1. Emotion

2. Emotions Whole-organism responses, involving: Physiological arousal
Expressive behaviors
Conscious experience

3. Basic Emotions Fear, surprise, anger, disgust, happiness, sadness
Basic emotions are innate (inborn) and “hard-wired”
Complex emotions are a blend of many aspects of emotions
Classified along two dimensions
Pleasant or unpleasant
Level of activation or arousal associated with the emotion

4. Concept of Emotion
A class of subjective feelings created by stimuli that have high significance to an individual
stimuli that produce high arousal generally produce strong feelings
are rapid and automatic
emerged through natural selection to benefit survival and reproduction

5. Functions of Emotion
Emotions can move us to act, triggering motivated behavior
Emotions help us to set goals, but emotional states can also be goals in themselves.
Emotions are important in many different areas, including rational decision making and purposeful behavior.
Emotional intelligence is the capacity to understand and manage your own emotional experiences and to perceive, comprehend, and respond appropriately to the emotional responses of others.

6. Evolutionary Explanations of Emotion
Darwin argued that emotions reflect evolutionary adaptations to the problems of survival and reproduction
Today’s evolutionary psychologists believe that emotions are the product of evolution and that they help us solve adaptive problems posed by our environment

7. The Subjective Experience of Emotion
People vary in their subjective experience of emotion in the following ways:
People vary greatly in the intensity of their emotions
The sexes differ little in their experience of emotions
The sexes differ in the expression of emotion: women are more emotionally expressive

8. The Subjective Experience of Emotion
There are a limited number of basic emotions that all humans, in every culture, experience.
They are thought to be biologically determined, the products of evolution
People often experience a blend of emotions or mixed emotions, rather than a pure emotion.

9. The Neuroscience of Emotion
The Nervous System & Emotion

10. Divisions of the Nervous System

11. Autonomic Nervous System
The division of the peripheral nervous system that controls the glands and muscles of the internal organs
Monitors the autonomic functions
Controls breathing, blood pressure, and digestive processes
Divided into the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems
Cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that the basic emotions are associated with distinct patterns of autonomic nervous system activity

12. Divisions of the Nervous System

13. Sympathetic Nervous System
The part of the autonomic nervous system that arouses the body to deal with perceived threats
Fight or flight response

14. Divisions of the Nervous System

15. Parasympathetic Nervous System
The part of the autonomic nervous system that calms the body
Brings the body back down to a relaxed state

16. Autonomic Nervous System

17. Autonomic Nervous System

18. Autonomic Nervous System

19. Autonomic Nervous System

20. Autonomic Nervous System

21. Autonomic Nervous System

22. Autonomic Nervous System

23. Fear: A Closer Look The Role of Brain in Emotion

24. Physical Arousal and Emotions
Sympathetic nervous system is aroused with emotions (fight-or-flight response)
Different emotions stimulate different responses
Fear—decrease in skin temperature (cold-feet)
Anger—increase in skin temperature (hot under the collar)
A recent study using PET scans found that each of four emotions (sadness, happiness, anger, and fear) produced a distinct pattern of brain activation and deactivation
This indicates that each emotion involves distinct neural circuits in the brain

25. High Arousal
Arousal response - pattern of physiological change that helps prepare the body for “fight or flight”
muscles tense, heart rate and breathing increase, release of endorphins, focused attention
can be helpful or harmful
in general, high arousal is beneficial for instinctive, well-practiced or physical tasks
harmful for novel (new), creative, or careful judgment tasks
Keywords: arousal, arousal response

26. Arousal Theory
Experiencing pleasant emotion after internal or external achievement motivates our behavior.

27. Yerkes-Dodson Law Some arousal is necessary
High arousal is helpful on easy tasks
As level of arousal increases, quality of performance decreases with task difficulty
Too much arousal is harmful
Degree of arousal
Quality of performance
Very difficult task
Moderately
difficult task
Easy task
Keywords: Yerkes-Dodson law

28. Brain-Based Theory of Emotions
Amygdala
evaluate the significance of stimuli and generate emotional responses
generate hormonal secretions and autonomic reactions that accompany strong emotions
damage causes “psychic blindness” and the inability to recognize fear in facial expressions and voice
Keywords: brain-based theory of emotions, amygdala, psychic blindness

29. Brain-Based Theory of Emotions
Frontal lobes
influence people’s conscious emotional feelings and ability to act in planned ways based on feelings (e.g., effects of prefrontal lobotomy)
Parietal
Frontal
Occipital
Temporal
left frontal lobe
may be most
involved in
processing
positive emotions
right frontal lobe
involved with
negative emotions
Keywords: brain-based theory of emotions, frontal lobes

30. How You Experience Fear
When a person is faced with a potentially threatening stimulus, the visual stimulus is first routed to the thalamus.
Information is then relayed simultaneously along two neural pathways:
crude, archetypal information travels rapidly to the amygdala (in the limbic system),
More detailed information travels to the visual cortex, where the stimulus is interpreted
If the cortex determines that a threat exists, the information is relayed to the amygdala along the longer, slower pathway.

31. Amygdala then sends information along two pathways
One pathway leads to an area of the hypothalamus, then on to the medulla; together, they trigger arousal of the sympathetic nervous system
Another pathway leads to a different hypothalamus area that, in concert with the pituitary gland, triggers the release of stress hormones.
Joseph LeDoux believes that the direct thalamus–amygdala connection represents an adaptive response that has been hard-wired by evolution in the human brain.
The indirect route allows more complex stimuli to be evaluated in the cortex.