This week we started to focus on the nature of emotion. These next few weeks are just focusing on one chapter a week, which means that there is not as much information to focus on. There are five underlying key questions which are asked in psychology in relation to emotion.
What is an emotion?
What causes an emotion?
How many emotions are there?
What good are the emotions?
What is the difference between emotion and mood? (Reeve, 2009).
The answer to all of these questions it the same answer to most questions posed in psychology. The answer is that none of the above questions are particularly simple to answer because emotion is a complex and multidimensional construct (Reeve, 2009). There are many biological and environmental triggers and mechanisms for experiencing an emotion. There is varied debate as to how many there actually are, and the function that they serve. There is no such thing as a good or bad emotion, as they appear to serve adaptive function and would not have evolved if they did not do so. Finally, a mood, unlike an emotion is a general sense of feeling either good or bad and is not necessarily triggered by a specific incident. An emotion however is relatively specific, triggered, experienced and dissipated relatively fast. This then leads psychologists to ask five more questions:
How can emotion be measured?
What are the consequences of emotion?
How can emotion be changed?
How and why did emotions evolve?
How do emotions of animals and humans vary? (Reeve, 2009)
Again there is no one straight forward answer to any of these questions. Emotion is not able to be physically measured and psychologists must rely on self report measures and subjective experiences. Emotion has been found to have negative consequences on health, as too much negative emotion has dire effects on both physical and mental health (Neill, 2010). There are some emotions that both humans and animals share which represent the animalistic part of our evolution, but there are also some that humans have uniquely (Neill, 2010).
When asked to define emotion in tutorials a few weeks ago, it was much harder to define than motivation. Psychologists however have found four components which are continually touched upon when describing an emotion. These are displayed in the flow chart below.
(Reeve, 2009)
I found Reeve’s view on emotion quite interesting.
Emotion as Motivation
According to Reeve (2009) the emotions you experience are motivational agents which either inhibit you from taking action or draw you towards something positive. In this process, the emotion is the reward or punishment which then goes on to feed this cycle of behaviour.
Emotion as readout
The readout is part of the feedback loop that tells you if you are on the right or wrong track. Whether the emotional response is high or low it will redirect your efforts towards the goal (Reeve, 2009). As James mentioned, without emotion we would be like a robot (Neill, 2010). This is the most challenging part of robotics, as somehow scientists will have to create a similar feedback and reward system. Scientists have not been able to build an emotional organic robot.
I have found this clip on You-Tube where Japanese scientists have tried to convey emotional facial expression in a robot. In doing, these scientists have been able to create 30 different facial expressions and combinations of these emotions in response to words. Their aim is to create a flow of consciousness in robots and in doing so, improve communications between humans and robots. These scientists want to convey emotion with the power of speech, however it is evident that there is still a long way to go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLXGS0J52co. Here is another robot which looks like Albert Einstein which has been designed to mimic facial expressions showing fear, happy, disgust and confusion http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkpWCu1k0ZI&NR=1. A bit scary! It makes me wonder if one day we will not be able to tell the difference between a human and a robot…
The one question that continues to arise in this topic is just how many emotions are there? The biological view on emotions suggests that only a small number exists. It states that there are between 2-10 universally that continue to occur across cultures (Reeve, 2009). These evidently have risen from biological and evolutionary processes. The cognitive view however, suggests that there is no end to the number of emotions, it sees many shades of gray. There can be culturally specific emotions, as well as personal, however these can differ dramatically. For instance one person’s experience of sadness may be different to someone else’s. There is no way of testing this, as some think that their experience of an emotion is unique to them. Much of the complexity in this is brought about from individuals having different emotional experiences (Neill, 2010).
Reeve (2009) has identified six basic emotions. It can be said that emotion can be reduced to clusters or factors. These can be formed on the basis of whether these emotions are also found in animals, whether people have a similar response to the same situation or if the same physiological arousal occurs in the body. Sadly, love was not included in this model.
Fear: Is the response to the threat of harm, it has a unique cognitive and physiological response. For instance, I had this feeling the other night when I came across a massive huntsman on the ceiling which I had to very bravely dispose of!
Anger: I People site anger as their most memorable experiences. Anger is experienced when something is not right, when an injustice has occurred or someone has been wrong. If we look at this in the light of positive and negative emotions, despite anger being negative, it drives positive behaviours to make things right.
Disgust: Drives you to be repelled from an object you do not want to be connected with. This could be someone in a social setting, off food etc.
Sadness: Is a less energising response, it is a downstate of not being activated, being sorrowful for what you do not have.
Joy: Has a euphoric, pleasant, positive affect. It can occur when something goes better than expected, when someone makes progress towards their goals and achieves them. An example of this in my life was getting full marks for my speech the other day, much better than I had anticipated!
Interest: Sees an arousal of curiosity. This is the feeling you get when you start something new, you may take a risk approach and investigate something further (Reeve, 2009).
As the flow diagram shows, these can be divided into both positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions help us to respond to threat and prevent harm and positive emotions help you to get involved and feel satisfied when you achieve something (Neill, 2010).
Overall, I find this nature vs nurture debate to be a common theme throughout my studies. It is again brought about in emotion. Personally I think that emotion is a combination of the two. It is evident that everyone appears to experience the same emotions and the fact that people show similar experiences to the same events proves this. However as mentioned above, I also think that everyone is different and has led different lives. Therefore, someone’s individual emotional experience to one event may be different to someone else’s depending on whether they have or have not experienced something similar before. Personality may also play an important factor in emotion as well, as depending on people's coping mechanisms and how they view the world, an intense emotion such as anger could be more easily brought about and higher in intensity to a rather insignificant event compared to others who would not think anything of it.
References
Neill, J. (2010, October 13). [Nature of Emotion Lecture]. Lecture presented at the University of Canberra
Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion. United States of America
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