CHAPTER 10 Chapter Summary

What are the four key components of an emotion?

An emotion is a psychological state that combines (1) feelings, (2) thoughts, and (3) bodily arousal and that often has (4) a distinctive accompanying facial expression. In the Research Toolkit, you learned that the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a system for detecting emotions from facial expressions that avoids reliance on self-reports.

How do moods differ from emotions?

Moods last longer than emotions; moods are not necessarily accompanied by a specific pattern of thinking; and moods are not strongly linked to facial expressions.

What are four psychological activities that we can accomplish with the help of emotions?

Emotions can aid in our decision making; they have motivational power; they communicate information; and they support moral judgments.

How does our thinking affect our emotions?

Emotions result from the meaning that people give to events, not from the events themselves. If thinking varies from person to person, so too will emotions. This idea was well illustrated in research presented in Cultural Opportunities, where you learned that Hindu women in northern India, who are part of a culture that values social obligation, feel the emotion lajja when they sense that they are behaving consistently with those values. People from cultures that don’t emphasize those values do not experience lajja.

What kinds of thoughts influence emotional experience?

According to appraisal theories of emotion, a small number of appraisals can generate a wide variety of emotional experiences. They include appraisals of: motivational significance (is the event relevant to my concerns and goals?), motivational congruence (does it facilitate my goals or hinder them?), accountability (who is to blame or who deserves credit for an event?), future expectancy (can things change?), problem-focused coping potential (can I myself bring about change that solves a problem?), and emotion-focused coping potential (can I adjust, psychologically, to the event?).

What can we do to control our emotions? What shouldn’t we do?

Because appraisals shape emotion, people can control emotions by altering their anticipatory appraisals, the thoughts they have prior to the occurrence of an event. For example, when children are taught to think of a marshmallow as a ball they can play with rather than a food, they are able to refrain from eating it. Altering anticipatory appraisals is more effective than emotion suppression, which can ironically increase arousal.

How well can we predict the degree of our happiness if we win a lot of money?

Not very well. People tend to overestimate the impact of life events on emotions. They anticipate that bad events will be emotionally worse and good events more emotionally uplifting than they actually turn out to be. In This Just In, you further learned that when predicting our happiness, we shouldn’t overestimate the effect of genes. As it turns out, social factors, such as setting goals for altruistic behavior, can increase happiness.

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What does it mean to say that we can describe any mood with two simple structures: valence and arousal?

Arousal refers to the level of activation of the body and brain during the mood state. Valence refers to the positivity or negativity of the mood. By combining these two dimensions, psychologists can describe the full variation in mood in terms of a two-dimensional structure that functions like a map. No matter what your mood at any given time, it can be located somewhere in the “mood map.”

What activities have been demonstrated to improve mood?

One activity is exercise, including yoga, which can increase positive emotions and decrease negative arousal (stress). The same is true of massage therapy. Other activities include listening to music and singing.

Can today’s weather influence how satisfied we are with life in general?

Yes. The mood-as-information hypothesis proposes that people evaluate life satisfaction by consulting their feelings. One implication is that irrelevant factors, such as the weather, may affect people’s evaluations. This was supported by an experiment whose results indicated that people who were interviewed on a sunny day evaluated their life more positively than did people interviewed on a rainy day.

Are people more likely to help others when in a positive mood or a negative mood?

Research suggests that people are much more likely to help if they are in a positive mood. Even subtle influences on mood can affect willingness to help, such as finding a small amount of money.

Do we first have to experience bodily arousal in order to experience an emotion?

According to the James–Lange theory of emotion, yes. When an event occurs, your brain receives information from sensory systems and generates a bodily response, arousal. The body then alerts the brain of this arousal, and you experience an emotion. The Cannon–Bard theory of emotion, on the other hand, suggests that bodily arousal does not precede, and is not the cause of, emotion. Instead, information about emotionally arousing events travels from the sensory system to structures in the brain’s limbic system, which simultaneously produces the experience of emotion and generates the bodily changes that are distinctive of emotion.

Are all emotions produced via the same process, and according to a step-by-step sequence of events, as the James–Lange and Cannon–Bard theories had predicted?

No. Contemporary researchers recognize that multiple processes contribute to emotional experience. Moreover, contemporary research on the brain shows that large numbers of brain events occur simultaneously.

What subcortical brain structures are key to emotional life? How do we know?

