Neurobiology of Emotions

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COGNITIVE SCIENCE 17 Why Emotions Are
Necessary Part 1 Jaime A. Pineda, Ph.D.
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Emotions

• Responses of the whole organism, involving...
• physiological arousal (autonomic/hormonal)
• expressive behaviors (behavioral)
• conscious experience (cognitive)

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Evolutionary Advantage to Emotion

• For example
• Fight or flight response
• but can basic emotions help or overwhelm rational
  thinking?

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A Biological Purpose for Emotion?

• Signaling function (that we might take action)
• Provide strong impulse to take action
• Promote unique, stereotypical patterns of
  physiological change and behavior

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Emotions

• Negative
• Fear
• Anger
• Grief
• Hate
• Positive
• Love
• Empathy
• Caring
• Joy

useful as motivation for moving away from what
one doesn't want

useful as motivation for moving towards what one
does want
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Psychological Reasons for Experiencing Emotion

• Catharsis
• energy release
• catharsis hypothesis
• releasing aggressive energy (through action or
  fantasy) relieves aggressive urges
• Feel-good, do-good phenomenon
• peoples tendency to be helpful when already in a
  good mood

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Psychological Reasons for Experiencing Emotion

• Subjective State of Well-Being
• self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with
  life
• used along with measures of objective well-being
• physical and economic indicators to evaluate
  peoples quality of life

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Basic Emotions--presumed to be hard wired and
physiologically distinctive
Are Emotions Universal?

• Joy
• Surprise
• Sadness
• Anger
• Disgust
• Fear

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Expressing Emotion

• Culturally universal expressions

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Expressing Emotion

• Smiles can show different emotions
• a) Mask anger
• b) Overly polite
• c) Soften criticism
• d) Reluctant compliance

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Expressing Emotion

• Gender and expressiveness

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Experiencing Emotion

• Does money buy happiness?

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Experiencing Emotion

• Values and life satisfaction

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Theories of Emotion
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James-Lange Theory of Emotion

• Experience of emotion is awareness of
  physiological responses to emotion-arousing
  stimuli

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Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion

• Emotion-arousing stimuli simultaneously trigger
• physiological responses
• subjective experience of emotion

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Schacters Two-Factor Theory of Emotion

• To experience emotion one must
• be physically aroused
• cognitively label the arousal

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Physical Arousal
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Arousal and Performance

• Performance peaks at lower levels of arousal for
  difficult tasks, and at higher levels for easy or
  well-learned tasks

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Cognition Drives Emotion
Cognition
Emotion
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Cognition-Emotion Relationship
Cognition Ive been treated less than my worth
Emotion Anger
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Behavior Drives Emotion
Behavior
Emotion
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Behavior Drives Emotions

• Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• Activation of sad face muscles makes subject
  feel sadder (from Larsen, et al., 1992)