Unit Three: Behavior and Cognition Marshall High School Mr. Cline Psychology Unit Three AK
The wheel allows him to show how he thinks these emotions blend with each other to form more complicated ones. Joy blended with trust and equals love. Love isn't a fundamental one, it's not one that increases our fitness, but it is a combination of these fundamental ones that he identified. So that's Plutchik's basic theory; he has this wheel and the ones that are on the wheel are the ones he thinks are somehow evolutionarily advantageous. Plutchik and Ekman were two psychologists who came up with these theories about emotion. There's a third part of this that isn't really associated with any particular psychologist, but it's very important. That's looking at emotion processing speeds.
What we find out is that different emotions take different pathways through the brain and through the body. Some emotions are processed by the lymbic system. It involves the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the thalamus. In general, the basic emotions like fear that Ekman and Plutchik were identifying, these tend to go through the lymbic system because they're super fast. You need to process fear right away or else you're going to get eaten by a lion. That's not going to be good. There's another processing speed that's slower, and that's basically the frontal lobe.
This is the part of your brain that is also doing all of your thinking - so as you're thinking about this lesson right now, you're using your frontal lobe. But you're also using your frontal lobe when you're thinking about emotional experiences that aren't quite so fundamental. If you're experiencing resentment, that's not something that's going to go through the lymbic system, that's something that has elements of all these things that are really fundamental, but it's something that you have to process cognitively to really identify as resentment, as Polutchik would say. You have to think about all the horrible things that person did to you and build it up inside you as a horrible feeling
But you can see it's not the same quality as something like fear or anger that just happens to you. It's something that's definitely involved in cognitive processing. Do you know how physiological characteristics, such as sweaty palms and racing hearts, factor into our experiences of emotion? Do emotions cause the symptoms, or vice-versa? Believe it or not, psychologists have been wondering about this since the nineteenth century, and over time, multiple theories have been developed about the role physiological arousal plays in emotion. Here, we'll talk about three well-known theories. We'll also note one additional hypothesis about relationships between facial muscles and emotion.
In the late 19th century, William James (1842-1910), who is also known as the father of functionalist psychology, formulated one theory. Around the same time, albeit independently of James, a Danish psychologist named Carl Lange (1834-1900), developed a similar one. So today, we refer to this single theory using the names of both men. Associating one theory with two names will be a trend common to all three theories of emotion. Anyway, this first one is known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. It proposes that physiological arousal precedes the experience of emotion. Let's think about this for a second.
For example, according to this theory, we don't blush because we're embarrassed; rather, we feel embarrassed because we blush. Do you agree with this idea? Certainly, some psychologists have challenged it. In particular, Walter Cannon (1871-1945) and Philip Bard (1898-1977), proposed a different theory. Their Cannon-Bard theory of emotion suggests that we experience emotions at the same time as we experience physiological arousal; or, the emotion and the arousal are simultaneous. So, according to this, we blush and feel embarrassed at the same time. Does this make sense to you?
Maybe, but it cannot explain every instance. For example, sometimes the same physiological symptoms can be involved with very different emotions. To use the example of a racing heart, sometimes that happens when I'm scared, but sometimes that happens when I'm in love. So, in 1962, two more psychologists, Stanley Schachter (1922-97) and Jerome Singer, proposed yet another theory. They believed that when we experience physiological arousal, we cognitively process the context in which we find ourselves before feeling the proper emotion. Their theory is sometimes called the two-factor theory of emotion.
This isn't because two men helped to develop it, but because this theory maintains that the experience of emotion depends on two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive processing. Now, the psychologist Richard Lazarus called this sort of cognitive processing appraisal, and he argued we could be either conscious or unconscious. Our appraisals are not always accurate. One well-known study determined that men who met an attractive female in a fear-arousing situation were more likely to feel attracted to her than men who met her in a situation that did not arouse fear. In other words, the men in the fear-arousing situation may have mistaken the arousal tied to their fear for arousal tied to attraction.
Reasonably enough, this sort of inaccuracy is called misattribution of arousal. One final interesting hypothesis about physiology and emotion is known as the Facial Feedback hypothesis, which proposes that the movement of facial muscles influences our emotional experiences. The hypothesis suggests that our brains use feedback from our facial muscles to recognize the emotions we are experiencing. Did you know that more than 40 muscles in the face can be involved with the expression of emotion? This hypothesis has a long history.
In the late 19th century, Charles Darwin, the scientist who is most famous for his ideas about evolution, recognized that projecting our emotions on our faces can intensify our experience of that emotion, and that subduing those projections can diminish the emotion. Darwin was suggesting that facial projections can change the intensity of already existing emotions. But do you think that facial feedback can actually generate emotions altogether? The leap from correlation to causality is tricky. But at least the correlation does seem to exist.
