B Emotions Are Transitory Social Roles: Averill
Many theories have been developed from the social perspective, but one that has been particularly significant is James Averills, which will be reviewed in this section . According to Averill, an emotion is a transitory social role that includes an individuals appraisal of the situation and that is interpreted as a passion rather than as an action . These transitory social roles and syndromes are generated by social norms and expectations, and so, by these means, social norms and expectations govern an individuals emotions.
Averill employs the notion of a syndrome to indicate that each emotion , covers a variety of elements. A syndrome is a collection of all of the appropriate responses of a particular emotion, any of which may at certain times constitute an emotion response, but none of which are essential or necessary for that emotion syndrome. It also consists of beliefs about the nature of the eliciting stimuli and perhaps some natural elements. All of these various components are linked together for an individual by principles of organization. These principles are what allow the various elements to be construed coherently as one particular emotion .
The Science Of Emotion: Exploring The Basics Of Emotional Psychology
Posted June 27, 2019 by UWA | Psychology and Counseling News
Important Dates
How we interpret and respond to the world around us makes up who we are and contributes to our quality of life. The study of emotional psychology allows researchers to dive into what makes humans react as they do to certain stimuli and how those reactions affect us both physically and mentally. While the study of emotional psychology is vast and complex, researchers have discovered quite a bit about what constitutes our emotions and our behavioral and physical reactions to them.
Proven Benefits Of Negative Emotions
Itâs not all doom and gloom. When handled well, negative emotions can have proven benefits for our wellbeing, and far more research has been poured into exploring this aspect of negative emotions.
Iâve summarised some of the key findings from the research for how negative emotions can benefit you:
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Mirror Neuron Systems Emotions And Empathy
If the concept of memes becomes a staple in psychology, it may happen for two reasons. First, perhaps the most interesting and socially significant memes have an emotion component and are essentially emotion schemas whose behavioral manifestations can be readily observed and analyzed. Second, they may depend in part on the MNS, which seems to mediate capabilities for perspective taking and empathy. The MNS may enable one to take the perspective of another and provide the shared emotion feeling that defines the essence of empathy . The MNS apparently translates ones sensory-perceptual experiences and accompanying conceptions of the expressions and movements of others into patterns of neural activity in the observer . This neural activity and its products help the observer to understand and predict the thoughts and feelings of the observed person.
The MNS may relate to sympathy and altruism as well. The cognitive component of an emotion schema, in interaction with its feeling component, may transform empathy to sympathy. This transformation would entail a shift from a response governed primarily by neuro-physiological or motor-system contagion to one that requires conceptual processes . An MNS that facilitates sympathy, altruism, and mimetic processes would facilitate highly adaptive advantages .
The Origins Of Emotions
Russell proposed that core affect is continuous in the brain and provides information on the pleasure/displeasure and arousal value of stimuli. In contrast, I have maintained that a discrete emotion or pattern of interacting emotions are always present in the conscious brain . Barrett suggested that discrete emotions arise as a result of a conceptual act on core affect or as a function of conceptual structure that is afforded by language . In contrast, we have proposed that discrete emotion feelings cannot be created, taught, or learned via cognitive processes . As Edelman & Tononi observed, emotions are fundamental both to the origins of and the appetite for conscious thought . So, perceptual and conceptual processes and consciousness itself are more like effects of emotions than sources of their origin. Discrete emotion experiences emerge in ontogeny well before children acquire language or the conceptual structures that adequately frame the qualia we know as discrete emotion feelings. Moreover, acquiring language does not guarantee that emotion experiences can always be identified and communicated verbally. Even adults have great difficulty articulating a precise description of their emotion feelings .
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Interpreting Plutchiks Wheel Of Emotions
Primary: The eight sectors are designed to indicate that there are eight primary emotions: anger, anticipation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness and disgust.
Opposites: Each primary emotion has a polar opposite. These are based on the physiological reaction each emotion creates in animals :
- Joy is the opposite of sadness. Physiology: Connect vs withdraw
- Fear is the opposite of anger. Physiology: Get small and hide vs get big and loud
- Anticipation is the opposite of surprise. Physiology: Examine closely vs jump back
- Disgust is the opposite of trust. Physiology: Reject vs embrace
Combinations: The emotions with no color represent an emotion that is a mix of the 2 primary emotions. For example, anticipation and joy combine to be optimism. Joy and trust combine to be love. Emotions are often complex, and being able to recognize when a feeling is actually a combination of two or more distinct feelings is a helpful skill.
There are also tertiary feelings, not shown on the feelings wheel, that are a combination of 3 ,
Intensity: The cones vertical dimension represents intensity emotions intensify as they move from the outside to the center of the wheel, which is also indicated by the color: The darker the shade, the more intense the emotion. For example, anger at its least level of intensity is annoyance. At its highest level of intensity, anger becomes rage. Or, a feeling of boredom can intensify to loathing if left unchecked, which is dark purple.
