Chapter 6: Emotion and Affect

What is emotion?
Emotion: a conscious evaluative reaction that is clearly linked to some event.
A mood sometimes is a feeling state that is not clearly linked to some event.
Mood: a feeling state that is not clearly linked to some event.
Affect: a result of mapping all emotions onto a single good–bad dimension.
The automatic response that something is good (positive affect) or bad (negative affect).
• Positive affect encompasses all good emotions: such as joy, bliss, happiness, love, and contentment.
• Negative affect encompasses all bad emotions: such as anger, anxiety, fear, jealousy, and grief.
Most researchers argue that positive and negative affect are separate dimensions, not opposite ends of the same
dimension.
The limbic brain region, which regulates emotions, responded strongly to negative or sad sounds, but it did not
differentiate between neutral and happy sounds.
Conscious emotion versus automatic affect.

Conscious emotion Automatic affect

conscious emotion is felt as a powerful, single (unified) feeling the automatic effect is felt as liking or disliking, or as good
state. and bad feelings toward something, and may occur outside of
consciousness.
The term emotion is used to refer to the conscious reaction, often including a bodily response, to something.
The term affect is used to refer to the automatic response that something is good or bad (liking versus disliking).
Affective reactions to things that are “good” and “bad” are automatic and very fast, occurring in the first
microseconds of thought.
Automatic affect & conscious emotion are both important!
Emotions have both mental and physical aspects.
Emotional arousal
Emotions bridge the mind and the body.
Emotions have both mental aspects and physical aspects.
Arousal: a physiological reaction that occurs within the body, including faster heartbeat and faster or heavier
breathing, linked to most conscious emotions.
James-Lange theory of emotion:
James–Lange theory of emotion: the proposition that the bodily processes of emotion come first, and the mind’s
perception of these bodily reactions then creates the subjective feeling of emotion.
James–Lange theory of emotion:
Emotional stimulus → Physiological arousal → Experienced emotion

The James–Lange theory led to an important contemporary hypothesis – the facial feedback hypothesis.
Facial feedback hypothesis: the idea that feedback from the facial muscles evokes or magnifies emotions.
According to the facial feedback hypothesis, facial expressions can evoke or magnify emotions because the brain
reacts to what the facial muscles are doing.
The facial feedback hypothesis holds that if you are smiling, you will enjoy things more than if you are frowning
Facial feedback may also help us recognise emotional expressions in others:
Schachter-Singer theory of emotion:
Schachter and Singer said that emotion has two separate components-physiological arousal and cognitive label.
Physiological arousal is similar in all emotions.
The cognitive label is different for each emotion.
The arousal is the mix of feelings that you get when your sympathetic nervous system is activated – your heart
beats faster, more blood flows to your muscles and brain, the bronchioles in the lungs dilate so that more oxygen
goes into the blood and so on.
Schachter-Singer theory of emotion
Emotioal
stimulus

Physiologic Cognitive
al arousal Label

Experienced
emotion
The emotional stimulus produces physiological arousal and a cognitive label, which produces an experienced emotion.
In the Schachter–Singer theory of emotion, emotion is something like a television programme – the arousal is the
on/off switch and volume control: it determines that there is going to be an emotion, and how strong it will be.
The cognitive label is like the channel switch: it determines what emotion will be felt.
Misattribution of arousal:
One aspect of the Schachter–Singer theory is that it allows for arousal states to be mislabelled or re-labelled.
That is, arousal may arise for one reason but get another label, thereby producing a different reaction.
Someone may not realise that what they are drinking has caffeine, which may create an arousal state.
The mind then searches for a label to make sense of the emotional state. If something frustrating happens,
someone who has this extra, unexplained arousal may get much angrier than they would otherwise. The arousal
from the first event (drinking caffeinated coffee) transfers to the second event (frustration).
This process is called excitation transfer.
Excitation transfer: the idea that arousal from one event can transfer to a later event.
Is the bodily arousal state really the same in all emotions?
There is not just one single state underlying all emotions.
It is more likely that there are at least two basic arousal states that feel quite different – one of these is pleasant
and the other is unpleasant.
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Some important emotions

