Emotion: Arousal, Behavior, and Cognition

10-8 How do arousal, expressive behavior, and cognition interact in emotion?

Motivated behavior is often connected to powerful emotions. My [DM’s] own need to belong was unforgettably disrupted one day. I went to a huge store and brought along Peter, my toddler first-born child. As I set Peter down on his feet for a moment so I could do some paperwork, a passerby warned, “You’d better be careful or you’ll lose that boy!” Not more than a few breaths later, I turned and found no Peter beside me.

With mild anxiety, I peered around one end of the customer service counter. No Peter in sight. With slightly more anxiety, I peered around the other end. No Peter there, either. Now, with my heart accelerating, I circled the neighboring counters. Still no Peter anywhere. As anxiety turned to panic, I began racing up and down the store aisles. He was nowhere to be found. The alerted store manager used the public-address system to ask customers to assist in looking for a missing child. Soon after, I passed the customer who had warned me. “I told you that you were going to lose him!” he now scorned. With visions of kidnapping (strangers routinely adored that beautiful child), I braced for the unthinkable possibility that my negligence had caused me to lose what I loved above all else, and that I might have to return home and face my wife without our only child.

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But then, as I passed the customer service counter yet again, there he was, having been found and returned by some obliging customer. In an instant, the arousal of terror spilled into ecstasy. Clutching my son, with tears suddenly flowing, I found myself unable to speak my thanks and stumbled out of the store awash in grateful joy.

Emotions are subjective. But they are real, says researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett (2012, 2013): “My experience of anger is not an illusion. When I’m angry, I feel angry. That’s real.” Where do our emotions come from? Why do we have them? What are they made of?

Emotions are our body’s adaptive response. They support our survival. When we face challenges, emotions focus our attention and energize our actions (Cyders & Smith, 2008). Our heart races. Our pace quickens. All our senses go on high alert. Receiving unexpected good news, we may find our eyes tearing up. We raise our hands triumphantly. We feel exuberance and a newfound confidence. Yet negative and prolonged emotions can harm our health.

As my panicked search for Peter illustrates, emotions are a mix of:

The puzzle for psychologists is figuring out how these three pieces fit together. To do that, the first researchers of emotion considered two big questions:

Historical emotion theories, as well as current research, have sought to answer these questions.

Historical Emotion Theories

The psychological study of emotion began with the first question: How do bodily responses relate to emotions? Two historical theories provided different answers.

JAMES-LANGE THEORY: AROUSAL COMES BEFORE EMOTION Common sense tells most of us that we cry because we are sad, lash out because we are angry, tremble because we are afraid. First comes conscious awareness, then the feeling. But to pioneering psychologist William James, this commonsense view of emotion had things backward. Rather, “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (1890, p. 1066). To James, emotions result from attention to our bodily activity. James’ idea was also proposed by Danish physiologist Carl Lange, and so is called the James-Lange theory. James and Lange would have guessed that I noticed my racing heart and then, shaking with fright, felt the whoosh of emotion—that my feeling of fear followed my body’s response.

CANNON-BARD THEORY: AROUSAL AND EMOTION OCCUR SIMULTANEOUSLY Physiologist Walter Cannon (1871-1945) disagreed with the James-Lange theory. Does a racing heart signal fear or anger or love? The body’s responses—heart rate, perspiration, and body temperature—are too similar, and they change too slowly, to cause the different emotions, said Cannon. He, and later another physiologist, Philip Bard, concluded that our bodily responses and experienced emotions occur separately but simultaneously. So, according to the Cannon-Bard theory, my heart began pounding as I experienced fear. The emotion-triggering stimulus traveled to my sympathetic nervous system, causing my body’s arousal. At the same time, it traveled to my brain’s cortex, causing my awareness of my emotion. My pounding heart did not cause my feeling of fear, nor did my feeling of fear cause my pounding heart.

