EMOTION

Dr. Sahithya BR
Assistant Professor, Department of Clinical Psychology,
DIMHANS
Activity…
• Try to list all the emotions you feel during a day…
 Introduction
• An emotion is a subjective state of being that we often
describe as our feelings.

• It is a complex, multicomponent episode that creates a

readiness to act.

• Emotions are distinct from moods in multiple ways.

 • Difference between Emotions and Mood…

SN Emotion Mood
1 Emotions typically have a clear cause. Moods, on the other hand, are
They are about something or someone often free-floating and diffuse
(You are angry at your sister, You are affective states.
awestruck by the Grand Canyon).
2 Emotions are typically brief, lasting only Moods endure longer, lasting for
seconds or minutes. hours, even days.
3 Emotions typically implicate the multiple Moods may be salient only at the
component systems. level of subjective experience.
4 Emotions are often conceptualized as Moods, are often conceptualized
fitting into discrete categories, like fear, as varying along the dimensions
anger, joy, and interest. of pleasantness and arousal level.
 Components…
• An intense emotion has at least six components:

1. Cognitive appraisal 4. Internal bodily changes

2. Subjective experience 5. Facial expressions

3. Thought and action 6. Responses to emotion

tendencies

None of these 6 components by itself is an emotion - Instead, they

come together to create a particular emotion.
 Components…
Cognitive appraisal:
• An emotion begins with a cognitive appraisal.
• It is a person’s assessment of the personal meaning of his/her
current circumstances.

Subjective experience:
• The affective state or feeling tone the emotion brings.
• This component we most frequently recognize.
Thought and action tendencies:
• Urges to think and act in certain ways.
• Example, if you are angry, you may be tempted to act
aggressively.

Internal bodily reaction:

• Physiological responses.
• Autonomic nervous system (such as changes in heart rate and
sweat gland activity) is activated.
• Example, when you are afraid, your heart may pound, and your
palms may sweat.
Facial expressions:
• The muscle actions that move facial landmarks - like cheeks, lips,
noses, and brows - in particular ways.
• For example, when you experience disgust, you frown.

Responses to emotion:
• Final component.
• It means how people cope with or react to their own emotion or
the situation that triggered it.
• Schematic Diagram of the Emotion Process.
(Lazarus, 1991; Rosenberg, 1998)
COGNITIVE APPRAISAL AND EMOTION
• The objective situation in which a person finds herself are not
themselves components of emotions, because they do not always
or directly trigger emotions.
• For these circumstances to produce an emotion in us, we would
need to interpret them as relevant to our personal goals or
wellbeing.

• This interpretation process is called cognitive appraisal.

• Example, if you interpret receiving an insult as a threat to your
honor, you’d experience anger.
• Or, if you interpret that same insult as the meaningless ranting of an
erratic person, you experience no emotion whatsoever.
 •
1991)
associated core relational themes (appraisal patterns, Lazarus,
Emotions and their cognitive causes - Fifteen emotions and their
Lazarus Cognitive mediation
theory….
• The key idea of appraisal theory is that
you have thoughts (a cognitive
appraisal) before you experience an
emotion, and the emotion you
experience depends on the thoughts
you had.

• Two people can have two completely

different emotions regarding the same
event.
• Eg. suppose your psychology instructor
selected you to lecture on emotion; you
might see that as positive, because it
represents an opportunity to be the center
of attention, and you would experience
happiness.
Cognitive appraisals are largely responsible for
differentiating the emotions.
Personal meaning determines the type of emotion and its intensity.
 Two-factor theory of emotions
Schachter and Singer’s theory of emotions