Emotions Feelings And Moods
In everyday language, people often use the terms emotions, feelings, and moods interchangeably, but these terms actually mean different things. An emotion is normally quite short-lived, but intense. Emotions are also likely to have a definite and identifiable cause. For example, after disagreeing with a friend over politics, you might experience anger.
Emotions are reactions to stimuli, but feelings are what we experience as a result of emotions. Feelings are influenced by our perception of the situation, which is why the same emotion can trigger different feelings among people experiencing it.
Take the example of disagreeing with your friend. You might both walk away from the conversation having experienced the emotion of anger.
Your anger might feel like frustration because you feel that your friend never listens to you when you speak. Your friend’s anger, on the other hand, might feel like jealousy because they feel you know much more about the topic than they do. Both of you have the same emotion, but your feelings are different based on your separate interpretations.
A mood can be described as a temporary emotional state. Sometimes moods are caused by clear reasonsyou might feel everything is going your way this week, so you’re in a happy mood. But in many cases, it can be difficult to identify the specific cause of a mood. For example, you might find yourself feeling gloomy for several days without any clear, identifiable reason.
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Basic Emotions And Phenomenal Consciousness
It is quite reasonable to assume that human infants have some form of consciousness . Wider acceptance of this notion should save young infants a lot of pain. Various invasive procedures are still performed without analgesic. The facial expression of infants undergoing such procedures constitutes the prototypical expression of pain. With increasing age, the prototypical expression of pain in response to these procedures alternates with the prototypical expression of anger .
Developmental data suggest that young infants experience basic emotions . Their inability to report their emotion experiences via language rules out the idea that they experience emotions in access consciousness and suggests that their emotion feelings must occur in some other level of awareness or in phenomenal consciousness. Current conceptualizations of phenomenal consciousness, however, may not explain all emotion experiences in infancy .
How Can We Best Control And Deal With Our Negative Emotions
One of the best ways to deal with our negative emotions is through acceptance.
Just as there are benefits to negative emotions, forcing ourselves to be happy all the time can also be detrimental to our overall emotional wellbeing.
Accepting negative emotions, in ourselves and others, are all a part of being human allows us to build better compassion for how they might present themselves and why. Rather than becoming stuck in a mindset that negative emotions need to be avoided or that they are somehow âwrongâ to experience, we need to accept they are a natural part of who we are.
Once we do that we can really begin to change how we might respond to them and develop behaviors that are meaningful and bring value to how we express ourselves and engage with others.
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Emotion Feelings And Consciousness
As the foregoing formulation suggests, the neurobiological processes involved in emotions generate conscious experiences of feelings just as in seeing green neurobiological activities in the visual brain create the experience/sensation of greenness . The sensory processes involved in emotion feelings like joy, sadness, anger, and fear may represent prototypical emotion experiences. Such emotion feelings are critical to the evolution of human mentality and reflective consciousness .
Emotion experiences/sensations continue to be critical in the maintenance and functioning of consciousness. When trauma leads to damage or dysfunction of a sensory system, it affects the whole person, including the sense of self and of others as self-conscious. For example, when a dysfunctional visual cortex resulted in blindsight, the blindsighted person could guess rather accurately the location of objects in the environment and learn to navigate around them. Yet, she experienced her sensation-less vision as emotionless and reported that seeing without emotion is unbearable . She may also think of herself as less of a self and one that could not feel engaged in the hereness, nowness, and me-ness of the experience of the moment . In the social world, the blind-sighted person lacks a basis for empathy and for understanding the mental states of others by simulation.
Negative Emotions And Motivation
There is some new research emerging connecting negative emotions with motivation. Anger has by far been the main emotion explored in this area, and itâs one thatâs been repeatedly connected to encouraging and leading to motivation to act within a given scenario, but there is more research needed .
Biswas-Diener and Kashdan came up with the idea of âwholenessâ which encourages us to see difficult or negative emotions as a part of the bigger picture of overall happiness. They instruct us that a change is needed and we need to act on the negative behavior to create the change that would lead us to further happiness.
These researchers advise that we need to channel our negative emotions constructively to address our deeper needs and seek out positive outcomes.
âSecond waveâ positive psychology follows a similar vein. Ivtzan, Hefferon, and Worth ascertain that this new approach to positive psychology sees us embracing adversity, discomfort and negative emotions as a path to building better resilience.
They see negative emotions as an important part of spiritual living and in coming to terms with difficult emotions such as guilt or anxiety, we build a deeper connection with who we want to be and how we want to show up in the world.
The researchers concluded that the role of negative emotions is more complex than current research suggests.
