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. Culture & Emotional Experience
Studies of Japanese subjects added a third dimension, interpersonal engagement—the degree to which an emotion involves relationships with others.
Because Japan is a collectivistic culture, one’s identity is seen as interdependent with those of other people, rather than independent, as is characteristic of individualistic cultures

10. The Neuroscience of Emotion
The Nervous System & Emotion

11. Biology of Emotion: An Overview
View ABC Report on Science of Happiness (8 min)
Do genes or life experiences have the most effect on emotion?
Do we have a “happiness set-point?”
Can we change our brain through meditation?
View Psychology: The Human Experience DVD Segment 20 on Physiology of Emotion (3:04)
What were early studies on the biology of emotion focused on?
What do modern studies focus on?
What did scientists learn from stroke victims about the left & right frontal lobes when it comes to emotions?

12. Divisions of the Nervous System

13. 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

14. Divisions of the Nervous System

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

16. Divisions of the Nervous System

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

18. Autonomic Nervous System

19. Autonomic Nervous System

20. Autonomic Nervous System

21. Autonomic Nervous System

22. Autonomic Nervous System

23. Autonomic Nervous System

24. Autonomic Nervous System

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

27. 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

28. 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

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

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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

33. 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.

34. 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.

35. Fear Pathway in the Brain
When you’re faced with a potentially threatening stimulus—like a snake dangling from a stick—information arrives in the thalamus (blue) and is relayed simultaneously along two pathways. Crude, archetypal information rapidly travels the direct route to the amygdala (red), triggering an almost instantaneous fear response. More detailed information is sent along the pathway to the visual cortex (blue), 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. The amygdala triggers other brain structures, such as the hypothalamus, which activate the sympathetic nervous system and the endocrine system’s release of stress hormones.

36. Applications of Neuroscience & Emotion

37. Lie Detection The polygraph doesn’t really detect lies.
Some of its many problems include:
false negative results,
false positive results,
highly subjective interpretations of the physical changes that occur
A variety of nonverbal cues, especially microexpressions, are associated with deception, but no single nonverbal cue indicates that someone is lying

38. Are Lie Detectors Accurate?
Benjamin Kleinmuntz and Julian Szucko (1984) had polygraph experts study the polygraph data of 50 theft suspects who later confessed to being guilty and 50 suspects whose innocence was later established by someone's confession. Had the polygraph experts been the judges, more than one-third of the innocent would have been declared guilty, and almost one-fourth of the guilty would have been declared innocent.

39. Brain Fingerprinting
Uses an electroencephalograph to analyze brain waves to determine whether a stimulus is familiar or unfamiliar.
The brain emits a P300 wave in response to a familiar stimulus.
If a suspect emits a P300 wave in response to details that only the criminal would know, the examiner would conclude that the suspect possessed "guilty knowledge" of the crime.
Brain fingerprinting is still controversial and has only recently become admissible as evidence in court.