Embodied Emotion Emotions & the Autonomic Nervous Sx What is the link btwn emotional arousal & the autonomic nervous Sx? – Your autonomic nervous Sx (ANS) mobilizes your body for action & calms it when the crisis passes; w/o any conscious effort your body’s response to danger is wonderfully coordinated & adaptive – fight or flight! – Your sympathetic division of your ANS directs your adrenals to release the stress hormones epinephrine~ (adrenaline) & norepinephrine~(noradrenaline); liver pours extra sugar into your blood stream & to help burn this sugar, your respiration increases to supply needed oxygen; heart rate & blood pressure incr.; pupils dilate to allow more light; to cool your body you perspire; if you’re wounded blood clots more quickly…

-When the crisis passes, the parasympathetic division of your ANS takes over, calming your body slowly. -Arousal is adaptive in many situations… *i.e.:taking a test you want to be moderately aroused but not trembling w/ nervousness.

Physiological Similarities Among Specific Emotions Do different emotions activate different physiological & brain pattern responses? -Discerning physiological differences among fear, anger, & sexual arousal would be very difficult. -Different emotions do not have sharply distinct biological features

Physiological Differences Among Specific Emotions Researchers have found real (subtle) physiological differences among the emotions. Emotions differ much more in the brain circuits they use… -Brain scans & EEG recordings show emotions activate different areas of the brain’s cortex w/some tendency for negative emotions to be linked to the right hemisphere & positive emotions to the left. -The amygdala, the hippocampus & the basal ganglia make up the limbic Sx – the emotional center of the brain. -Dopamine pathways = the pleasure pathway

Cognition & Emotion To experience emotions, must we consciously interpret & label them? Sometimes our arousal response to one event spills over into our response to the next event… -i.e.:get home after invigorating run & find out you got your dream job!!! OMG!!! W/ arousal lingering from the run, would you feel more elated than if you received the news after waking from nap? To find out if this spillover effect exists, Schachter & Singer – injecting males w/ epinephrine & they discovered that a stirred-up state can be experienced as one emotion or another very different one depending on how we interpret & label it.

Cognition Doesn’t Always Precede Emotion Can you recall liking something/someone immediately, without knowing why? Robert Zajonc (1980, 1984), we have many emotional reactions apart from, or even before, our interpretations of a situation. *you’ve forgotten an important deadline or hurt someone’s feelings; as conversation distracts your attention, you lose awareness of the bad news…yet the feeling still churns…you feel a little bad but can’t put your finger on why. The arousal lingers w/o a label.

Just like speedy reflexes, some emotions take what LeDoux (2002) calls the “low road”, via neural pathways that bypass the cortex (the alternative “high road” pathway). The shortcut allows our emotional response before our intellect intervenes. Whalen et.al., (2004) used fMRI scans to observe the amygdala’s response to subliminally presented fearful eyes. Compared w/ a control condition that presented the whites of happy eyes, the fearful eyes triggered increased amygdala activity.

*Emotions researcher Richard Lazarus conceded that our brains process & react to vast amounts of info w/o our conscious awareness. …so in sum: some emotions require no conscious effort at all (simple likes, dislikes & fears); but other more complex emotions (hatred, guilt, happiness & love) are influenced by our cognition…