• Emotion- a response of the whole organism
• Physiological arousal
• Expressive behaviors
• Conscious experience

Emotional Arousal

• Autonomic nervous system controls physiological arousal
• Arousal and Performance- Performance peaks at lower levels of arousal for difficult tasks, and at higher levels for easy or well-learned tasks.

Emotion-Lie Detectors

• Polygraph- machine that is commonly used in attempt to detect lies; measures several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion (i.e. perspiration, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing changes0
• Control Question
• Up to age 18, did you ever physically harm anyone?
• Relevant Question
• Did the deceased threaten to harm you in any way?
• RELEVANT > CONTROL ! LIE
• Is 70% accuracy good?
• Assume 5% of 1000 employees actually guilty…after testing all employees 285 will be wrongly accused
• What about 95% accuracy?
• Assume that 1 in 1000 employees actually guilty…after testing all employees 50 are wrongly declared guilty and 1 of 51 testing positive are guilty (2%)

Experiencing Emotion

• The amygdala is a neural key to fear learning
• Catharsis- emotional release; catharsis hypothesis- "releasing" aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges
• Feel-good, do-good phenomenon- people's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood.
• Subjective Well-Being-  self perceived happiness or satisfaction with life; used along with measures of objective well-being (physical and economic indicators to evaluate people’s quality of life.
• Adaptation-Level Phenomenon-  tendency to from judgements relative to a “neutral” level (i.e. brightness of lights, volume of sound, level of income); defined by our prior experience
• Relative Deprivation-  perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself

Theories of Emotion

• Does you heart pound because you are afraid…or are you afraid because you feel your heart pounding?
• James-Lange Theory of Emotion

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

•  Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotion

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

•  Schachter’s Two Factor Theory of Emotion

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

• Emotion and cognition feed on each other

Bibliography

Myers, David G., Psychology Fifth Edition. Worth Publishers, Inc. New York, NY ©1998