8.4 SUMMARY
Emotional Experience: The Feeling Machine
- Emotional experiences have two underlying dimensions: arousal and valence.
- The James–Lange theory suggests that a stimulus causes a physiological reaction, which leads to an emotional experience. The Cannon– Bard theory suggests that a stimulus causes both an emotional experience and a physiological reaction simultaneously. Schachter and Singer’s two-factor theory suggests that a stimulus causes undifferentiated physiological arousal about which people draw inferences. Each theory has elements that are supported by research.
- Information about a stimulus is sent simultaneously to the amygdala (which makes a quick appraisal of the stimulus’s goodness or badness) and the cortex (which does a slower and more comprehensive analysis of the stimulus).
- People use many strategies to regulate emotions, such as reappraisal, which involves changing the way one thinks about an object or event.
Emotional Communication: Msgs w/o Wrds
- Darwin suggested that emotional expressions are the same for all people and are universally understood, and research suggests that this is generally true.
- Emotions cause expressions, but expressions can also cause emotions.
- Not all emotional expressions are sincere because people use display rules to help them decide which emotions to express.
- Different cultures have different display rules, but people enact those rules using the same techniques.
- There are reliable differences between sincere and insincere emotional expressions, but people are generally poor at detecting them. The polygraph can distinguish true from false utterances with better-than-chance accuracy, but its error rate is troublingly high.
Motivation: The Wanting Machine
- The hedonic principle suggests that people approach pleasure and avoid pain and that this basic motivation underlies all others.
- Biological motivations, such as hunger and sexual interest, generally take precedence over psychological motivations.
- People have many psychological motivations that can be classified in many ways, such as intrinsic vs. extrinsic, conscious vs. unconscious, and approach vs. avoidance.