• The research says that once you get your body into a hunched-over
posture with tension only in your neck and you are constantly sighing,
you tend to feel sad.
• Question – But how do you know whether you are angry or frightened? Anger and
fear are so similar physiologically that your autonomic changes cannot tell you which
one you are experiencing
• According to the theory, the intensity of the physiological state—that is,
the degree of sympathetic nervous system arousal— determines the
intensity of the emotion, but a cognitive appraisal of the situation
identifies the type of emotion.
• If people could be induced to be in a general state of autonomic arousal,
the quality of their emotion would be determined solely by their
appraisal of the situation.
• Emotions result from the combination of two factors – an initial state of
unexplained arousal plus a cognitive explanation/appraisal for that
arousal.
The experiment…
• Participants in the study were given an injection of epinephrine,
which typically causes autonomic arousal – an increase in heart
and respiration rates, muscle tremors, and a jittery feeling.
• The experimenter then manipulated the information that the
participants were given regarding the effects of the injection.
• Some participants were correctly informed about the arousal
consequences of the drug, but others were given no information
about the drug’s physiological effects.
• The informed participants therefore had an explanation for their
sensations, whereas the uninformed participants did not.
• Participants were left in a waiting room with another person,
seemingly another participant but actually a partner of the
experimenter.
• The partner created either a happy situation or an angry situation.

• The uninformed participants placed in the happy situation rated their

feelings as happier than did the informed participants in that same
situation.
• In the angry situation - the uninformed participants were angrier than
the informed participants.

• In other words, participants who had a physiological explanation for

their arousal (i.e., ‘that injection I got’) appeared to be less influenced
by the situation than those who did not have an explanation.
• There were several issues with the experiment…

• The differences between critical groups did not reach

statistical significance

• Control group did not react in a manner consistent with the

hypotheses.
• Follow-up experiments have found that participants rate their
experiences more negatively (less happy or more angry) than
the situation warrants, suggesting that the physiological
arousal produced by epinephrine is experienced as somewhat
unpleasant.
• Later experimenters have had difficulty reproducing the
results obtained by Schachter and Singer
 Misattribution of arousal theory

• Completely neutral arousal may be mistakenly attributed to a

particular emotion.
• This effect means that lingering physiological arousal – (eg. from
running up four flights of stairs) – can be mistakenly attributed
to subsequent circumstances – like an ambiguous remark (eg.
‘nice hair’) – and intensify our emotional reactions to those
circumstances.
• The Experiment…
• Participants first engaged in strenuous physical exercise and
then participated in a task, during which they were provoked by
a partner of the experimenter.
• The exercise created physiological arousal that was neutral and
that persisted until the participant was provoked.
• This arousal should have combined with any arousal elicited by
the provocation, resulting in a more intense response of anger.
• In fact, participants who had just exercised responded more
aggressively to the provocation than those who did not
(Zillmann & Bryant, 1974).
• This effect has been replicated in many studies.
• Cognitive appraisals can occur outside conscious awareness.
• The Experiment… (Ohman, 2000)
• Researchers presented pictures of spiders and snakes to
participants who
• (1) fear snakes, (2) fear spiders, or (3) have no phobias.
• In one condition, the pictures were shown long enough for participants to
consciously recognize them.
• In another condition, backward masking was used - pictures were shown
for only 30 milliseconds and then masked by a neutral picture so that
participants were unaware of the picture’s content.
• Phobics showed nearly identical physiological responses to
pictures of their phobic object, regardless of whether they
consciously saw the spider or snake or not.
• These studies suggest that appraisals can occur at unconscious
levels, making people experience emotions for reasons unknown
to them.
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCES AND EMOTION
• The subjective experience of emotions – the feeling
component – is, within awareness.
• The feeling component of emotion is thought to guide behavior,
decision making, and information processing.

• Eg. When we feel a negative emotion, like fear or anger, the

unpleasant feeling serves as a cue that something in our
environment poses us a threat and that we may need to act fast to
protect ourselves.
• When we feel a positive emotion, like joy or interest, the pleasant
feeling signals that we are safe and satiated, and that we can feel
free to play or explore.
• Feelings modify attention and learning
• We tend to pay more attention to events that fit our current
feelings than to events that do not. As a consequence, we learn
more about the events that fit, or are congruent with, our feelings.
• Feelings modify evaluations and judgments
• Our feelings can affect our evaluations of other people.
• When we are feeling happy, a friend’s habit of constantly checking
his appearance in a mirror may seem just an idiosyncrasy; when
we are feeling irritable, we may dwell on how vain he is.
• Feelings affect judgment as well
• The Experiment… (Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993).
• Participants were made either sad or angry by imagining
themselves experiencing either a sad event or an angry one.
• They were then asked to evaluate the possible causes of
hypothetical events, such as missing an important flight or
losing money.
• Participants who were angry tended to attribute the hypothetical
events to the mistakes of other people, but participants who
were sad tended to attribute them to situations (eg. traffic
congestion was the reason for missing a flight).
• So the angry participants were more ready to blame someone
for negative events, whereas the sad participants were more
willing to acknowledge that an unlucky situation might have
caused the events.
THOUGHT AND ACTION TENDENCIES AND EMOTION
• One way that feelings guide behavior
and information processing is through
the urges that accompany them.
• These urges are called thought–
action tendencies