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Which Emotions Are Universal
Even though the images below depict the seven universal emotions separately, no emotion exists as a single affective or psychological state. Instead, emotions are comprised of a family of related emotional states which are variations on a shared theme.
- remembering or imagining an event
- talking about, thinking about, or physically reenacting a past emotional experience
What actually makes us emotional, however, varies person to person based on our shared evolution, cultural influences, and unique personal experiences. So, even though we can’t choose the emotions we feel, we can choose the ways in which we respond through emotional awareness.
What Are Negative Emotions
Itâs important to distinguish between what an emotion is and what a feeling is. While the two are interconnected, thereâs a bigger difference than you may realize. Itâs definitely something that surprised me when I began with my research.
Emotions Emotions are regarded as âlower levelâ responses. They first occur in the subcortical areas of the brain such as the amygdala and the ventromedial prefrontal cortices. These areas are responsible for producing biochemical reactions that have a direct impact on your physical state.
Emotions are coded into our DNA and are thought to have developed as a way to help us respond quickly to different environmental threats, much like our âfight or flightâ response. The amygdala has also been shown to play a role in the release of neurotransmitters that are essential for memory, which is why emotional memories are often stronger and easier to recall.
Emotions have a stronger physical grounding than feelings meaning researchers find them easier to measure objectively through physical cues such as blood flow, heart rate, brain activity, facial expressions, and body language.
Feelings Emotions are seen as preceding feelings, which tend to be our reactions to the different emotions we experience. Where emotions can have a more generalized experience across all humans, feelings are more subjective and are influenced by our personal experiences and interpretations of our world based on those experiences.
- Sensory Pleasure
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How Do We Practice Emotional Awareness
As weve learned, we do not choose the emotions we experience. However, our emotional responses shape our experience of the world. In order to choose our responses wisely, we must first become more aware of and familiar with our own emotional experiences.
Dr. Ekman, one of the worlds leading experts in the field of emotions has devoted his life to researching emotions and developing tools to help us better understand the emotional lives of ourselves and others.
Social And Cultural Theories
The second main approach to explaining the emotions begins with the idea that emotions are social constructions. That is, emotions are the products of societies and cultures, and are acquired or learned by individuals through experience. Virtually everyone who defends this position acknowledges that emotions are to some degree, natural phenomena. Nonetheless, the central claim made in these theories is that the social influence is so significant that emotions are best understood from this perspective.
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A Motivations For The Social Approach
This section will discuss some of the motivations for adopting this approach to explaining the emotions. Some brief examples to show how these ideas have been developed are also reviewed.
1. A number of anthropological studies have found discrepancies among the emotion words used in different languages. In particular, there are emotion words in other languages that do not correspond directly or even closely to emotion words in English. Given that individuals experience the emotions that they have terms for , the claim that follows from these findings is that people in different cultures have and experience different emotions. The following are some of the examples that are often used to illustrate the variability of emotion terms.
The people of Ifaluk, a small island in the Pacific, have an emotion that they refer to as fago. Catherine Lutz translates fago as compassion/love/sadness and claims that it is unlike any single western emotion . The Japanese have the emotion amae, which is a feeling of dependency upon anothers love. This is similar to the feeling that children have towards their mothers, but it is experienced by adults. . And there are several cultures in which anger and sadness are not distinguished as separate, discrete emotions .
3. Emotions and their expression are regulated by social norms, values, and expectations. These norms and values influence what the appropriate objects of emotion are , and they also influence how emotions should be expressed.
How Do You Become The Boss Of Your Emotions
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Color Psychology And Product Design
Color psychology research isnât limited to color therapy, it’s also used in marketing, advertising, and product design. One example is pharmaceuticals.
Drugmakers are interested in what color psychology research says about the therapeutic values of pill colors. Red pills are associated with stimulants and blue are associated with relaxation. The right color choice can create a placebo effect that enhances the effectiveness of the medicine.
Selecting the right pill color is important even in the clinical trial stage of drug development. Some pill colors are more likely to cause people to miss doses or even stop taking the medicine. Drugmakers know that if they choose the wrong pill color, it could potentially throw off data from clinical trials due to non-compliance.
The use of colors to affect human emotions, health, and actions is an ancient art that modern science is still exploring. If you are feeling down and have the urge to paint your walls yellow or to take a walk in a colorful garden, rest assured that surrounding yourself with the right colors can improve your mood and sense of well-being.
Show Sources
American Research Journal of Pharmacy: âChromo therapy â An Effective Treatment Option of Just a Myth?? Critical Analysis on the Effectiveness of Chromo therapy.â
Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine: âA Critical Analysis of Chromotherapy and Its Scientific Evolution.â
Harvard Health Publishing: âBlue light has a dark side.â