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If our bodily responses and emotional experiences occur simultaneously and independently, as the Cannon-Bard theory suggested, then people who suffer spinal cord injuries should not notice a difference in their experience of emotion after the injury. But there are differences, according to one study of 25 World War II soldiers (Hohmann, 1966). Those with lower-spine injuries, who had lost sensation only in their legs, reported little change in their emotions’ intensity. Those with high spinal cord injury, who could feel nothing below the neck, did report changes. Some reactions were much less intense than before the injuries. Anger, one man with a high spinal cord injury confessed, “just doesn’t have the heat to it that it used to. It’s a mental kind of anger.” Other emotions, those expressed mostly in body areas above the neck, were felt more intensely. These men reported increases in weeping, lumps in the throat, and getting choked up when saying good-bye, worshiping, or watching a touching movie. Such evidence has led some researchers to view feelings as “mostly shadows” of our bodily responses and behaviors (Damasio, 2003). Brain activity underlies our emotions and our emotion-fed actions (Davidson & Begley, 2012).

But our emotions also involve cognition (Averill, 1993; Barrett, 2006). Here we arrive at psychology’s second big emotion question: How do thinking and feeling interact? Whether we fear the man behind us on the dark street depends entirely on whether we interpret his actions as threatening or friendly.

Schachter-Singer’s Two Factors: Arousal + Label = Emotion

10-9 To experience emotions, must we consciously interpret and label them?

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962) demonstrated that how we appraise our experiences matters greatly. Our physical reactions and our thoughts (perceptions, memories, and interpretations) together create emotion. In their two-factor theory, emotions have two ingredients: physical arousal and cognitive appraisal. An emotional experience, they argued, requires a conscious interpretation of arousal.

Consider how arousal spills over from one event to the next. Imagine arriving home after an invigorating run and finding a message that you got a longed-for job. With arousal lingering from the run, would you feel more elated than if you received this news after staying awake all night studying?

To explore this spillover effect, Schachter and Singer injected college men with the hormone epinephrine, which triggers feelings of arousal. Picture yourself as a participant: After receiving the injection, you go to a waiting room, where you find yourself with another person (actually an accomplice of the experimenters) who is acting either euphoric or irritated. As you observe this person, you begin to feel your heart race, your body flush, and your breathing become more rapid. If you had been told to expect these effects from the injection, what would you feel? The actual volunteers felt little emotion—because they attributed their arousal to the drug. But if you had been told the injection would produce no effects, what would you feel? Perhaps you would react as another group of participants did. They “caught” the apparent emotion of the other person in the waiting room. They became happy if the accomplice was acting euphoric, and testy if the accomplice was acting irritated.

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This discovery—that a stirred-up state can be experienced as one emotion or another, depending on how we interpret and label it—has been replicated in dozens of experiments (Reisenzein, 1983; Sinclair et al., 1994; Zillmann, 1986). As Daniel Gilbert (2006) noted, “Feelings that one interprets as fear in the presence of a sheer drop may be interpreted as lust in the presence of a sheer blouse.”

The point to remember: Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it.

Zajonc, LeDoux, and Lazarus: Does Cognition Always Precede Emotion?

But is the heart always subject to the mind? Must we always interpret our arousal before we can experience an emotion? Robert Zajonc (1923–2008) [ZI-yence] didn’t think so. Zajonc (1980, 1984a) contended that we actually have many emotional reactions apart from, or even before, our conscious interpretation of a situation. Perhaps you can recall liking something or someone immediately, without knowing why.

For example, when people repeatedly view stimuli flashed too briefly for them to interpret, they come to prefer those stimuli. Unaware of having previously seen them, they nevertheless like them. We have an acutely sensitive automatic radar for emotionally significant information; even a subliminally flashed stimulus can prime us to feel better or worse about a follow-up stimulus (Murphy et al., 1995; Zeelenberg et al., 2006).