• With most negative emotions, people’s

thought–action tendencies become
narrow and specific.
• Eg: In fear, we feel the specific urge to
escape the danger.
• By contrast, with most positive
emotions, people’s thought–action
tendencies become broad and more
open to possibilities.
• Eg: In joy, we feel the urge to be playful in
• Whether urges become actions depends on the complex
interplay of impulse control, cultural norms, and other factors.

• Many emotion theorists hold that having particular thought and

action tendencies come to mind is what made emotions
evolutionarily adaptive:
• For negative emotions, specific thought–action tendencies
are thought to represent those actions that worked best in
getting our ancestors out of life-or-death situations.
• Negative emotions narrow people’s momentary thought–action
repertoires, promoting quick action in life-threatening
circumstances.
• Positive emotions broaden people’s momentary thought–action
repertoires, which, over time, can build lasting resources for
BODILY CHANGES AND EMOTION
• Many of the physiological changes that take place during
emotional arousal result from activation of the sympathetic
division of the autonomic nervous system.
• The sympathetic nervous system prepares the body for
emergency action and is responsible for the following changes
(which need not all occur at once):
• 1. Blood pressure and heart rate increase.
• 2. Respiration becomes more rapid.
• 3. The pupils dilate.
• 4. Perspiration increases while secretion of saliva and mucus decreases.
• 5. Blood-sugar level increases to provide more energy.
• 6. The blood clots more quickly in case of wounds.
• 7. Blood is diverted from the stomach and intestines to the brain and
skeletal muscles.
• 8. The hairs on the skin become erect, causing goose pimples.
• The sympathetic nervous system gears up the organism for
energy output.
• As the emotion subsides, the parasympathetic nervous
system – the energy-conserving system – takes over and
returns the organism to its normal state.

• These activities of the autonomic nervous system are triggered

by activity in certain regions of the brain, including the
hypothalamus and the amygdala.
• Impulses from these areas are transmitted to nuclei in the brain
stem that control the functioning of the autonomic nervous
system.
• The autonomic nervous system then acts directly on the muscles
and internal organs to initiate the bodily changes. It also acts
indirectly by stimulating the adrenal hormones to produce other
• Positive emotions produce few bodily changes because their
associated thought–action tendencies are broad and not specific.

• So instead of producing the heightened arousal that supports

specific actions, positive emotions may be particularly suited for
helping people recover from any lingering arousal that follows
negative emotions, an idea called the undoing effect of positive
emotions.
• The Experiment… (Fredrickson, Mancuso, Branigan, & Tugade,
2000)
• Participants were asked to prepare a speech on ‘Why you are a
good friend’ under considerable time pressure. They were told
that the speech would be videotaped and evaluated by their
peers.
• This speech task produced feelings of anxiety, along with
increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and other indices of
cardiovascular activity.
• These physiological changes lingered on, even after participants
were told that they would not have to deliver their speech after
all.
• The participants were shown a randomly selected film clip that
induced one of two positive emotions (joy/contentment), a
negative emotion (sadness), or no emotion.
• Results: Those who turned their attention to either of the two
 James–Lange theory
• Autonomic arousal contributes to the intensity of emotional
experience.
• But does it differentiate the emotions? is there one pattern of physiological
activity for excitement, another for anger, still another for fear, and so on?