Five important emotions include:
1. happiness.
2. anger.
3. guilt.
4. shame.
5. disgust.
Inner processes serve interpersonal functions.
Some emotions may serve more basic biological needs, especially survival and reproduction.
People mainly achieve survival and reproduction by forming and maintaining good relationships with other people.
Happiness
Refers simply to feeling good right now.
One measure of happiness relates to the frequency of the type of emotions: referred to as affect balance.
Affect balance: the frequency of positive emotions minus the frequency of negative emotions.
The most complex form of happiness is sometimes called life satisfaction.
Life satisfaction: an evaluation of how one’s life is generally and how it compares to some standard.
It involves not only evaluating how your life is generally, but also how it compares to some standard.
Objective roots of happiness: what would make you happy?
Most people answer this question by referring to objective circumstances.
The one odd exception is having children.
Couples who have children are less happy than couples who have no children.
The drop in happiness has been shown repeatedly.
It goes against intuitive beliefs, most parents expect that having children will increase their happiness.
They continue to believe that having children has made them happier, even though the research clearly shows
otherwise.
Culture plays a big role in all this.
If you want to reduce the negative effect on happiness, you can take several steps:
1. Have a stable relationship to avoid the added stresses of being a single parent.
2. Extend the “newlywed” phase of life between marriage and birth of first child, rather than rushing into
parenthood.
3. Save up some money, which can be used to cover new expenses and thereby reduce some of the financial
stresses that parenthood puts on the couple.!
The fact that having children reduces happiness may actually be a fairly recent, modern phenomenon.
throughout most of childlessness was a family
history, most people when you changed from being an
were farmers, grew too old to work disaster for a married
economic unit to focusing
and they lived the farm, you couple, in terms of on the
in societies that would starve, unless their intimate relationship, the
offered no social emotional impact of
you had children to practical
security systems, take over the farm and economic prospects. parenthood shifted to
pensions or other and support you. become more negative.
means of support. when the
People who are alone in the world are much less happy than people who have strong, rich social networks.
people who
if you think reach their
generally, career goal
for all other that reaching
people who may
circumstances, your goals will experience
meet their
even including make you some
goals are temporary
health, injury, happy, you
briefly happy, happiness, but
money and are likely to be they do not
but then they
career, the disappointed, live happily
go back to ever after.
differences are even though
where they most things
small. technically wear off pretty
were before.
you are right. soon.

a) The hedonic treadmill

The tendency for objective changes to wear off led some social psychologists to speak of the hedonic treadmill.
Hedonic treadmill: a proposing that people stay at about the same level of happiness regardless of what happens to
them.
b) Subjective roots of happiness
Happiness appears to lie more in our outlook and personality than in our circumstances.
People who are happy now will be happy in the future, whereas those who are grumpy or depressed or irritable now
will continue to be so. Happiness is rooted in a person’s outlook and approach to life.
Subjective: refers to how you feel about something.
Objective: refers to the thing itself.
c) Increasing happiness:
Several psychological patterns have been shown to increase happiness:
 forgiving others.
 expressing gratitude.
 counting up good things that have happened recently.
 practising religious beliefs.
 being optimistic.
d) Happy all the time?
There are benefits to happiness:
Happy people:
 make more money and have superior jobs.
 are better leaders and negotiators.
 are more likely to marry and to have fulfilling marriages.
 are less likely to divorce.
 have more friends and social support.
  have stronger immune systems.
 are physically healthier.
 live longer.
 are more helpful and philanthropic.
 show more resilience to stress and trauma.
They can also reduce bias due to stereotypes and prejudice.
unpleasant emotions: pleasant emotions:
unpleasant emotions cause people to focus away from the self, pleasant emotions signal that the external world is fine
attending more to the environment and analysing things carefully. and so the person can turn inward and take it easy.

The healthiest pattern is to experience a broad variety of emotions.

