By: Jessica Cowley, Camille Brown, Abi Loach and Tori Bates

Emotion is a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of psychological activity.

His theory was that stimuli trigger activity in the autonomic nervous system, which in turn produces an emotional experience in the brain. Emotional experience=consequence So if you see something that creates an emotion, then you will feel that way. Ex: If you see a spider, you feel scared.

Their theory says a stimulus simultaneously triggers activity in the autonomic nervous system and emotional experience in the brain. So feelings, thinking and emotions happen at the same time. Ex: you get bit by a snake, you feel it, know what’s happening and feel afraid at the same time.

Emotions are inferences of undifferentiated psychological arousal. So the brain interprets your emotions. Ex: you act the same when you are excited or scared, but the brain knows that if you see a tornado you are scared and if your on a rollercoaster then you are excited.

Evaluation of the emotion-relevant aspects of a stimulus– happens because of the Amygdala. Ex: certain words such as ‘crap’ or ‘hooray’ are emotionally evocative to us, but people whose amygdalae are damaged (or people who take drugs that impair the neurotransmission in the amygdala) do not have the ability to recognize the emotion.

When people see a Great White Shark, the information in the brain takes 2 routes– the fast pathway (thalamus to the amygdala) and the slow pathway (thalamus to cortex to amygdala). While the cortex is using the information to investigate the stimulus’s importance, the amygdala has already got the info from the thalamus and is producing fear and deciding what bodily reaction to produce.

Because the amygdala receives info from the thalamus before it gets info from the cortex, people can be afraid of something before they even know what it is.

The cognitive and behavioral strategies people use to influence their own emotions. Ex: Taking drugs, doing distracting activities, avoiding places that make you feel a certain way, etc.

Changing your emotional experience by changing the meaning of the emotion- enticing stimulus. Basically, how people think about an event can determine how they feel about it. Ex: Two people were shown a picture of somebody screaming. Immediately, the amygdala became active. But, when the people were asked to imagine the person screaming because they are at a concert, the amygdala shut down. They consciously deactivated the amygdala by thinking about the experience differently.

Observable sign of an emotional state. Ex: The way we talk (intonation, inflection, volume, duration) posture, touch, gaze, etc. Our face can communicate emotion– we can produce over 10,000 different expressions.

Emotional expressions have the same meaning for everybody. Ex: Infants and people who are born blind react to anger, fear, happiness, disgust, sadness and surprise with the exact same facial expressions as every one else.

Emotional expressions can cause the emotional experiences they signify. Ex: if you are sad, but you force yourself to smile or laugh anyway, you will start to feel happier because the muscle contractions change the temperature of the brain. Also, smiling and happiness are so strongly associated with each other that it is impossible to have one without the other.

Norms for the control of emotional expression. Intensification– Exaggerating an emotion (ex: when you pretend to be more happy with a birthday present than you actually are.) Deintensification– muting an emotion (ex: somebody hurts your feelings, but you try to act cool about it.) Masking– showing one emotion, but feeling another (ex: a poker player pretending to be disappointed about a hand with four aces.) Neutralizing– feeling an emotion but displaying no expression (ex: being worried, but not showing it for the sake of somebody else.)

Morphology– some facial muscles, like the zygomatic major (which raises the corners of the mouth), cannot be controlled easily. Symmetry– sincere expressions are more symmetrical. A lopsided smile is probably less genuine than an even one. Duration– sincere expressions last longer than fake or insincere ones. Temporal patterning– sincere expressions happen over a few seconds, but insincere expressions are more abrupt.