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Emotions in Social Relationships, Social Constructionist Perspective, Rules of Emotions, Darwinian Survival, Complex Emotions and Social Construction, Aesthetics of Action Theory, Approaches to Emotion, James and Peripheralism, Expressive Behaviour, Bodily Changes. These are the important points of Psychology of Emotion.
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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.
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:
For example:
James listed three kinds of bodily changes:
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:
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:
The most important points are Number 2 and 3!
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?