Neuroscientists are charting the neural pathways of emotions (Ochsner et al., 2009). Our emotional responses can follow two different brain pathways. Some emotions (especially more complex feelings like hatred and love) travel a “high road.” A stimulus following this path would travel (by way of the thalamus) to the brain’s cortex (FIGURE 10.9a below). There, it would be analyzed and labeled before the response command is sent out, via the amygdala (an emotion-control center).

But sometimes our emotions (especially simple likes, dislikes, and fears) take what Joseph LeDoux (2002) has called the “low road,” a neural shortcut that bypasses the cortex. Following the low road, a fear-provoking stimulus would travel from the eye or ear (again via the thalamus) directly to the amygdala (FIGURE 10.9b). This shortcut enables our greased-lightning emotional response before our intellect intervenes. Like speedy reflexes (that also operate apart from the brain’s thinking cortex), the amygdala reactions are so fast that we may be unaware of what’s transpired (Dimberg et al., 2000).

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The amygdala sends more neural projections up to the cortex than it receives back, which makes it easier for our feelings to hijack our thinking than for our thinking to rule our feelings (LeDoux & Armony, 1999). Thus, in the forest, we can jump at the sound of rustling bushes nearby, leaving it to our cortex to decide later whether the sound was made by a snake or by the wind. Such experiences support Zajonc’s belief that some of our emotional reactions involve no deliberate thinking.

Emotion researcher Richard Lazarus (1991, 1998) conceded that our brain processes vast amounts of information without our conscious awareness, and that some emotional responses do not require conscious thinking. Much of our emotional life operates via the automatic, speedy low road. But, he asked, how would we know what we are reacting to if we did not in some way appraise the situation? The appraisal may be effortless and we may not be conscious of it, but it is still a mental function. To know whether a stimulus is good or bad, the brain must have some idea of what it is (Storbeck et al., 2006). Thus, said Lazarus, emotions arise when we appraise an event as harmless or dangerous, whether we truly know it is or not. We appraise the sound of the rustling bushes as the presence of a threat. Later, we realize that it was “just the wind.”

So, as Zajonc and LeDoux have demonstrated, some emotional responses—especially simple likes, dislikes, and fears—involve no conscious thinking (FIGURE 10.10). When I [ND] view a big spider trapped behind glass, I experience fear even though I “know” the spider can’t hurt me. Such responses are difficult to alter by changing our thinking. Within a fraction of a second, we may automatically perceive one person as more likeable or trustworthy than another (Willis & Todorov, 2006). This instant appeal can even influence our political decisions if we vote (as many people do) for a candidate we like over the candidate who expresses positions closer to our own (Westen, 2007).

But our feelings about politics are also subject to our conscious and unconscious information processing—to our memories, expectations, and interpretations. When we feel emotionally overwhelmed, we can change our interpretations (Gross, 2013). Such reappraisal often reduces distress and the corresponding amygdala response (Buhle et al., 2014; Denny et al., 2015). Highly emotional people are intense partly because of their interpretations. They may personalize events as being somehow directed at them, and they may generalize their experiences by blowing single incidents out of proportion (Larsen & Diener, 1987). Thus, learning to think more positively can help people feel better. Although the emotional low road functions automatically, the thinking high road allows us to retake some control over our emotional life. Together, automatic emotion and conscious thinking weave the fabric of our emotional lives. (TABLE 10.3 summarizes these emotion theories.)

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Whether you are falling in love or grieving a death, you need little convincing that emotions involve the body. Feeling without a body is like breathing without lungs. Some physical responses are easy to notice. Other emotional responses we experience without awareness. Before examining our physical responses to specific emotions, consider another big question: How many distinct emotions are there?

The Basic Emotions

10-10 What are some of the basic emotions?

Carroll Izard (1977) isolated 10 basic emotions (joy, interest-excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt), most present in infancy (FIGURE 10.11 below). Others believe that pride is also a distinct emotion, signaled by a small smile, head slightly tilted back, and an open posture (Tracey & Robins, 2004). Love, too, may be a basic emotion (Shaver et al., 1996). Izard has argued that other emotions are combinations of these 10, with love, for example, being a mixture of joy and interest-excitement. But are these emotions biologically distinct? Does our body know the difference between fear and anger?