People who are happy all the time are only using part of their emotional range and may be missing out on some
valuable parts of the human experience.
Emodiversity: the degree to which a person experiences the variety and relative abundance of human emotions.
High emodiversity is linked to better mental and physical health.
Emodiversity does not necessarily mean extremity of emotion.
A person can have plenty of emodiversity even though all emotions are relatively mild.
Some people often experience intense emotions, both positive and negative, whereas others rarely feel intense
emotions of any sort.
e) worker happiness globally and in South-Africa:
Being able to recruit and retain top talent is critical for a company to maintain a competitive edge and drive
innovation.
In this regard, employee satisfaction and loyalty is important to consider, the global workforce.
Happiness index assessed:
a) employee satisfaction at their current job.
b) likelihood of recommending their current employer.
c) their stated sense of job loyalty.
The study linked staff happiness with employee retention and productivity.
Anger
Anger: an emotional response to a real or imagined threat or provocation.
Anger can range in intensity from mild irritation to extreme rage.
Many events make people angry.
interpersonal stressors
 such as a provocation. such as frustration.
physical pain.
exposure to violent media.
discomfort caused by heat, crowding, noise or foul odours.
Chemicals inside the body, such as the hormone testosterone, also contribute to getting angry.
Emotions, including anger, are often helpful signals for what to approach and avoid.
Positive emotions signal that you should approach Negative emotions are mostly avoidance signals because they tell
something, typically because it is good. you something is bad.
Fear, sadness, jealousy, anxiety, depressed feelings, and others tend
to motivate people to avoid and withdraw.
Anger is a rare example of an emotion that feels bad but that still signals approach.
Being angry often makes people want to approach or confront the problem, such as by fixing it or by arguing with
the person who made them angry.
Anger is widely recognised as a problem.
It is one of the most heavily regulated emotions, in the sense that cultures have many different norms about
anger.
a) Is anger maladaptive?
Anger seems maladaptive – useless, counterproductive, harmful, divisive, and problematic.
Why would anger exist if it is harmful and maladaptive?
Despite all its faults and drawbacks, anger must have some positive value that helps the organism survive.
Anger is adaptive because it motivates the person to act aggressively and assertively.
Emotions exist in order to motivate actions. each emotion points toward a certain kind of act.
Anger helps get people ready to:
 defend themselves.
 assert their rights.
 pursue goals that might be blocked.
 perform other useful acts.
Why not go directly to the aggression? Why become angry first?
1. anger tips off your enemies that you might attack them, allowing them to prepare themselves or even attack you
first.
2. anger helps reduce aggression.
Both anger and aggression occur in situations where there is conflict, frustration, or provocation.
If human beings had evolved to skip feeling anger and go directly to aggression, there would still be plenty of
aggression.
Research on negotiation has shown some social benefits of anger.
When two people are negotiating and one shows anger, the other takes this as a sign to give in.
It is a sign that the angry person will not compromise or make concessions, so one had best go along.
Anger is useful for a negotiator.
b) dealing with anger
There are three possible ways of dealing with anger:
One standard approach A second approach is to vent one’s anger. The third approach is to try to get rid of one’s
that has been endorsed This view treats anger as a kind of inner anger.
by many societies is pressure or corrosive substance that builds up
never to show anger. over time and does harm unless it is released. This solution is important because the problems
of both the other approaches arise because the
It can end up prompting Catharsis theory: the proposition that person stays angry.
people to push their expressing negative emotions produces a
anger deep inside and healthy release of those emotions and is The important thing is to stop feeling angry.
repress it. therefore good for the psyche. anger can be reduced by getting rid of the
arousal state, such as by relaxing or by counting
Long-term concealed Unfortunately, findings do not show that to 10 before responding.
anger can be quite venting one’s anger has positive value.
destructive to the Anger can also be addressed by mental tactics,
person, increasing the It tends to make people more aggressive such as by reframing the problem or conflict, or
risk of such illnesses as afterward and to worsen interpersonal by distracting oneself and turning one’s attention
heart disease. conflicts. . to other, more pleasant topics. Certain behaviours
can also help get rid of anger. for example, doing
On the other hand, One variation of venting is intense physical something incompatible with anger and
inner states follow exercise. although exercise is good for your aggression can also help, such as petting a
outward expressions, so heart, it is not good for reducing anger. the puppy, watching a comedy, making love, or
if people generally act as reason exercise doesn’t work is that it performing a good deed.
if to show they are not increases rather than decreases arousal levels.
angry, some anger may when people become angry, their physiological These incompatible behaviours work because it is
be diminished. arousal increases. the goal is to decrease difficult or impossible to experience anger and
arousal rather than increase it. another positive emotion at the same time.
The prefrontal cortex is in charge of executive functions.
One of those functions is controlling our emotions, including anger.
We are better able to control our anger when we give our brain the fuel it needs by eating healthy foods.
Guilt and shame
Guilt is actually quite good for society and for close relationships. You would not want to have a boss, a partner, a
roommate, or a business partner who had no sense of guilt.
Such people exist (psychopaths), but they are often a disaster to those around them – they exploit and harm
others, help themselves at the expense of others, and feel no remorse about those they hurt.
a) guilt versus shame
Guilt: an unpleasant moral emotion associated with a specific instance in which one has acted badly or wrongly.
Generally, everyone occasionally does something wrong; the difference between people lies in whether they feel bad
about it or not.

