What’s More Important Thinking or Feeling?

• Aristotle. People were THINKING ANIMALS. What makes people special is they can overcome their brutish emotions.
• Rousseau:  Emotions are what makes people special and gives us a reason for living.

• Amygdala which is a part of the limbic system : The limbic system is one of the areas effected when animals get rabies.  The damage is responsible for the rage animals go through as a result of rabies and is part of what makes animals with rabies so dangerous.
• Hypothalmus which is a part of the forebrain:  Lesioning parts of the hypothalmus produces animals that are docile and unmotivated and is thought to result in a flat affect.
• Temporal Lobe which is part of the cerebral cortex:  Damage to the temporal lobe can result in a syndrome called Klover-Bucy Syndrome.  People and other animals that have this damage experience tameness, a loss of fear and hypersexuality.
• Frontal Lobe which is part of the cerebral cortex:  Damage to the frontal lobe produces difficulty in inhibiting emotional responses.

• Palms sweating
• Increased heart rate
• Focused attention
• Greater skin conductance
• Particular response may depend on what particular emotions one is experiencing

Polygraphy: Measures physiological responses of the autonomic nervous system in an attempt to detect the feelings of axiety that often accompany deception.

Types of polygraphy

• Guilty/innocent test
• Control Question Test:
• Guilty Knowledge Test

• Introduction of polygraphy evidence is not permitted in most U.S. Courts
• Polygraphy is often used however to establish innocence and is also used in employment interviews
• Polygraphy not a fool-proof way of detecting deception, but neither is it as flawed as some have argued in the past.
• Recent advances by DOD and other government agencies may have improved their accuracy.
• Its also important to note that it is sometimes possible for people familiar with polygraphy to adopt countermeasures to beat the tests if the examiner is not careful or is not properly trained.

James/Lange Theory:

• Developed independently by William James and Carl Lange.
• According to the theory an emotional event causes a response in the autonomic nervous system.  This response is detected by the central nervous system to produce an emotional experience
• According to this theory different emotions produce different bodily responses and lead to what we experience as different emotions.
• Evidence for the theory

1. Different emotions do seem to be accompanied by somewhat different autonomic reactions.  For instance, positive emotions tend to be accompanied by increased blood flow to the limbs and constriction of the pupils while negative emotions lead to the opposite.

2. Patients with spinal cord damage sometimes report experiencing emotions less intensely than people without spinal cord damage.

 
• Problems with the theory:

1. Patients with damage to their spinal cords often report feeling less intense emotional experiences but they still do experience emotions.  In fact, sometimes quite intense emotions.

2. Injection with epinephrine produces arousal much like that of the sympathetic nervous system but by itself does not lead people to experience an emotional response.

 
3. The onset of emotional experiences appears to be to rapid for it to be accounted for completely by feedback from the autonomic nervous system.

Facial feedback hypothesis is similar to the James/Lange theory.  It says that we determine our emotions by sensing whether we're smiling or frowning. So let a smile be your umbrella.
This suggests that people might be happier if they would just smile more!

Cannon/Bard Theory

According to this theory emotional experience is produced both by the autonomic nervous system and by the brain.

• In particular emotional stimuli simultaneously produce a response in the autonomic nervous system and in the cerebral cortex.  The emotional experience is the combination of those two experiences.
• The influence of the cerebral cortex in controlling emotion can be shown in the phenomenon of sham rage.  When animals have their cortex removed they will go into extreme rages at the slightest provocation.  Its called sham rage because the response is often unrelated to the provocation and is short lived.

According to this theory emotions are produced when autonomic arousal is noticed by the person.  He/she tries to come up with an explanation for the arousal and depending on the explanation they come up with may label it an emotion.

Evidence in Favor of the Theory

1.  Schacter and Singer told subjects they were studying the effects of vitamins on performance.  Some subjects were injected with epinephrine and some subjects were injected with a placebo.  Subjects were told one of three things:

Correctly Informed: Your hand will start to shake, your heart will start to pound, your face may feel flushed.
Incorrectly Informed: You may experience itchiness, numbness or a headache.
No Information: Told nothing about what to expect

2. Dutton and Aron (1974) had an attractive woman individually approach young men as they crossed a narrow, wobbly 450-foot-long suspension walkway hanging 230 feet above British Columbia's rocky Capilano River.  She asked each man to fill out a questionnaire and then gave them her phone number and invited him to call if he wanted to hear more about the project. This same woman approached other men on a low solid bridge and followed the same procedure.

Emotional Set Points

Some recent research has shown that how happy or unhappy you are on average may not be a function of what happens to you.  According to emotional set-point theory our happiness is determined by a biological setpoint (perhaps innate) and average happiness always returns to that setpoint.

Why does this occur?

• Adaptation Level Principle: Emotions are relative to our current state

• Relative Deprivation Principle: Compare your state to those of others in your social group.

• Linguistic Evidence

• Ethnographic interviews

• Linguistic Evidence not dispositive

 
• Second, the psychologist Paul Ekman has shown that people in all cultures appear to have a basic understanding of certain facial expressions that accompany emotions and these facial expressions seem to be universal.

• So does culture have no role?  Not necessarily.  Different cultures may well differ in how they choose to express different emotions and also in how common different emotions are.

Ekman's findings have led some to propose that there are a set of basic emotions that are shared cross culturally and that combine to make up more complex emotions.

Basic Emotions

• Happiness
• Sadness
• Fear
• Anger
• Surprise
• Disgust

          1. anger + disgust = contempt
          2. sadness + surprise = disappointment

Conclusions about emotions

• Emotions are both in the mind and in the body
• Emotions do not just happen to people.  People have some control over how they interpret events and as a result some control over the emotions they experience.  Emotions are choices
• Emotions are universal.  This allows us to read other people's emotions, empathize with them, and negotiate our emotional lives together.