once thought.
-Even though James predicted that loss of bodily sensation (eg, through spinal injury) would
depress emotions, this is not fully supported (some people report an increase in emotional
intensity).
The viscera are largely unresponsive and react relatively slowly (i.e. - we often 'feel' the
emotion before the physiological changes have occurred.)
– Visceral responses appear the same no matter what the reported emotion.
• Although James proposed immediate visceral responses create emotion,
• recent research indicates that some emotional changes may take a long time to develop.
Problems for James-Lange?

13. New Support for the James-Lange?
• Theory? Ekman and Friesens’
Facial Feedback Hypothesis:
• Facial expressions appear to be innate.
– People of all cultures show six basic emotional
expressions: happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger,
and disgust.
– Even the blind and deaf smile and laugh when they are
happy.

14. Ekman and Friesens’ Facial Feedback
Hypothesis (Renewed support for the
James-Lange theory?)
• Universally recognized facial expressions

15. The Face may actually be an organ of
visceral function

16. The Facial Feedback Hypothesis and the
James Lange theory
• The facial feed back hypothesis holds that
facial expressions may be crucial to the
experience of an emotional state, and may
even cause emotional reactions.
– Ekman found that actors moving their faces according to
explicit instructions showed physiological responses
appropriate to their facial expressions.
– Strack (1988) found that people who held a pencil
between their teeth rated cartoons funnier than those
who held it between their lips.

17. Ekman’s Facial Feedback
Theory Problems?
Facial expressions have an effect on self-reported
anger and happiness
• Response to Facial Posing are not
especially strong
• ACTORS?...feel?
• Masking emotion should lead to
suppression of emotion…but this is not a
clear result of masking.

18. Cannon-Bard theory:
– When presented with a stimulus, the thalamus activates
both a physiological reaction and an emotional response.
– The thalamus simultaneously signals the autonomic
nervous system and the cerebral cortex.
• EXAMPLE: You are walking down a dark alley late at night. You
hear footsteps behind you and you begin to tremble, your heart beats
faster, and your breathing deepens. At the same time as these
physiological changes occur you also experience the emotion of fear.

19. Problems for Cannon-Bard?
• The Cannon-Bard theory argues that we experience physiological
and emotional arousal at the same time,
– but gives no attention to the role of thoughts (interpretation) or
behavioral responses.
• Cannon argued that the Thalamus was the
emotion center of the brain,
– but we now know that there are many brain areas involved in
emotionality…esp. the amygdala
•

20. cognitive-appraisal theories
– Schachter-Singer theory (the "two factor
theory)
– A stimulus causes physiological arousal; this is
considered in light of environmental and social cues.
– The arousal is then cognitively interpreted as an
emotional state based on the cues.
» In other words, the environment, particularly the
behavior of other people, is used to explain the
physiological state.
– Events significant to one's own well-being are particularly
important in determining emotional response.
–

21. Stimulus
Physiological
Reaction
Cerebral
Cortex
Emotion
3. Cognitive Theory (formerly Schacter-Singer Theory)
Environmental
Cues
EXAMPLE: You are walking down a dark alley late at night. You hear footsteps behind
you and you begin to tremble, your heart beats faster, and your breathing
deepens. Upon noticing this arousal you realize that you are walking down a dark alley
by yourself. This behavior is dangerous and therefore you feel the emotion of fear.

22. The Schachter theory: The
classic “supproxin study
• Hypothesis: The same bodily reaction will
cause one emotion in one situation, and
another emotion in a different situation.
– Give people a dose of adrenaline;
– Put them in different situations;
– What happens?
FEAR LOVE

23. The "Suproxin" experiment:
• Men were given epinephrine, which causes
sympathetic arousal. The subject was either
informed or uninformed as to the drugs effects.
• A confederate behaved in one of two ways:
happy or angry.
• The subjects responded accordingly (but only
when they had not been told that the drug would
cause an increase in heart rate, etc).

24. • Schachter & Singer 1962:
The Schachter theory
VERY ANGRY!
VERY EXCITED!
(know what
pill does)
Least angry
Least excited
Medium angry!
(didn’t take pill)
Medium excited!

25. Lazarus Theory
Lazarus Theory argues that a thought (cognition) must come
before any emotion or physiological arousal. In other words,
you must first think about your situation before you can
experience an emotion.
EXAMPLE: You are walking down a dark alley late at
night. You hear footsteps behind you and you think it may be
a mugger so you begin to tremble, your heart beats faster,
and your breathing deepens and at the same time
experience fear.

26. Problems for Appraisal Theories?
• Cognitive appraisal of a situation is necessary for
the experience of emotion and Behavioral
responses??
– many studies now indicate that we may be emotionally
affected and motivated without awareness.

27. Dual Process Theory
• Two primary pathways from the thalamus mediate
the processing of cognition, emotional valence and
behavioral response.
• The thalamus projects sensory information to the
Amygdala first ( fast pathway).
• The thalamus also projects information to the
cerebral cortices where deliberate/rationale
information processing occurs ( slow pathway) and
intentional/conscious responses may be produced.

28. Dual Process
• The Amygdala initiates fast
(automatic/unconscious?) “affective”
responses through efferent pathways to the
hypothalamus and other lower brain
regions.
• The Amygdala also relays info to the frontal
lobes where deliberate response
processing may be influenced
unconsciously ( cognitive bias?)

29. Dual Process Theories

30. Cognitive Bias?
• Underlying motivations Bias cognitive
processes.
• appear to exist and influence a broad
range of cognitive functions from attention,
memory and perceptual interpretations (e.g.,
stereotypes), to decision making and behavioral
responses (Bargh& Chartrand, 1999).

31. cognitive bias
automatic,
effortless,
relatively fast,
independent from consciousness and
intention
Reber, 1993; Remillard and Clark, 2001; Hasher & Zacks, 1979; Schneider,
Dumais, & Shiffrin, 1984; Sherman, Gawronski, Gonsalkorale, Hugenberg,
Allen and Groom, 2008; but see Okon-Singer, Hadas, Tzelgov, Joseph, Henik,
Avishai, 2007.
I

32. Cog bias
• Major sources of evidence support this
theory (see MacCleod, 2004 for partial
review).
• Typically studied through implicit test
procedures such as the :
• Modified (emotional) Stroop test
• …many other test procedures have been used

33. The Stroop Test procedure:
• Subjects required to respond to each stimuli among a long list of
stimuli (typically word stimuli) as rapidly as possible based on the
color of the words’ font color. There are a number of variations but in
a simple representation of this task subjects may be asked to press
one button if a word is presented with a blue font and a different
button if the word has a red font.
• Most of the stimuli have relatively neutral motivational valence, but
some of the stimuli are intended to be motivationally salient.
• Eg…

34. • DICTIONARY
• Subject presses the “1” key as fast as possible

35. • MURDER
• Subject presses the “3” key as fast as possible

36. Interpretation of Modified Stroop
RTs..
• Though the task instructions are to ignore
the word and respond only to the color,
• Reliable differences in RT are thought to
reflect the relative attention-grabbing
power of the word meaning that are
processed Automatically.

37. Such tests have revealed reliable
differences in RT for stimuli that relate to
inferred motivational states
across samples of people with known motivational
problems:
– Cognitive Bias has been indicated in subjects with
clinically diagnosed
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Drug dependence
• Eating disorders studies….
• And for subjects with other obvious motivational tendencies
such as inmates incarcerated for violent offenses
• etc
– Not as well studied in “normal populations”