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Psychology 1002: Emotion

Marc de Rosnay

Consultation hour:11.30 to 12.30 ThursdayBrennan MacCallumRoom: 4449351 4528

marcd@usyd.edu.au

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Overview1

Lectures 1 & 2: Built for Emotion

Evolutionary and biological perspectives on emotion

Lecture 3: Emotion in Infancy

Adaptive, functional and social perspectives

Lecture 4: Emotions in Development

Language development, the onset self-consciousness and atypical development

Lecture 5: What is an Emotion?

How should we think about emotions in the study of psychology?

1Overheads are only an aid for lectures, they are not exhaustive

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Lecture 1. Darwin

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)

• Importantly, Darwin emphasized continuities between human beings and non-human primates

• Basic emotional (including facial) expression are innate, they are produced and recognized automatically

“... the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.”

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Lecture 1. Darwin

• Darwin pioneered the careful observation of facial expressions of emotion, including those of human infants and blind children

• When infants cry,

1. do they have their eyes open or shut?2. is their mouth open or shut?

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Lecture 1. Darwin

“Infants, when suffering even slight pain, or discomfort, utter violent and prolonged screams. While thus screaming their eyes are firmly closed, so that the skin round them is wrinkled, and the forehead contracted into a frown. The mouth is widely opened with the lips retracted in a peculiar manner, which causes it to assume a squarish form”

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Lecture 1. Darwin and his contemporaries

• Photographs from Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (1862) by Guillaume Duchenne – heavily relied upon by Darwin

• Electric stimulation was used to determine the facial muscles responsible for different facial expressions

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Lecture 1. The legacy of Darwin

Darwin,• fundamentally changed the ways in which

emotions would be conceptualized within Western scientific thinking

• grounded emotion in our evolutionary history and drew strong parallels between different species regarding the functions of emotional expression

• Provided a framework for subsequent emotion research that is still influential today

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1971)• Endeavored to show that certain basic emotions

are universally recognized and understood to signify the same psychological state of the individual

• They, and others (e.g., Izard, 1971), were able to show this in literate cultures but argued that,

“…, it is necessary to demonstrate that cultures which have had a minimal visual contact with literate cultures show similarity to these cultures in their interpretation of facial behavior.” (p. 125)

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1971):

STEP 1

USA Papua New Guinea

(Fore linguistic group)

STEP 2

Papua New Guinea USA

(Note: step 2 not a direct replication)

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1971) stories:

• His friends have come, and he is _____

• Her mother has died, and she feels very _____

• He is _____, about to fight

• She is just now looking at something new and unexpected

• He is looking as something which smells bad

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1971) stories:

• She is sitting in her house all alone, and there is no one else in the village. There is no knife, axe, or bow and arrow in the house. A wild pig is standing in the door of the house, and the woman is looking at the pig and is very _____ of it. The pig has been standing in the doorway for a few minutes, and the person is looking at it very _____, and the pig won’t move away from the door, and she is _____ the pig will bite her

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1971) Results:

• Men, women and children from the tribe had very little difficulty matching the stories with an appropriate facial expression

• Remarkable continuity between the Fore linguistic group in PNG and literate cultures

• Remember, the expressions were posed by Caucasians, not fellow tribesmen

• There was some difficulty distinguishing surprise from fear

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Interim conclusions:

• Ekman & Friesen (1971) provide good evidence for universal recognition and universally shared understanding of certain basic emotions

• Why didn’t they examine other emotions?(shame, pride, guilt, contempt, etc)

• What makes an emotion basic?

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1986)

• Examined the possibility that contempt is a pan-cultural emotion

• Predicted that is was not, because,

1. not observed in other primates2. one of the last emotions to appear3. doesn’t involve bilateral facial actions

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Contempt – unilateral facial action

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Tightening and slightly raising corner of lip unilaterally

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The other side of the face remains relatively passive

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Contempt – bilateral facial action

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman & Friesen (1986). Findings:

• Did not confirm their hypothesisContempt expressed as tightening and slightly raising corner of lip unilaterally was universally recognized (in 10 countries)

• Other variations of the contempt expression (defined differently in terms of facial actions) were not universally differentiated

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Conclusions:

• Generally accepted that anger, happiness, fear, sadness, (surprise), disgust and contempt are basic emotions

• There is still controversy surrounding other emotions (pride, shame, guilt, etc), moods (grumpy), persistent affective states (love, passion, hate, etc) and more stable personality traits or dispositions (depressive, anxious)

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Conclusions:

• Generally accepted that anger, happiness, fear, sadness, (surprise), disgust and contempt are basic emotions

• There is still controversy surrounding other emotions (pride, shame, guilt, etc), moods (grumpy), persistent affective states (love, passion, hate, etc) and more stable personality traits or dispositions (depressive, anxious)

• Once you start to think about emotion and the emotion system in action then it becomes quite difficult to know what is emotion and what is not

• Consider, for a moment, mother-infant communication: vitality affects (Stern, 1985)

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Lecture 1. Are there basic emotions?

Ekman (1999) suggests the following criteria for basic emotions:

1. Distinctive universal signals

2. Distinctive physiology

3. Automatic appraisal, tuned to:

4. Distinctive universals in antecedent events

5. Distinctive appearance developmentally

6. Presence in other primates

7. Quick onset

8. Brief duration

9. Unbidden occurrence

10. Distinctive thoughts, memories, images

11. Distinctive subjective experience