• According to the Theory: Because the perception of autonomic

arousal (and perhaps of other bodily changes) constitutes the
experience of an emotion, and because different emotions feel
different, there must be a distinct pattern of autonomic activity
for each emotion.
• This Theory asserts that emotions arise from physiological arousal.
• The James–Lange theory therefore holds that autonomic arousal
differentiates the emotions.
• The theory was heavily criticized…
• 1. The internal organs are relatively insensitive structures and
are not well supplied with nerves, internal changes occur too
slowly to be the primary source of emotional feeling.
• 2. Artificially inducing the bodily changes associated with an
emotion – Eg. injecting a drug such as epinephrine – does not
produce the experience of a true emotion. At most, it produces
‘as if’ emotions: Injected participants remark, ‘I feel as if afraid.’
• 3. The pattern of autonomic arousal does not seem to differ
much from one emotional state to another. For example, anger
makes our heart beat faster, but so does the sight of a loved
one.
• Differences in opinion and results…
• A study by Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen (1990) provided some
evidence for differences in physiological arousal between negative
and positive emotion.
• Participants produced emotional expressions for each of six
emotions – surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, and happiness.
• The researchers measured their heart rate, skin temperature, and
other indicators of autonomic arousal.
• Heart rate was faster for the negative emotions of anger, fear, and
sadness than for happiness, surprise, and disgust
• Even though both anger and the sight of a loved one make our heart
beat faster, only anger makes it beat much faster;
• Although anger and fear have much in common, anger is hot and
fear is cold
Differences in arousal for different
emotions
Another research…
• Other research suggests that these distinctive arousal patterns
may be universal.
• Levenson, Ekman, Heider, & Friesen (1992) studied the
Minangkabau of Western Sumatra, a culture very different from
Western culture.
• Participants produced facial expressions for various emotions –
fear, anger, sadness, and disgust – while measures were taken of
their heart rate, skin temperature, and other indicators of arousal.
• Although the magnitude of the physiological changes was less
than that of the changes reported earlier for American individuals,
the patterns of arousal for the different emotions were the same:
• Heart rate was faster for anger, fear, and sadness than for disgust,
and skin temperature was highest for anger.
• Cannon-Bard theory

• According to this view, physiological arousal and emotional

experience occur simultaneously, yet independently.

• So, when you see the venomous snake, you feel fear at exactly
the same time that your body mounts its fight or flight
response. This emotional reaction would be separate and
independent of the physiological arousal, even though they co-
occur.
FACIAL EXPRESSION AND EMOTION
• The facial movements that accompany an emotion serve to
communicate the sender’s emotion, often eliciting emotion in those
who receive that communication.
• Function of emotional expression
• Communication of emotion as an important function - one that has
survival value for the species.
• Eg. Looking frightened may warn others that danger is present,
perceiving that someone is angry tells us that he or she may be
about to act aggressively, and seeing someone smile will make us
feel safe and drawn to them.
• Other research suggests that, in addition to their communicative
function, emotional expressions – in the face, body, and voice –
contribute to the subjective experience of emotion, just as appraisals
and internal bodily changes do.
• Facial expressions might at times even jumpstart the whole emotion
• Facial feedback Hypothesis
• The idea that facial expressions, in addition to their
communicative function, also contribute to our experience of
emotions is called the facial feedback hypothesis.
• This hypothesis runs parallel to the James–Lange theory: Just as
we receive feedback about (or perceive) our autonomic arousal,
so do we receive feedback about our facial expressions, and this
feedback can cause or intensify the experience of emotions.
• The experiment… (Strack, Martin, & Stepper,
1988)
• Participants rated cartoons for funniness while
holding a pen either in their teeth or in their
lips.
• Holding a pen in your teeth forces your face
into a smile, while holding it in your lips
prevents a smile.
• Participants who held the pen in their teeth
rated the cartoons as funnier than those who
held the pen in their lips.
• Another experiment… (Levenson, Ekman, &
Friesen, 1990)
• Producing particular emotional expressions led
to changes in heartbeat and skin temperature.
• Facial expressions may have an indirect effect
• Universality of expressions…
• Certain facial expressions seem to have a
universal meaning, regardless of the culture in
which an individual is raised.
• The universal expression of anger, for example,
involves a flushed face, brows lowered and drawn
together, flared nostrils, a clenched jaw, and
bared teeth.
• Experiment… (Ekman, 1982)
• When people from 5 countries (US, Brazil, Chile,
Argentina, Japan) viewed photos showing facial
expressions typical of happiness, anger, sadness,
disgust, fear, and surprise, they had little
difficulty identifying the emotion that each
expression conveyed.
• Even members of remote groups that had had virtually no
contact with Western cultures (the Fore and Dani peoples in New
Guinea) were able to identify the emotions represented by facial
expressions of people from Western cultures.

