Emotions in Social Relationships - Psychology of Emotion - Lecture Slides, Slides of Social Psychology of Emotion

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Emotions in Social

Relationships

The Social Constructionist Perspective

THE RULES OF EMOTIONS ARE LEARNED!

We learn from our society the sets of rules that implicitly govern our emotional performances.

This approach emerges from the social constructionist perspective of the 1970s which focused more on the social self than the personal self.

Emotions are associated with attitudes, beliefs, judgments, and desires reflecting the cultural values of particular communities.

So appraisals are not seen as innate responses to evolutionarily significant events.

Emotions reflect moral judgments about events in the world.

According to Frijda, the experience of passivity is part of what it means to be emotional in our culture.

Social functions of emotions:

Fear can be seen as one of the means by which social norms are maintained in the regulation of social behaviour.

We can compare the emotional lexicons of different cultures to get a sense for which emotions are important in that culture. (e.g., absence of fear in a warrior culture)

The acquisition of a culturally appropriate lexicon by children is central to the socialization of emotion and is a major determinant of changes in children’s experiences of emotion.

Basic Emotions and Darwinian Survival

Fear and a situation of danger.

Anger and the need for defense.

Love and the need for caring attention.

Complex Emotions and Social Construction

Shame, embarrassment, guilt and so on… more emphasis on situational interpretation.

Experience oriented approaches to emotion: William

James & Peripheralism

Now we begin the BIG TRANSITION from the Action Approach to a more Experience Oriented Approach that encompasses James’s PERIPHERALISM , PSYCHODYNAMICS , & PHENOMENOLOGY.

Let me review the transition we are about to make…

The first phase of the course focused on Action Theory which has been with us in various guises since the British Enlightenment of the 1700s. This theory shaped both our ideas about emotion and even extended to an explanation of how drama works.

Philosophers of the Enlightenment, like John Locke, emphasized a practical approach to life in which we attempt to realize goals and evaluate events in the environment in terms of how beneficial they are to us. Our experience of pleasure or pain is an index of whether or not we have succeeded.

Philosophers of the Enlightenment favoured a kind of Classical approach to art and drama which emphasized the manipulation of people’s emotion through the author’s control over action, place and time.

In the 1800s, the Darwinian perspective emphasized challenges posed by the physical and social worlds and this carried over into the early 1900s with McDougall’s emphasis on our “capacity to strive toward an end or ends, to seek goals, to sustain and renew activity adopted to secure consequences beneficial to the organism or the species.”

Walter Cannon, the great American physiologist, extended this idea with his Emergency Response theory, the mobilization of our Sympathetic Nervous System as part of Fear or Anger responses to threat or frustration.

The EXPERIENCE APPROACH should be placed in the tradition of Romanticism which emphasized the role of imagination and interpretation both in everyday life and in relation to art, poetry and drama. Recall their focus on critical life episodes or scenes that reveal something special about the nature of our lived-world.

WILLIAM JAMES (1842-1910) and the Peripheral Approach: EMOTION = The Experience of Bodily Changes

James’s basic principle was that the body is central to the generation and experience of emotion.

While Darwin was primarily concerned with the expression of emotion, James was interested in the experience of emotion.

Common sense leads us to say the following about the sequence of emotional events:

1. We PERCEIVE an emotion eliciting stimulus
2. We EXPERIENCE emotion
3. We EXPRESS it

For example:

1. We lose our fortune, are sorry and weep.
2. We are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike.
3. We meet a bear, are frightened and run.

James listed three kinds of bodily changes:

1. Expressive behaviour
2. Instrumental acts such as running away
3. Physiological “changes” in the heart & circulatory system

The modern interpretation is that:

“Bodily changes” = “Visceral changes”

The increase in sympathetic nervous system activity controls the functioning of the glands and other internal organs such as the heart and stomach. These changes are expressed as sweating, salivation, shedding tears, secreting digestive juices and stomach motility.

Implication: Different emotions are accompanied by recognizably different bodily states. James’s theory permits an almost infinite number of emotions because it associates individual emotions with specific physiological states. Each emotion would be characterized by a specific physiological package.

This indirectly leads to the idea that the voluntary arousal or

manifestation of bodily changes should produce emotions

(e.g., “put on a happy face”).

James was influenced by his own introspections:

1. “Unmotivated emotion” – attacks of anxiety, panic or fear in the absence of an appropriate cause. Also, anxiety attacks could sometimes be alleviated by controlling one’s breathing and changing one’s posture.
2. Persons who could not experience any feelings from his or her body (corporeal anaesthesia).

Walter B. Cannon (1871 – 1945), the great American physiologist, offered a critique of William James’s theory which led to a rejection of his work for a period of time.

Cannon did his research on the physiology of digestion and disturbances of digestion which led him to reject James’s ideas about “autonomic specificity”.

The 1920s was a period in medical history when psychosomatic medicine was established as a separate discipline… for example in the area of stress.

Critiques:

1. Total separation of the viscera from the CNS does not alter emotional behaviour.
2. The same visceral changes occur in very different emotional states and non-emotional states.
3. The viscera are relatively insensitive structures.
4. Visceral changes are too slow to be a source of emotional feeling.
5. Artificial induction of the visceral changes typical of strong emotion does not produce them. This is where he applied the data from Maranon’s study about the 79% who received an injection but did not experience an emotion.

The most important points are Number 2 and 3!

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Floyd Allport (1890 - 1978) argued in 1924 in support of James’s idea that feedback from facial expressions could help differentiate emotions. Accordingly, afferent (incoming) feedback from the face differentiates anger from fear.

Sylvan Tomkins (1911-1991) maintained in the 1960s that feedback from facial muscles differentiates emotions. Accordingly, affect is primarily facial behaviour and secondarily it is bodily behaviour, outer skeletal and inner visceral activity.

On what basis does Tomkins maintain this position?

1. A newborn exhibits greater responsiveness to facial and head stimulation than to bodily stimulation.
2. The rapid development of head movement, visual fixation and eye-hand coordination. Standing and walking appear later.
3. The greater density of afferent-efferent channels moving information between the face and the brain.
4. The facial muscles show greater resistance to habituation.
5. The face is the centre of affective expression.