Yesterday we took a look at the limbic system, where the source of our emotions is situated. Let's explore more what emotions are and what is their use biological and social.
The most fundamental emotions, known as the basic emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. These have a long history in our evolution and have developed to help us make rapid judgments about stimuli and respond quickly with appropriate behavior. They are experienced and displayed in much the same way across cultures and we can read other's face accurately even if we never met.
Not all of our emotions come from the old parts of our brain; we also interpret our experiences to create a more complex array of emotional experiences.
For instance, the amygdala may sense fear when it senses that the body is falling, but that fear may be interpreted completely differently (perhaps even as excitement) when we are falling on a roller-coaster ride than when we are falling from the sky in an airplane that has lost power.
The cognitive interpretations that accompany emotions — known as cognitive appraisal — allow us to experience a much larger and more complex set of secondary emotions.
Although they are in large part cognitive, our experiences of the secondary emotions are determined in part by arousal and whether they are pleasant or unpleasant feelings.
When you succeed in reaching an important goal, you might spend some time enjoying your secondary emotions, perhaps the experience of joy, satisfaction, and contentment. But when your close friend wins a prize that you thought you had deserved, you might also experience a variety of secondary emotions (in this case, the negative ones) — for instance, feeling angry, sad, resentful, and ashamed. You might mull over the event for weeks or even months, experiencing these negative emotions each time you think about it.
The distinction between the primary and the secondary emotions is paralleled by two brain pathways: a fast pathway and a slow pathway. The thalamus acts as the major gatekeeper in this process.
Our response to fear, for instance, is primarily determined by the fast pathway through the limbic system. When a car pulls out in front of us on the highway, the thalamus activates and sends an immediate message to the amygdala. We quickly move our foot to the brake pedal.
Secondary emotions are more determined by the slow pathway. When we stew in jealousy over the loss of a partner to a rival or recollect our win in the big tennis match, the process is more complex. Information moves from the thalamus to the frontal lobes for cognitive analysis and integration, and then from there to the amygdala. We experience the arousal of emotion, but it is accompanied by a more complex cognitive appraisal, producing more refined emotions and behavioral responses.
In some cases it may be difficult when experiencing a high level of arousal to accurately determine which emotion we experience. That is, we are certain that we feel arousal, but the meaning of the arousal (the cognitive factor) may be less clear. Some romantic relationships, for instance, have a very high level of arousal, and the partners alternatively experience extreme highs and lows in the relationship. One day they are madly in love with each other and the next they are in a huge fight. In situations that are accompanied by high arousal, people may be unsure what emotion they are experiencing. In the high arousal relationship, for instance, the partners may be uncertain whether the emotion they are feeling is love, hate, or both at the same time. The tendency for people to incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing is known as the mis-attribution of arousal.
In one interesting field study by Dutton and Aron (1974), an attractive young woman approached individual young men as they crossed a wobbly, long suspension walkway hanging more than 200 feet above a river in British Columbia . The woman asked each man to help her fill out a class questionnaire. When she had finished, she wrote her name and phone number on a piece of paper, and invited him to call if he wanted to hear more about the project. More than half of the men who had been interviewed on the bridge later called the woman. In contrast, men approached by the same woman on a low, solid bridge, called significantly less frequently. The idea of mis-attribution of arousal can explain this result — the men were feeling arousal from the height of the bridge, but they mis-attributed it as romantic or sexual attraction to the woman, making them more likely to call her.
In addition to experiencing emotions internally, we also express our emotions to others, and we learn about the emotions of others by observing them. This communication process has evolved over time and is highly adaptive.
One way that we perceive the emotions of others is through their nonverbal communication. Our tone of voice, gait, posture, touch, and facial expressions, and we can often accurately detect the emotions that other people are experiencing through these channels, particularly liking or disliking, and dominance or submission.
The most important communicator of emotion is the face. The face contains 43 different muscles that allow it to make more than 10,000 unique configurations and to express a wide variety of emotions. For example, happiness is expressed by smiles, which are created by two of the major muscles surrounding the mouth and the eyes, and anger is created by lowered brows and firmly pressed lips.
In addition to helping us express our emotions, the face also helps us feel emotion. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that the movement of our facial muscles can trigger corresponding emotions. Fritz Strack and his colleagues (1988) asked their research participants to hold a pen in their teeth (mimicking the facial action of a smile) or between their lips (similar to a frown), and then had them rate the funniness of a cartoon. They found that the cartoons were rated as more amusing when the pen was held in the smiling position — the subjective experience of emotion was intensified by the action of the facial muscles.
These results, and others like them, show that our behaviors, including our facial expressions, both influence and are influenced by our affect. We may smile because we are happy, but we are also happy because we are smiling. And we may stand up straight because we are proud, but we are proud because we are standing up straight.
So... pull those shoulders back now and smile! ♥
No comments:
Post a Comment