• American college students who viewed videotapes of facial

expressions of Fore natives identified the associated emotions
accurately, although they sometimes confused fear and surprise.
• The universality of certain emotional expressions
supports Darwin’s claim that they are innate responses
with an evolutionary history.
• According to Darwin, many of the ways in which we express
emotion are inherited patterns that originally had some survival
value
• Learned expressions…
• Although facial expressions seem to be innately associated with
particular emotions, certain aspects of them are learned.
• Emotional display rules, which, vary across cultures and specify
the types of emotions people should express in certain situations
and the behaviors appropriate for particular emotions.
• Eg. In some cultures people who lose a loved one are expected to
feel sad and to express their sadness by openly crying and wailing
for the loved one to return. In other cultures, bereaved people are
expected to sing, dance, and be merry.
• In Europe, two men greeting each other on the street may
embrace, but in the United States such displays of affection are
often taboo for men.
RESPONSES TO EMOTION: EMOTION REGULATION
• Emotion regulation - People’s responses to their own
emotions.

• People always have reactions to their emotions and goals about

what they would like to feel or express, and when.
• Sometimes people have the goal of maintaining or intensifying
an emotion, whether positive or negative.
• Eg. Savoring and prolong the joy you feel when you’re with
people you love.
• In another circumstance, you might want to work up your anger
before registering a complaint to a merchant.
• Other times, people have the goal of minimizing or eliminating
an emotion, whether positive or negative.
• Eg. Imagine feeling immensely proud of a personal
achievement, perhaps landing a good job.
• While on that pleasurable high, imagine running into a friend
who has recently been turned down for multiple jobs and
remains jobless.
• Will you want to minimize your expressions of pride at that
moment?

• Most commonly, people’s goals are to minimize their negative

emotions, like sadness or anger.
• Emotions and people’s efforts to regulate them go hand-in-hand.
• A considerable part of the socialization process is directed
toward teaching children how and when to regulate their
emotions.

• Parents teach their children, both directly and by example, when

certain emotions are appropriate and when they are not.

• Eg. Receiving a disappointing gift from grandmother. Can you

show your disappointment to your grandmother? Your parents
hope that you won’t, and eventually you learn not to.
• Experiments…
• Studies suggests that children’s success in learning these
lessons about emotion regulation predicts their social success
more generally (Eisenberg, Cumberland, & Spinrad, 1998).

• Experimenters gave preschool children disappointing gifts in the

lab.
• Kids’ abilities to control their expressions of negative emotion
were negatively correlated with their risks for later disruptive
behavior problems (Cole, Zahn-Waxler, & Smith, 1994).
• People control or regulate their emotions in many different ways.
• Different strategies that people use to improve their negative
emotions - either cognitive or behavioral and as either diversion or
engagement tactics. (Parkinson & Totterdell, 1999)
• Eg: Suppose you had a fight with a close friend, are angry, but
want to feel better.
• You could disengage from your anger through sheer mental
effort, by trying to think of nothing,
• or by distracting yourself by doing something fun or demanding,
like playing your guitar.
• You could confront your feelings or the situation with an
engagement strategy - you can reappraise the situation as
better than you thought – if there’s another reason your friend
was so irritable, you need not take it personally.
• Or you can try to solve the underlying problem, by talking
through the issues with your friend.
• These tactics are not mutually exclusive. You might first use
distraction to quell the heat of your anger and then later, when
you have a cooler head, you might discuss the underlying
• Which strategy is better…
• Suppression vs Reappraisals?
• The strategy of suppressing facial expressions has been shown
to increase both autonomic nervous system activation (Gross &
Levenson, 1997) and amygdala activation (Goldin, McRae,
Ramel, & Gross, 2008).
• Reappraisals, by contrast, don’t appear to take a physiological
toll and actually reduce amygdala activation (Goldin et al.,
2008), because they change emotions, rather than stifle them.
• So reappraisal seems a better strategy for regulating emotions
than suppressing facial expressions.
• Other studies –
• Rumination vs distraction

• In the short run, distraction techniques – like playing basketball

or reading an absorbing novel – are better strategies than
rumination techniques – like thinking over and over again about
the causes and consequences of your sadness or anger.
• Rumination tends to heighten negative emotions, whereas
distraction lessens them.
HEAD INJURY AND EMOTIONS
• Patients suffer impoverished or inappropriate emotions
following brain damage.
• Eg. Phineas Gage. The accident damaged part of his prefrontal
cortex.
• During the first months after this accident, Gage often showed
little emotion, and he made poor, impulsive decisions.

