L19 Emotion

• What is an emotion?

  An internal process that modifies the way an organism responds to certain kinds of external stimuli.
• Common sense view of emotion:

  Event leads to emotion which leads to action. E.g. snake leads to fear which leads to running away
• What is the James—Lange Theory?

  Emotional experience is the by-product of autonomic responses. E.g. you experience fear because your heart is pounding and you are running away - bottom up theory.
• The James-Lange theory predicts that people with weak autonomic or musculo-skeletal responses will feel less emotion. What supports this?


  Pure autonomic failure: failure of ANS to the body, so stressful situations don’t lead to autonomic changes. Patients have little difficulty identifying emotions people might experience but feel their emotions less intensively than before.
• The James- Lange theory predicts that people with weak autonomic or musculoskeletal-skeletal responses will feel less emotion. What opposes this?

  People with paralysis are unable to instigate fight or flight behaviours. However, most report experiencing emotion at the same level as before their injury.
• James-Lange Theory: what evidence suggests that autonomic responses and subjective experience are not always connected?

  People with somatosensory cortex damage had a normal autonomic physiological response to emotional music but little subjective experience.

  Patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex had weak autonomic responses but a normal subjective response.
• James-Lange theory - does causing or increasing someone’s action/response enhance an emotion?

  Evidence - spontaneous rapid breathing leads to worry about suffocation and panic attacks.

  However, Walter Canon asks ow an action like running might enable us to differentiate between the range of possible emotions e.g. fear -running away, or happiness - running towards
• What is the Cannon-Bard Theory?


  Emotional stimulus simultaneously triggers autonomic response and emotional experience in the brain
• What is support for the Cannon-Bard Theory?

  1. ANS responds too slowly to account for rapid onset of emotional experience e.g. a blush
  2. People have problems detecting changes in autonomic activity, so how can this lead to a change in what experience of emotion?
  3. If non-emotional stimuli causes the same pattern of autonomic activity that emotion does then why don’t we feel afraid when we have a fever?
  4. Not enough unique patterns of autonomic activity to represent the array of unique emotional experience we have.
• What is the schachter-singer theory of emotion?

  Emotion is due to two factors, physiological arousal and cognitive processes.