Guilt Shame
 guilt focuses narrowly on the action.  shame spreads to the whole person.
 guilt says, “I did a bad thing”.  shame says, “I am a bad person”.
 guilt is usually constructive.  shame is usually destructive
There are plenty of ways that a good person can remedy an isolated bad act:
 apologise.
 make amends.
 reaffirm one’s commitment to the relationship.
 promise not to repeat the action.
b) effects of guilt
Guilt motivates people to do good acts, such as apologising.
Apologies can help repair damage to relationships because they:
a) convey the implicit agreement that the act was wrong.
b) suggest that the person will try not to do it again.
c) counteract any implication that the bad action meant that the person does not care about the relationship.
Guilt also motivates people to make amends.
When people feel guilty about something they have done, they try harder to perform positive or good actions.
In order to make a relationship more successful, people must sacrifice their own selfish interests and do what is best
for the other person.
Guilt can help make you a better person.
Does it make your own life better?
Guilt has a positive effect on relationships.
Researchers showed that guilt can increase pleasure, mainly because people have learned to associate guilt with
pleasures such as eating, drinking and having fun when they should be working.
A bit of guilt can increase one’s happiness!
c) guilt and relationships
Some forms of guilt do not revolve around doing anything wrong.
Sometimes people feel guilty simply because other people have suffered more than they have.
Survival guilt: an unpleasant emotion associated with living through an experience during which other people died.
People who survive other natural or human-caused disasters feel guilty for having lived when so many others died.
These people had not done anything wrong, but the phenomenon of survivor guilt shows that people are deeply
sensitive to a sense of fairness and have some unease when life is “unfair” in their favour.
d) washing away the guilt
Research by modern social psychologists has confirmed that the average person actually does feel less guilty after
washing their hands.
Guilt is not so easily escaped.
Sometimes guilt can be most directly alleviated by providing restitution to those harmed.
Efforts at restitution aim to repair the damage done by one’s wrongdoing by restoring justice for both perpetrator
and victim.
Retributive justice seeks to punish the wrongdoer.
Those feeling guilt are highly motivated to seek forgiveness to make restitution, so the process of forgiveness is
linked to the emotion of guilt.
e) forgiveness
Forgiveness is an intentional and voluntary process, driven by a deliberate decision to forgive coupled with a letting
go of negative emotions toward the offender.
Forgiveness is the result of the victim’s full recognition that they deserved better treatment.
Forgiveness and reconciliation:
Reconciliation or the restoration of a relationship is an aspect of the forgiveness process.
Benefits of forgiveness:
a) fosters psychological healing through positive changes in affect.
b) aids physical and mental health.
c) restores a victim’s sense of personal power.
d) helps to bring about reconciliation between the offended and offender.
e) encourages hope for the resolution of real-world intergroup conflicts.
Forgiveness interventions:
There are a large number of interventions designed to improve individuals’ abilities to forgive, both at the
interpersonal level and at the group level.
Interventions that promote understanding the roots of violence can foster reconciliation and forgiveness after mass
violence and after individual injury.
Disgust:
Is a strong negative feeling of repugnance and revulsion.
It is different from anger, in that anger motivates people to approach rather than avoid things, whereas disgust is a
strong signal to avoid something.
Although disgust is unpleasant, it does have its benefits:
It can motivate a broad range of healthy behaviours. (besides avoidance of things that will make you sick)
Many people do not wash their hands often enough, including after going to the toilet.
Cultivating a sense of disgust helps motivate people to wash more often.
Another use of disgust to motivate healthy behaviour is in the policies by which some governments require cigarette
companies to put disgusting pictures on cigarette packs to motivate people to quit smoking.
Disgust can be considered part of a” behavioural immune system” that supports health. The body’s inner immune
system for fighting off infections requires considerable energy and is not always successful, so it is safer to avoid
things that could bring infection.
People also regard some forms of immoral behaviour as disgusting, and they elicit similar facial responses and
attitudes as do unpalatable foods, filthy toilets, and bloody wounds. In particular, behaviours associated with purity,
such as cleanliness and physical health are particularly linked to disgust.
Why do we have emotions?
Emotions make up an important and powerful feedback system.
Emotions tell us whether something is good or bad.
Caring (motivation) is, therefore, one ingredient necessary for making emotion as we go through life and things
happen to us, emotions follow afterward and help us determine whether each event was good or bad.
This is true for both automatic affect and conscious emotion.
Emotions promote belongingness.
 emotions help people get along better.
 people’s emotions promote their ties to others.
 forming social bonds is linked to positive emotions.
Many bad emotions are linked to events that end, damage, or threaten relationships:
 divorce and other forms of social rejection foster sadness, depression, and anger.
 having an enemy lead to fear or hate.
 being a victim of crime or racism also causes anger, sadness and depression.
 doing something that hurts a loved one causes guilt.
 being treated badly or rejected unfairly causes anger.
 the threat that your partner might leave you for someone else causes jealousy.
 the prospect of being abandoned and alone causes anxiety.
 losing a loved one causes grief.
 Happy feelings often reflect healthy relationships, whereas hurt feelings often reflect damaged relationships.
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Emotions help promote good interpersonal relations.