For example, brain scans of women injected in the face with Botox, a drug that minimizes wrinkles by paralyzing facial muscles, have revealed decreased activity in areas of their brains that are associated with the processing of emotion. * Emotions and Physiological Responses You might have heard of the fight or flight response. That's something that has gotten into our vocabulary a little bit. And it's basically something that's super observable in animals so that's the best way to start, I think.
and Physiological Responses A way to think about it is, you know when people tell you that a certain animal is more afraid of you that you are of it? You might encounter a scary raccoon or something like that - 'No, it's more afraid of you than you are of it.' Well, it usually is and the reason why this is a good thing for you is that, when threatened, a lot of animals will just run away. And that's usually true if the animal can get away, so if it's not cornered. Sometimes though, this sort of a threat, like a person standing in front of it, will actually provoke a fight response instead. The reason this is true is because both of these responses - running away and fighting - are basically the result of what's called an aroused sympathetic nervous system.
and Physiological Responses And when this happens, when your sympathetic nervous system is aroused, you basically get pepped up to do one of two things: you either are going to fight, or you're going to flee. You're going to run away. And to understand this a little better, we have to go over what the sympathetic nervous system is. In brief, it's a part of the autonomic nervous system and this is basically the part of your brain's communication with your body that isn't conscious. It's not like when you decide, 'I'm going to move my arm. Look, it moved.' That's not your autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is things that you don't even know are going on, like your breathing and digestion. And this autonomic part is, again, divided into two parts within autonomic. We got parasympathetic and sympathetic.
and Physiological Responses Your parasympathetic is dealing with things in a resting state. Things like digesting your food, salivating, if you're going to produce tears to keep your eyes all moist and happy. Your sympathetic nervous system is what gets going when you're ready for action, and that's why it's important for fight or flight because what it does is it readies your muscles to go. And if you think about it, fighting and running away are basically requiring the same muscle preparation. You might crouch down or tense up, and your sympathetic nervous system is sending out all sorts of signals to help you do this. It's mediated by certain parts of your body known as the HPA axis.
and Physiological Responses It's called an axis because it's three things that work all together, so you can think of it as a little system. One of them is called the hypothalamus, and there is also the pituitary gland, this is also in the brain, and also, your adrenal glands - these are not in the brain, these are near your kidneys, it's kind of random. We can just remember, you got two in the brain - hypothalamus, pituitary - and one random guy just hanging out down by your kidneys. That's your HPA axis. And what this does is it sends out hormones like adrenaline. So when you're in a situation where you need to fight or flee, your HPA axis is sending out these adrenaline hormones because your sympathetic nervous system is getting going.
and Physiological Responses So, when you're about to do something intense in sports, this is what is happening. And your body has a lot of interesting reactions to this besides just getting ready to fight or flee. You may have noticed some of these as well. What it does is it gets your heart racing, that's probably pretty obvious. You've probably felt that. It also actually stops digestion. This is something kind of interesting because basically, what your body is doing when it gets into this aroused sympathetic state, is it's just saying, 'You know what, if there's anything I don't need to be doing right now, I'm just going to stop.'
and Physiological Responses So anything that your parasympathetic was taking care of that was maintenance, longterm things, sympathetic says, 'No, we're going to stop digesting.' It even cuts off your peripheral vision because you don't need to see what's going on the side, you just need to see what's right in front of you. It basically shuts down your body to do anything but focus on the problem at hand and whether you're going to run or you're going to stand there and fight it. Animals do some pretty crazy things when their fight or flight responses are activated.
and Physiological Responses Octopuses and squids, they shoot ink - there's that Finding Nemo scene: 'You guys made me ink!' - that's basically what's going on there; their sympathetic nervous systems are active and camouflage is sort of a manifestation of the fight or flight response. It's saying, 'How can I get away?' basically, and hiding is one of those things. Puffer fish, for example, when they get all big are utilizing their fight or flight response because it's trying to help them evade capture by looking scary. The animal world gets pretty crazy with this stuff. People, not so crazy. We don't change colors, we don't shoot ink, we don't get big...nothing exciting like that happens, but it's the same basic response.
and Physiological Responses But with humans, and with animals too, to a certain extent, it's not always quite as immediate as you might think about it with a puffer fish - 'whooph' that's right away. What happens with humans, what happens a lot is - let's say you're walking down a street that's dark, you see someone sketchy. It's not like this happens right away, you either run or you go and you attack this guy. What it does is it puts you into a state of heightened awareness, basically. Your sympathetic nervous system is starting to get activated and you get into this state of heightened awareness so that you watch for signs from other people, from the sketchy person, to figure out how you should react.
and Physiological Responses Your body all the time is readying you for either fighting or fleeing. So it can do the same thing at once because they're the same basic response. It's the same muscle preparation, so it gives you time to figure out what's the best situation. This is a lot of what Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is about. Sufferers have become so accustomed to being in situations where their fight or flight sympathetic nervous responses have been triggered, and being so wary and in a state of heightened awareness, that their bodies have taken this for the norm, and they find themselves constantly in this state.