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Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

10-11 What is the link between emotional arousal and the autonomic nervous system?

In a crisis, the sympathetic division of your autonomic nervous system (ANS) mobilizes your body for fight or flight (FIGURE 10.12). It triggers your adrenal glands to release the stress hormones epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). To provide energy, your liver pours extra sugar into your bloodstream. To help burn the sugar, your respiration increases to supply needed oxygen. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. Your digestion slows, diverting blood from your internal organs to your muscles. With blood sugar driven into the large muscles, running becomes easier. Your pupils dilate, letting in more light. To cool your stirred-up body, you perspire. If wounded, your blood would clot more quickly.

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When the crisis passes, the parasympathetic division of your ANS gradually calms your body, as stress hormones slowly leave your bloodstream. After your next crisis, think of this: Without any conscious effort, your body’s response to danger is wonderfully coordinated and adaptive—preparing you to fight or flee. So, do the different emotions have distinct arousal fingerprints?

The Physiology of Emotions

10-12 Do different emotions activate different physiological and brain-pattern responses?

Imagine conducting an experiment measuring the physiological responses of emotion. In each of four rooms, you have someone watching a movie: In the first, the person is viewing a horror show; in the second, an anger-provoking film; in the third, a sexually arousing film; in the fourth, a boring film. From the control center, you monitor each person’s perspiration, breathing, and heart rate. Could you tell who is frightened? Who is angry? Who is sexually aroused? Who is bored?

With training, you could probably pick out the bored viewer. But discerning physiological differences among fear, anger, and sexual arousal is much more difficult (Barrett, 2006). Different emotions can share common biological signatures.

A single brain region can also serve as the seat of seemingly different emotions. Consider the broad emotional portfolio of the insula, a neural center deep inside the brain. The insula is activated when we experience various negative social emotions, such as disgust. In brain scans, it becomes active when people bite into some disgusting food, smell disgusting food, think about biting into a disgusting cockroach, or feel moral disgust over a sleazy business exploiting a saintly widow (Sapolsky, 2010). Similar multitasking regions are found in other brains areas.

Yet our emotions—such as fear, anger, sexual arousal, and disgust—feel different to us, and they often look different to others. We may appear “paralyzed with fear” or “ready to explode.” Fear and joy prompt similar increased heart rate, but they stimulate different facial muscles. During fear, your brow muscles tense. During joy, muscles in your cheeks and under your eyes pull into a smile (Witvliet & Vrana, 1995).

Some of our emotions also differ in their brain circuits (Panksepp, 2007). Observers watching fearful faces showed more amygdala activity than did other observers who watched angry faces (Whalen et al., 2001). Brain scans and EEG recordings show that emotions also activate different areas of the brain’s cortex. When you experience negative emotions such as disgust, your right prefrontal cortex tends to be more active than the left. Depression-prone people, and those with generally negative personalities, have also shown more right frontal lobe activity (Harmon-Jones et al., 2002).

Positive moods tend to trigger more left frontal lobe activity. People with positive personalities—exuberant infants and alert, enthusiastic, energized, and persistently goal-directed adults—have also shown more activity in the left frontal lobe than in the right (Davidson, 2000, 2003; Urry et al., 2004).

To sum up, we can’t easily see differences in emotions from tracking heart rate, breathing, and perspiration. But facial expressions and brain activity can vary from one emotion to another. So, do we, like Pinocchio, give off telltale signs when we lie? For more on that question, see Thinking Critically About: Lie Detection.

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Learning Objectives

Test Yourself by taking a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within the chapter). Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term memory of the concepts (McDaniel et al., 2009).

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Terms and Concepts to Remember

Test yourself on these terms.

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Experience the Testing Effect

Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.

Question 10.16

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Question 10.19

Use to create your personalized study plan, which will direct you to the resources that will help you most in .