Emotions communicate social information.
Emotions fit the general pattern that nature says go; culture says stop.
Children do not need to be taught to have emotions rather, they learn to conceal their feelings when appropriate.
The natural state of an emotion includes visible display, so that others can tell what you are feeling.
Emotions are thus not purely for the inside.
Emotions cause behaviour – sort of.
It has been assumed that emotions guide behaviour.
This view is consistent with physiological arousal.
Arousal gets the body ready for action.
Some theorists have proposed that emotion does not exist without a readiness for action.
Other theorists have proposed that implicit muscle movements are part of emotion.
That is, an emotion naturally and normally starts your body moving.
Then again, maybe emotions do not guide behaviour.
People have plenty of emotions without doing anything.
Additionally, we do not associate most emotions with any single action.
The objection that emotion is too slow to guide behaviour applies mainly to conscious emotion, of course.
Automatic affect – the feeling of liking or disliking something – arises in a fraction of a second and therefore can
be very helpful – if you had to wait around for arousal to build and a full-fledged conscious emotion to occur, it
would be too late to help you make that decision.
When emotion causes behaviour, it is often because the person wants to change or escape the emotional state. for
example, researchers have long known that sad, depressed moods make people more helpful.
The emotion does not directly cause behaviour; rather, it makes people look for ways to escape the bad feeling.
There is another reason to suspect that the purpose of emotion is not to directly cause behaviour – when emotion
does cause behaviour, as in the so-called heat of passion, it often produces behaviours that are not wise or beneficial
to the individual. for example, angry people often say and do things that they later regret.
Evolution favours characteristics that bring benefits and advantages.
If emotions mainly caused foolish actions, then natural selection would have gradually phased emotion out of the
human psyche.
The irrationality of emotional actions is therefore a reason to suspect that the natural purpose of emotion is
elsewhere.
One seeming exception to the view that emotions do not cause behaviour is communication – it seems that
emotions are meant to be communicated, and, in this sense, emotions do cause behaviour.
It may be natural to show one’s feelings and artificial to hide them.
Young children, for example, typically express their emotions freely and without reserve.
As they grow up, they slowly learn to hide them sometimes, which is another sign that the influence of socialisation
is to restrain and conceal feelings rather than to instil them.
Once again, nature says go and culture says stop!
Affect-as-information hypothesis – the idea that people judge something as good or bad by asking themselves
“how do I feel about it?”
 if they feel good, they conclude that the thing is good.
 if they feel bad, then they conclude that whatever they are dealing with must be bad.

When people are in an emotional state, they seem to see the world in a more emotional way, and this changes the
way they process information. people put things in categories based more on their emotional tone than on their
meaning.
Emotion links you to emotional connections out in the world.
Emotion guides decisions and choices:
Emotions are a feedback system in the sense that they give us dramatic and powerful evaluations of whatever has
just happened. In a sense, therefore, emotions focus on the recent past.
Is that any help toward the future?
 one way they could help would be with learning.
 people can learn to anticipate how they will feel if something happens.
 as a result, they can begin to guide their behaviour based on how they expect to feel.
  if emotion rewards and punishes behaviour, then perhaps people decide how to act based on how they expect to feel
afterward.
 they avoid acts that they expect will make them feel bad, and they favour acts that they think will make them feel
good.
 anticipated emotion is important.
Humans are the only animals that can travel mentally through time, preview a variety of different futures, and
choose the one they think will bring them the greatest pleasure.
Affective forecasting: the ability to predict one’s emotional reactions to future events.