• Eg. Elliot. Damage to prefrontal cortex during surgery to remove

brain tumor.
• After the operation, he showed almost no emotional
expression, no impatience, no frustration, no joy from music
or art, and almost no anger.
• Besides his impaired emotions, he had trouble making or
following reasonable plans.
• He could discuss the probable outcome of each possible choice but
still had trouble deciding. As a result, he could not keep a job, invest
his money intelligently, or maintain normal friendships.
• As a rule, people with damage to one part of the prefrontal
cortex (the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, to be precise) have
trouble making decisions, and seem particularly impaired in
what we consider moral judgment.

• Eg. They think it is okay to flip a switch to make a trolley car

kill one person instead of five, but presumably you wouldn’t
think so if the one person who would die is your mother or
your daughter.
• People with this type of brain damage generally say it would
be okay.
• And they tend to make decisions like that with little
hesitation.
• The rest of us would consider the action “logical” but
emotionally much too painful.
• If the brain damage occurs in childhood or early adolescence,
the effects are even greater

• Example: They would say it is okay to kill a boss you disliked, if

you were sure you could get away with it (Taber-Thomas et al.,
2014).
• The amygdala is the brain area primarily responsible for processing
emotional information (such as feeling sad or guilty).
• Ordinarily, the amygdala feeds that information into the ventromedial
prefrontal cortex, which weighs it when making a decision.

• When the connection from amygdala to cortex is broken, the result is

decisions that ignore potential feelings of sadness or guilt.
• People with frontal lobe damage don’t easily imagine the emotional
outcomes.

• When we face a moral decision, we often react emotionally - Those quick

emotional feelings steer our behavior toward what is usually the right
choice.
• Utility…
• Strong emotional responses are associated with strong
physiological arousal, which caused some theorists to suggest
that the signs of physiological arousal might be used to
determine whether someone is telling the truth or not.
• The assumption is that most of us would show signs of
physiological arousal if we were being dishonest with someone.
• A polygraph, or lie detector test, measures the physiological
arousal of an individual responding to a series of questions.
• While polygraphs are still commonly used, their validity and
accuracy are highly questionable because there is no evidence
that lying is associated with any particular pattern of
physiological arousal (Saxe & Ben-Shakhar, 1999).
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
• Daniel Goleman popularized the term emotional intelligence in
his 1995 book.
• It is the ability to perceive, imagine, and understand emotions
and to use that information in making decisions (Mayer &
Salovey, 1995, 1997).

• Emotional intelligence is thought to have four components:

Mayer and Salovey (Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2004)
• 1. accurate perception and expression of emotions,
• 2. the ability to access and generate emotions,
• 3. understanding of emotions and emotional meanings,
• 4. good emotional regulation.
• 1. Accurate perception and expression of emotions.
• Being able to read the emotions of others enables you to anticipate
possible threats they might pose.
• 2. Ability to access and generate emotions in the service of
thinking and problem solving.
• We often ask ourselves, ‘How do I feel about this?’ in trying to make
an important decision, such as what college to attend or what major
to pursue.
• 3. Understanding emotions and emotional meanings.
• We may accurately perceive we are anxious, but if we don’t
understand why we are anxious, we can’t do much about it.
• 4. Emotional regulation – being able to manage and regulate your
emotions appropriately.
• This does not mean completely controlling the emotions you feel or
express, rather regulating it’s expression in a safe and healthy
manner.
• It is thought that People with higher emotional intelligence tend
to be healthier psychologically and physically.

• However, it is not clear that current measurements of emotional

intelligence predict much that we could not already predict
based on academic intelligence and certain aspects of
personality
• To summarize….
References…

• Atkinson & Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology, 15th Edition

• Introduction to Psychology, Eleventh Edition, James W. Kalat
• https://courses.lumenlearning.com/waymaker-psychology/chapter/
emotion/