Review the section on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
Without the FACS, how good do you think you are at detecting emotions based on facial expressions? What explains your skill? [Comprehend]
Devise your own FACS to detect lying or some other behavior. [Apply]
How will you validate the FACS you devised for lying? That is, how will you demonstrate whether you are correct? In determining your validation method, consider what biases you might have about the effectiveness of your emotion detection skills and how you can overcome them. [Synthesize]
Research using the Iowa Gambling Task demonstrates that “going with your gut” can lead you to make better decisions. However, in Chapter 1, you were cautioned against relying solely on intuition. Instead, you were encouraged to answer questions scientifically—
You learned that emotions may have evolved to motivate certain adaptive behaviors. For example, interest motivates us to spend more time on tasks and fear motivates us to avoid dangerous circumstances. Think of four emotions and discuss their evolutionary significance; that is, what problems did they likely evolve to solve? [Analyze]
According to appraisal theories of emotion, your appraisal of an experience can determine your emotional response to it. Does this suggest we can learn new emotional responses to past experiences through reappraisal? Explain. [Analyze]
You learned that people tend to overestimate the impact of life events on emotions, such that they think a positive event will be more satisfying than it eventually is and a negative event more devastating. Why do you suppose this is? Do you think we can learn how to correct for this bias and become more skilled at predicting our feelings? [Synthesize]
You learned that we experience subjective stress when situational demands and personal resources are out of balance, and that this goes both ways. That is, when demands exceed resources, we experience stress, but we also experience stress when resources (e.g., time) exceed demands (e.g., work). Describe an experience that fits each of these situations. Would others have perceived the situations in the same way? Why or why not? [Comprehend]
You learned that an effective method for changing emotions is to change anticipatory appraisals. Consider the type of anticipatory appraisals individuals make when they experience the subjective stress of expecting that situational demands and personal resources will be out of balance. Describe a time when you anticipated this imbalance. How could you have changed this anticipatory appraisal to make the event less stressful? [Comprehend]