Most people are fairly accurate at predicting which emotions they would feel, but they substantially overestimate
how long they would feel that way.
Predicting wrongly could carry some costs.
Revenge, for example, is something people often pursue on the basis of affective forecasting errors.
Anticipated emotion can be a powerful guide to behaviour.
One of the most studied effects of anticipated emotion is anticipated regret.
Decision making shows a “status quo bias”, which means that people tend to stick with what they have and be too
reluctant to make changes, even if changing would logically put them in a better position.
Researchers explain the status quo bias on the basis of anticipated regret: if you made the wrong decision, you would
probably regret it more if you had made a change than if you had stuck with what you had.
Emotions help and hurt decision making.
Without emotions, people have trouble making up their minds.
People can think through the good and bad features of different choices, but they have trouble settling on which one
is best.
decisions are also guided by anticipated on the other hand, the traditional awareness that people make bad decisions
emotion, usually for the better. under the influence of emotion suggests that emotion can harm decisions as
well as helping them.
Evolution seems to have prepared humans and other primates to experience fear and anxiety in response to certain
objects.
Anxiety has been called the “shadow of intelligence” because it motivates people to plan ahead and avoid taking
unnecessary risks. According to the risk-as-feelings hypothesis, people react to risky situations based on how severe
the worst outcome is and how likely it is to occur.
They do this at a gut level,f their gut tells them the situation is too risky, they avoid it.
Risk-as-feelings hypothesis: the idea that people rely on emotional processes to evaluate risk, with the result that
their judgements may be biased by emotional factors.
Strong conscious emotions can also influence people to engage in risky behaviour and ignore future consequences.
Sexual arousal often interferes with decision-making ability.
Positive emotions counteract negative emotions.
Positive emotions are studied far less than negative emotions. Compared to negative emotions, there are fewer
positive emotions, and they are relatively undifferentiated.
it is difficult to distinguish joy, amusement, happiness, and contentment. in contrast, it is easier to distinguish anger,
fear, sadness, and disgust.
What adaptive function do positive emotions serve?
Broaden-and-build theory: the proposition that positive emotions expand an individual’s attention and mindset and
promote increasing one’s resources.
Positive emotions broaden and expand an individual’s attention and mindset. for example, joy broadens by creating
urges to play, push the limits and become creative.
These broadened mind-sets build an individual’s:
 physical resources.
 intellectual resources.
 social resources
Positive emotions broaden and expand an individual’s attention and mindset.
These broadened mindsets, in turn, build an individual’s intellectual, physical, social, and psychological resources.
Intellectual resources Social resources Psychological resources
-develop problem-solving skills. -solidify bonds. -develop resilience and optimism.
-learn new information. -make new bonds. -develop sense of identity and goal
-develop coordination. orientation.
-develop strength and cardiovascular
health.
Research has shown that positive events are strongly related to positive emotions but not negative emotions,
whereas negative events are strongly related to negative emotions but not positive emotions.
Other benefits of positive emotions.
 being in a good mood helps flexibility, creativity, and problem-solving ability.
 being in a bad mood does not help flexibility and creativity.
 work can benefit from positive emotions.
People in a positive mood:
 perform better.
 are more persistent,
 try harder.
 more motivated than people in a neutral or negative mood.
People in a positive mood are:
 less logical.
 have poorer short-term memory.
 are more easily distracted by irrelevant information.
These effects might be due to the fact that positive moods promote heuristic thinking that relies on mental short
cuts.
Group differences in edition:
Are emotions different across cultures?
Some experts now agree that most emotions may be quite similar across cultural boundaries.
Paul Ekman and his colleagues have identified six basic emotions that can be reliably inferred from facial expressions:
1. anger.
2. surprise.
3. disgust.
4. happiness.
5. fear.
6. sadness.
Are women more emotional than men?
A long-standing stereotype depicts women as more emotional than men: is this stereotype accurate?
Women Men
Women are supposed to be more readily overcome with In contrast to men, who make decisions based on
feelings and to be more guided by them. cool, rational deliberation.
A female, on the other hand, can express a level of In South Africa, some cultural norms suggest that
discomfort, as it will ensure she receives help. men are not allowed to show their pain (Physical or
emotional).
Thus, cultural, and social norms impact on the
perception of pain. Expressing pain in any manner is frowned upon as
it is considered a sign of being weak.
The Sesotho idiom “mona ke nku ha ile” literally
translates as ‘a man is a cow, he does not cry’.
It implies that crying is a sign of weakness, and
that men are supposed to toughen up and take
whatever comes their way.
Observations of boy’s play indicate that they seek out exciting, arousing themes but try to learn to manage fear and
other emotions.
partly for this reason, boy's
games last longer than girls’
games. boys may find it more
difficult than girls to calm
themselves down when upset,
so they work harder to avoid
in games, boys put emotion in the first place.
