Individual Differences and Personality - Psychology of Emotion - Lecture Slides, Slides of Social Psychology of Emotion

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Individual Differences and

Personality

Freud later developed his Structural Model which contrasted the id, ego and superego.

THE ID: The id consists of personal drives and appears from birth. Its energy functions for instinctual gratification and operates according to the pleasure principle - achieve pleasure and avoid pain.

Reflex Action - energy is automatically discharged in motor action (in eating, drinking, sexual orgasm, and so on)

THE EGO: The ego has no energy of its own but acquires neutralized drive energy from the id.

It operates according to the reality principle which is the ability to distinguish between stimuli of the outer world and id impulses from the inner world.

The ego emerges to satisfy needs of the id upon frustration of the id by the environment. It represents a kind of executive functioning that mediates between the id and the environment.

Model: drive reaches threshold — delay of discharge — detoured searching — satisfaction

Ego Functions: motor control, sensory perception, library of memories, thinking and attention, and defensive functions like repression.

The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego — double-touch concept.

Let’s relate these ideas back to the topic at hand - our emotions:

• All behaviour has both id and ego - energy & direction
• Dreams and emotions are relatively unbound and work more according to instinctual processes.

However, the context of emotions is more varied than the content of instincts.

Energy becomes attached to memory images but we cannot readily access these early memories.

The latent content of our memory images can only be discerned by associations that these images arouse.

While emotional experience is often situationally and perceptually cued, its meaning comes from individual interpretations of and reactions to the situation itself. But the energy comes from early memories. All emotions are alike in terms of energy.

Three Groups of Emotions:

1. Relational emotions point to something outside the self (e.g., love and hate).

Theory of Ambivalence - virtually every relationship will have been accompanied by both pleasure and pain.

The family plays a crucial role here. The kinds of emotions that become differentiated depends on the dynamics of the family.

Examples of emotions - clinging dependency, affection, longing, fondness versus temporary resentment, anger, or long term hostility.

Affection can develop in response to affection. Longing can develop in response to indifference.

Aesthetic Experience

Now let’s apply this model to aesthetic experience. Consider your emotional reactions to unique meanings that are embedded in or expressed by paintings, plays, stories, films and so on.

Aesthetic Experience

You need a proper aesthetic distance from a work which balances personal relevance (engagement) and aesthetic understanding (detachment).

If the unique meaning floods you with emotion, you won’t like the piece and will withdraw.

An artwork, story or play that is personally valuable permits you to get out your emotions without being overwhelmed by them.

Existential Phenomenology and Emotion

However, when the emotional reaction is too powerful, it will be repressed by the ego and, as a consequence, the person might not quite know what is causing their bad feelings. The goal of therapy is to help the person gain access to both the feelings and their historic cause. This is usually accompanied by a catharsis , the release of emotion that was pent up in the unconscious.

We contrast phenomenology with the positivist outlook on the world.

Positivist Outlook

So what is known is relative to the knower, the knower’s own meanings and measurement tools.

So knowing is a human activity of identifying, relating, measuring and interpreting data that are selected and defined by the knower according to the criterion that he or she selects.

We never know from scratch. “Objective” knowledge is situated in prior understanding.

What is real can be measured, calculated or controlled. Consider the paradox that in its quest for the physical entity that exists separate and completely independent of our conception of it, physical science has been led to a submicroscopic entity that is so dependent on our conception of it that existence can only be indirectly inferred & we encounter limits in our attempt to measure it.

In this case, we examine the situation in relation to emotion.

For example, fear is: (1) physiological change and... (2) cognitive appraisal and... (3) avoidance behaviour but... (4) first and foremost it is fear.

It remains fear during and after scientific inquiry.

Its essential being is its being fear.

It means fear for us.

The neurological, cognitive and behavioural analyses are related to each other because they all refer to the structure we call “fear”.

Why has science overlooked this experiential ontology (defined as the science of being)?

By limiting fear to one aspect of its being, the physiologist discovers more about fear. The new discovery might be mistaken as the “essence” of fear.

For Husserl, we have an “intentional” relation to our environment which makes it intelligible. We don’t experience the environment as an unrelated series of meaningless data to be subsequently made intelligible and related to one another.

As Gestalt psychology has argued independently, we experience formal wholes, not disconnected data.

To understand is to situate!

The human environment is always first of all “a situation” - an organized hierarchy of wholes.

Isolated and meaningless data are always the results of analytical abstraction from an original and organized whole.

For Husserl, we experience phenomena as a whole because the act of experiencing is holistic.

Don’t confuse the part or mechanism of experience with the experience itself.

Phenomenology maintains that sensing and judging occur simultaneously.

To understand is to situate!

The human environment is always first of all “a situation” - an organized hierarchy of wholes.

Isolated and meaningless data are always the results of analytical abstraction from an original and organized whole.

For Husserl, we experience phenomena as a whole because the act of experiencing is holistic.

Don’t confuse the part or mechanism of experience with the experience itself.

Phenomenology maintains that sensing and judging occur simultaneously.