The limbic system, a set of brain structures that resides below the cortex and above the brain stem, is key to emotional life. A structure within the limbic system that is particularly important to emotional response is the amygdala, which is especially active in processing fear-inducing events. Evidence of this comes from the remarkable case of SM, a woman who experienced bilateral amygdala damage and, consequently, showed no fear.

How can we explain the psychologically complex phenomenon of emotional experience at the biological level of analysis?

A biological analysis of emotion must include the brain structure that underlies the psychological components of emotion (thoughts, feeling, motivations, and facial expressions): the cortex. It must also include the interconnections between the cortex and limbic system, to account for the synchronization of the psychological components. Evidence from studies using brain-imaging methods confirms that six interconnected groups of neural systems contribute to the complex phenomenon of emotional experience: two in the limbic system and four in the cortex.

How do psychologists classify environmental stressors? Are they always negative?

Researchers distinguish among three types of stressors: harms (damaging events that have already occurred), threats (potentially damaging events that might occur in the future), and challenges (upcoming or ongoing activities that pose difficulties and that are damaging if you cannot handle them). Acute stressors last a brief amount of time, whereas chronic stressors are present through a prolonged period of a person’s life. Stressors are often negative events, but they can also include positive events that require life adjustments, which can be challenging.

What psychological features determine whether we experience a given environment as stressful?

People experience subjective stress when situational demands and personal resources are out of balance; if demands outweigh resources, stress results. Likewise, when personal resources greatly outweigh situational demands, people become bored, and the boredom itself can be stressful.

Through what biological process do our bodies enable us to respond adaptively to stress?

When you experience a stressor, your body produces a stress response, a coordinated series of physiological changes that prepare you to confront or flee the stressor. Your heart rate increases to deliver more oxygen to muscles; your thinking changes to focus your attention on the stressor; and your immune system alters its functioning.

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Selye’s general adaptation syndrome (GAS) is a sequence of physiological reactions that occur in response to stressors. The first stage is alarm reaction; when a stressor first occurs, the body produces the stress response described above. The second is resistance; if a stressor continues to be present, the immune system responds by “working overtime.” If a chronic stressor persists long enough, we may experience the third stage, exhaustion, when we run out of energy and are at high risk of illness.

What is the role of hormones in the stress response?

The central system involved in stress reactions is the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. A sequence of hormone-releasing activities occurs when the hypothalamus is activated by stress. First, the hypothalamus releases corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) into a duct that leads to the pituitary gland. CRH causes the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), which is carried by the bloodstream to the adrenal glands. Finally, ATCH causes the adrenal glands to release cortisol into the bloodstream, which increases heart rate and blood sugar, thus energizing the body to react to stress.

How does stress affect the functioning of our immune system? What are the implications for health?

Short-term stressors increase immune system activity, whereas long-term or chronic stress suppresses the immune system. When immune system functioning is impaired, people experience poor health.

How can researchers test the effects of stress on immune system functioning in a way that controls for how hectic one’s life is?

They can take an experimental approach, as Sheldon Cohen and colleagues did. They randomly assigned participants to receive nasal drops that contained either a respiratory virus or a mixture of salt and water. They then quarantined participants in their apartments to control for virus exposure. Each day, a physician examined each participant and the researchers measured their subjective stress. Results indicated that, among those receiving the respiratory virus, people who reported more subjective stress were more likely to develop colds.

How can stress make us old before our time?

Stress influences aging by affecting telomeres, small strands of DNA at the end of each chromosome that maintain a cell’s “youthfulness.” When a cell loses too much of its telomere, it cannot replicate.

When coping with stressful events, is it more advantageous to try to change the problem or to focus on one’s emotions?

It depends. Focusing on problems to be solved can be advantageous unless, for instance, the problem is out of your control. Then it may be better to work on your emotional state. Research indicates that coping flexibly is advantageous.

How and why do men and women’s coping strategies differ?

When faced with a stressor, people may engage in a fight-or-flight coping strategy or a tend-and-befriend strategy. Women use the tend-and-befriend strategy more than men do, perhaps because they have been more heavily involved in parenting than males. Fighting and fleeing isn’t very compatible with protecting offspring and isn’t always possible during advanced stages of pregnancy. Tending to the needs of offspring helps them survive during times of stress, and befriending others creates social networks that can help to support the mother.

How is social support beneficial to physical and mental health?

Even before a stressor occurs, social support aids in health by increasing our sense of well-being. Once a stressor, such as the difficulty associated with parenting, is present, social support from others can “buffer” its impact on emotions. Positive emotional social support between partners helps maintain marriages.