an disputes are settled by
appealing to abstract rules
emphasis on keeping this pattern continues into
their or, if necessary, replaying
the disputed event, adulthood and marriage: when
emotions under married couples argue,
control so whereas girls’ games are
likely to end when husbands show stronger and
that feelings do not emotion longer-lasting physiological
disrupt erupts. arousal than wives.
the game.
as a result, husbands tend to
avoid marital conflicts, whereas
wives are more willing to argue
and confront their spouse with
All these findings begin to suggest a very different conclusion: problems
Based on the research findings, one could even speculate that men are more emotional than women.
The findings of greater male emotionality in love and work, plus during infancy, fit this pattern.
Possibly male emotion has presented problems for society, as when male emotion leads to violence, risk taking,
intoxication and other potential problems.
Holding up an ideal of men as cool, rational, and unemotional may be a way for society to keep the dangers of male
emotion under control.
The apparent lack of gender differences in observed emotion may conceal a pattern suggesting that boys and men
are actually by nature more emotional but, as a result of this emotionality, develop ways of avoiding emotionally
intense situations and emotional provocations.
Arousal, attention, and performance:
That emotion contains arousal, in the sense of being physically excited.
Many people believe that emotional arousal is harmful – that it is better to calm down, especially when one is trying
to make a logical decision or perform effectively in a crisis.
Yet the arousal that goes with emotion seems designed by nature to make a person perform better, not worse.
One answer is that the relationship between arousal and performance is an upside-down u-shaped curve.
That is, increasing arousal first makes for better performance, then for worse.
Some arousal is better than none, but too much arousal can hurt performance.
Yerkes Dodson law: the proposition that some arousal is better than none, but too much can hurt performance.
According to the Yerkes–Dodson law, some arousal is better than none, but too much can hurt performance.
The curve is lower for complex tasks than for simple tasks because performance is generally lower for complex
tasks. in both cases, though, the link between arousal and performance resembles an inverted (upside-down) u, going
up and then back down.
Easterbrook’s main idea was that arousal makes the mind remove information and focus more narrowly:
When people have very low arousal, they do not As arousal increases, the mind begins to screen out irrelevant
perform very well because the mind is filled with all information, which helps it focus better on the task at hand, and
sorts of information (including much that is unhelpful performance improves. at some point, corresponding to the peak on
or irrelevant, such as noise outside when you are the curve and the best possible performance, the mind is processing
studying), so it has a difficult time focusing on the all the information relevant to the task and nothing else. that’s when
task at hand. you do your best work.
However, as arousal increases beyond that point, the mind continues to focus ever more narrowly – and this further
narrowing requires that it has to throw out helpful, task relevant information.
Hence, highly aroused people will be intensely, narrowly focused on what they are doing, but they may miss crucial
information that is relevant or helpful.
As a result, they end up performing worse than people with a moderate level of arousal.
The effects of stress on thinking appear to go along with Easterbrook’s theory.
Under stress, people focus more narrowly on the task at hand, so up to a point, stress makes people perform better
– but beyond that point, stress makes people ignore relevant information.
Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ)
Emotional intelligence: the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate, emotions so as to assist thought, to
understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and reflectively regulate emotions to promote emotional and
intellectual growth.
Emotional intelligence is denoted by EI or EQ rather than IQ.
Emotional intelligence has four parts:
1. Perceiving emotions Defined as the ability to recognise how you and those around you are feeling.
It also involves perceiving emotions in objects, art, stories, music, and other stimuli.
2. Facilitating thought Defined as the ability to generate an emotion and then to reason with this emotion.
3. Understanding emotions Defined as the ability to understand complex emotions and how emotions can transition from one
stage to another.
4. Managing emotions Defined as the ability to be open to feelings, and to modulate them in oneself and others so as to
promote personal understanding and growth.
People high on emotional intelligence are better than others at affective forecasting and less susceptible to common
errors.
They predict their future emotions more accurately than other people.
Scoring high on managing emotions was particularly conducive to being able to predict future emotions correctly.
Recent meta-analyses report that emotional intelligence is also positively related to:
 romantic relationship satisfaction.
 academic success.
 constructive conflict management in leaders.
Emotional intelligence seems to affect all relationships, including those at schools and in the workplace, regardless of
cultural positioning. On the other end of the spectrum, people who suffered brain damage provide extreme examples
of diminished emotional intelligence with high general intelligence.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio described Elliot, who had a brain tumour removed: “I never saw a tinge of emotion in
