This week looked deeper into biological, cognitive and socio cultural causes of emotion. As found in one of the first tutorials, emotion is hard to define. Not only do people have trouble identifying what an emotion is, but there is no agreement on what constitutes the criteria for core emotions.
I can understand this dilemma. From a naive perspective, how can we be sure that everyone experiences the same emotions? Are they experienced to the same extent? Each person is different and has varying life experiences, values and cultural norms. Emotions are such an abstract construct that I find it hard to believe that they can even be measured. So how can we possibly identify all the emotions that people experience and say that they are the same?
Despite these questions, there are 6 basic emotions that have been identified and sadly people appear to experience more negative emotions than positive. Reeve (2009) states that fear, anger, disgust and sadness are all basic, negative emotions and that joy and interest are basic, positive emotions.
From a biological view point, it appears that emotions are all inherently adaptive in some way. They have coping functions which help the individual cope with life events and social functions, to help you communicate how you are feeling with others (Reeve, 2009). They also are able to regulate behaviour through a feedback system by prompting you do act in adaptive ways.
The biological aspect of emotion also states that differing rates/patterns of cortical neural firing result in the experience of varying emotions (Reeve, 2009). This happens unconsciously in the brain at any time. Joy for instance is associated with a decrease in frequency of neural activation over time and surprise is associated with a quick activation increase (Neill, 2010).
Izard came up with 10 fundamental emotions these consist of positive, neutral and negative emotions.
(Reeve, 2009)
This theory suggests that these 10 discrete emotions prepare an person to act adaptively, this enables the individual to develop social relationships and tackle threats head on (Reeve, 2009).
What I found most interesting in the biological perspective was the facial feedback hypothesis, where just by moving the facial muscles and by the temperature changing in the face and glandular activity being altered in the skin, emotion can be created. In our face there are 36 of 80 muscles that are involved in facial expression (Reeve, 2009). A study looking at this found that by changing facial expressions for the five emotions rear, anger, disgust, joy and distress evoked changes in the respiratory and cardiovascular rates (Reeve, 2009).
Despite the fact that some facial behaviour is learned, some facial expressions are innate and are found across cultures throughout the world (Reeve, 2009). This suggests that some emotions are actually inherited and certain facial expressions are associated with varying emotions.
However despite this finding, many emotions can arise from social interaction. Cultural influence also determines one’s understanding of emotion. Reeve (2009) suggests that if you change your cultural context, the emotions that you will experience will also change. For example, in China love is viewed as a negative emotion and in the US
(Reeve, 2009)
In tutorials we explored this idea further. We separated into our groups and were given a hand-out with a list of emotions. We had to develop our own model of core emotions into clusters. We were told not to be guided by previous theories, however our group decided to initially follow the basic model of emotion in the hope of expanding and changing it further, unfortunately we ran out of time. We did however spend a lot of time sorting through the differing emotions to put them into categories (there were over 100). This also proved difficult, as there were many words we had never even heard of before! So out came the laptop and synonyms on Word! You can view our fabulous model below! For a closer view see Group Four's Emotion Model.
Again what I found sad was the fact that most of the emotions we decided to keep in our model were again negative. The largest cluster we had was for sadness, closely followed by anger. Happiness was our next largest group. We believed ours was extra special due to our artistic talent for our headings!
I guess Seligman would not be too impressed by the fact that negative emotions seem to be more prevalent and recognised within the individual. Maybe new words need to be created that reflect other positive emotions, rather than so many negative! That concludes my blog for this week, I will be continuing to work on my chapter throughout the next two weeks. I am feeling a little stressed but hopefully I can get it finished in time!
References
Neill, J. (2010, September 22). [Control beliefs and The Self Lecture]. Lecture presented at the University of Canberra
Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America
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