1 Psychology and human development1.9 Emotion
1.9 Emotion
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Written by Resident Doctor Committee · Published
Components of an emotional response
An emotion coordinates appraisal, subjective feeling, autonomic and endocrine arousal, expression and an action tendency such as escape or attack. The components can diverge, as when a person avoids a situation with a racing heart but reports no anxiety.
Body-first and parallel theories
Theory | Order of events | What the felt emotion is |
|---|---|---|
James-Lange | Stimulus, then visceral and skeletal change, then feeling | The perception of that bodily change |
Cannon-Bard | Feeling and bodily arousal arise together and independently | A thalamic signal to the cortex, sent in parallel with a signal to the body |
Under James-Lange, a person feels afraid because they tremble, so palpitations that come before conscious fear in panic fit the theory.
Cannon argued that visceral change is too slow and too non-specific to tell one emotion from another.
Two-factor theory
Schachter-Singer theory holds that emotion is general physiological arousal plus a cognitive label for its cause, taken from the situation.
In their 1962 experiment, uninformed volunteers given adrenaline reported emotion that followed a confederate's mood, but informed volunteers, who could blame the injection, felt little.
Appraisal and affective primacy
Lazarus's cognitive appraisal theory holds that appraisal always comes first, and the emotion and arousal follow from it.
Primary appraisal judges whether the event matters to wellbeing; secondary appraisal judges whether one can cope.
The emotion changes when the person reappraises the event, which supports cognitive therapy.
Schachter and Singer put arousal before the label, whereas Lazarus puts appraisal before both emotion and arousal.
Zajonc's affective primacy hypothesis holds that feeling can arise before and apart from cognition.
Zajonc based it on the mere exposure effect: people come to prefer shapes they cannot recognise having seen.
Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis holds that learned bodily responses, felt as gut reactions, bias a decision before reasoning is complete.
Its core evidence is the absent anticipatory skin conductance response on the Iowa Gambling Task.
Basic emotions
Model | Primary emotions | Further detail |
|---|---|---|
Ekman | Six universal: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, disgust | Each has a facial expression recognised across cultures |
Plutchik (psychoevolutionary) | Eight, in four opposing pairs | Secondary emotions blend two primaries, such as love (joy plus acceptance) and contempt |
Panksepp | Seven subcortical systems of the mammalian brain | SEEKING, RAGE, FEAR, LUST, CARE, PANIC/GRIEF and PLAY |
Ekman, Levenson and Friesen found that basic emotions differ in their physiology.
Anger raises both heart rate and finger temperature.
Fear raises heart rate but leaves the fingers cool.
Disgust lowers skin temperature.
The limbic system
Paul MacLean coined the term limbic system in 1952 and later proposed the triune brain.
His main anatomical addition to the circuit was the amygdala, together with the septal area.
Arousal and performance
The Yerkes-Dodson relationship between arousal and performance is an inverted U.
The optimum arousal is lower for complex or new tasks and higher for simple, rehearsed ones.