my many hours of conversation with him, no sadness, no impatience, no frustration”.
Elliot was shown disturbing pictures of injured people, destroyed communities and natural disasters, yet Elliot showed
& realised he felt – no emotion.
Dark tetrad of personality consists of narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism and sadism.
narcissism narcissists are selfish individuals with inflated egos.
psychopathy psychopaths show a pervasive disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others. they are callous and
unemotional individuals.
Machiavellianism “Machiavellianism” comes from the Italian philosopher and writer Niccolo Machiavelli. Machiavelli advocated
using any means necessary to gain raw political power, including aggression and violence.
sadism sadism is the enjoyment of hurting others.
People with these dark personality traits tend to be high in emotional intelligence, but they use their emotional
intelligence to manipulate others. This dark tetrad of personality is also related to aggression.
Affect regulation.
One reason that emotional intelligence is beneficial is that it can help people control and regulate their feelings –
when emotions run out of control, they can wreak havoc on inner and interpersonal processes.
People who are poor at controlling their own emotional reactions are more likely to fall victim to mental illnesses that
are characterised by severe emotional problems.
Self-regulate is important and valuable in many spheres of life.
Arousal control strategies include:
 exercising.
 drinking coffee or other caffeine product to increase arousal.
 drinking alcohol.
 taking a nap and using relaxation techniques to decrease arousal.
Exercise may be an especially interesting strategy because it first increases arousal but later, as one gets tired,
decreases it.
Seeking social support is another common strategy for controlling emotion.
People may call their friends when they feel bad.
Others go out and actively seek other’s company.
Even to deal with their own problem emotions, people turn to other people.
When you are upset about almost anything, you can go spend time with people who like you, and it is likely that you
will end up feeling better.
Again, this does not solve the original problem that made you feel bad, but it does help you stop feeling bad.
A very different set of affect regulation strategies is based on trying to deal directly with the problem in some way.
Many people report trying to reframe the problem, such as by putting it into perspective or trying to see a conflict
from the other person’s side. some try to use humour to make light of the problem and cheer themselves up.
Others try to vent their feelings, as by punching a pillow, screaming, or crying.
Religious activities such as praying help some people cope with their troubles; in fact, some studies have found
religious activities were rated as among the most effective strategies for regulating affect. for example, prayer has
been found to be an effective way to reduce angry feelings and aggressive behaviours.
Affect regulation goals.
in principle, affect regulation can have at least six different goals:
1) a person can try to get into a good mood.
2) a person can try get out of a good mood.
3) a person can prolong a good mood.
4) a person can try to get into a bad mood.
5) a person can try get out of a bad mood.
6) a person can prolong a bad mood.
Research has shown that how people regulate their emotional states prior to social interaction is often very specific
to the context.
People who expect to interact with a depressed person often seek out positive People who are going to interact with a close
stimuli that will make them even happier, possibly because they expect (rightly) relationship partner do not seem to change
that it will be depressing to talk to a depressed person, and they want to their moods, possibly because they intend
strengthen themselves with an extra good mood to help them resist being to share their good or bad feelings with the
brought down. partner.
Sometimes people even seek to cultivate anger.
People in one study preferred to listen to angry music rather than other types In contrast, participants anticipating a
of music when they expected a social interaction that would require cooperative or constructive social
confrontation and assertion. interaction chose other types of music.)
People seemed to anticipate that anger might be a useful emotion in the upcoming interaction, so they chose stimuli
to help them get and stay mad.
The angrier participants performed better in the confrontational situation.
People seem to seek out emotions partly on the basis of what will be useful and helpful in their social interactions.
This desire to be effective competes with the desire to feel good, of course.
Many strategies of emotion regulation are simply aimed at the goal of getting out of a bad mood or into a good one.
Gender differences in emotion control strategies.
Women eat, and men drink to regulate their moods.
Both strategies have obvious drawbacks!
Other gender differences exist in mood regulation strategies.
When seeking to feel better, men are more likely than women to use humour to make light of the problem.
Men are also more prone to report that sexual activity is a good way to improve their emotional state. in contrast,
women are more likely to go shopping or to call someone to talk about the issue.
Men and women are far more similar than different in their overall experiences with emotion and in most other
areas as well.
Is affect regulation safe?
Emotion regulation: “the ability to hang up the phone after getting the message”.
Once emotions have done their job, it may be useful to be able to control them. Culture teaches people that displays
of emotion are inappropriate on many occasions to be a successful member of almost any human society requires
the ability to regulate one’s emotional reactions to some degree.