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- Emotions can be defined as multi-component, brief,
goal-based responses that help us respond to problems
and opportunities, especially social ones.
- The experience of emotion is generally brief, lasting
on the order of seconds or minutes, as opposed to
the experience of moods, which often last for hours
and days.
- Emotions are generally felt about specific people and
events, motivating individuals to achieve specific
goals, such as redressing injustice or fleeing from a
dangerous situation, or promoting and preserving
social bonds.
- Emotions involve physiological processes, including
changes in the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic
nervous system (SANS) prepares the body for
action by increasing heart rate, blood pressure, and
cardiac output, among other effects, while the
parasympathetic nervous system (PANS) restores the
body's resources by decreasing heart rate and blood
pressure, among other effects.
- Emotions involve expressive processes, enabling us
to communicate our feelings and reactions through
configurations of muscles in the face, as well as
through touch, the voice, and art.
- Emotions involve cognitive processes. Language
enables us to label our emotions. At the same time,
emotion shapes our memories and judgments and
even what we pay attention to.
- There are universal aspects to emotion based on evolutionary
factors, not surprising given that emotions
enable us to respond quickly and effectively to
threats and opportunities related to survival.
- Paul Ekman's studies revealed that people in dramatically
different cultures judge expressions of anger,
disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise in
highly similar fashion.
- There are cultural differences in when and which
emotions are expressed based on culturally specific
display rules and ritualized displays.
- There is cultural variation as to the number of words
used to represent various emotions, as well as in
what triggers various emotions. Cultures vary as to
whether elicitors of emotion are socially "engaging"
or "disengaging." People in different cultures use the
same construal process for recognizing emotions,
but they vary in their construal of particular events
and in which emotional cues they pay attention to.
- William James believed that an emotionally exciting
stimulus generated a physiological response, the
perception of which is the emotion, and that each
emotion had a distinct bodily response.
- Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed a two-factor
theory of emotion in which the two components
are undifferentiated physiological arousal and
the construal of the state of undifferentiated arousal.
Their studies showed the importance of cognition in
the experience of emotion, as participants often
made a misattribution of arousal.
- Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen found distinct patterns
of facial expression for different emotions.
Using the Directed Facial Action (DFA) task, Ekman
and Friesen, along with Robert Levenson, directed
participants to make faces of the sort that would be
produced by various emotions. They found that dif-
ferent expressions resulted in different autonomic
patterns for anger, disgust, and fear.
- There is both conscious and unconscious elicitation
of emotion. Some emotion-related appraisal is
unconscious and automatic, as shown by studies of
split-brain patients, and some is conscious and
complex.
- Robert Zajonc and others demonstrated that the
unconscious perception of faces of anger and happiness
can change the evaluations of subsequently
presented stimuli, as well as the individual's emotional
response.
- Appraisal theorists such as Richard Lazarus study primary
and secondary appraisal. In the primary
appraisal stage, people evaluate whether ongoing
events are congruent with their goals, experiencing
positive emotions for goal-congruent events and
negative emotions for goal-incongruent events. In
the secondary appraisal stage, people determine
why they feel as they do and what to do about it,
considering different ways of responding and possible
future consequences of different responses.
- There are different ways of dealing with emotions
once we become aware of what we are feeling. There
are benefits to writing about negative emotions and
perils to ruminating on them.
- Emotions are rational in that they can help people
respond adaptively in different situations. Emotions
tend to promote order in social relations. Contrary
to intuition, emotions like embarrassment and love,
while experienced as chaotic and irrational, actually
promote more stable social bonds.
- Emotions can help us to make rational assessments
of complex situations. According to the emotion-congruence
account, emotions can influence thinking
by making anything associated with a particular
emotion more accessible and ready to guide
judgment.
- The feelings-as-information account says that emotions
provide rapid and reliable information for different
judgments when we don't have enough time
to evaluate detailed and complex information.
- The processing style account says that different emotions
lead us to process information in different
ways, with positive emotions leading to the use of
heuristics and stereotypes, and negative emotions
leading to more systematic and detailed
assessments.
- People's overall assessments of pleasure seems
closely tied to the peak and end of the pleasurable
stimulus, and surprisingly, have little to do with its
duration. Our ability to predict the sources of happiness
turns out to be suspect, in part due to two
biases: immune neglect and focalism.
- Many so-called objective factors, such as gender,
age, and money, have surprisingly small effects on
our happiness. In contrast, social-cultural factors,
such as relationships with other people and social
equality, have substantial effects upon our
happiness.
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