Download What is emotion?

Emotions and
Emotional Intelligence
Aj. Sittichai Thongworn
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Overview
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What is Emotion?
Functions of Emotion
Basic Emotions
Theories of Emotion
Emotion & Decision
Making
• Emotional Intelligence
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What is emotion?
• Emotion has the root of Latin word means ‘movement’
• Emotions are feelings that generally have both
physiological and cognitive elements and that influence
behavior. (Feldman, 1996)
• Emotions are composed of a subjective component, a
physiological component, and an expressive
component.
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Functions of Emotion
 Motivate us to take action
• There is an action urge connected to specific
emotions that is an automatic, built-in part of our
behavior.
• We also tend to take certain actions in order to
experience positive emotions and minimize the
probability of feeling negative emotions.
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Functions of Emotion (Cont.)
 Help us survive, thrive, and avoid danger
• Charles Darwin believed that emotions are
adaptations that allow both humans and animals
to survive and reproduce.
• Emotions serve an adaptive role in our lives by
motivating us to act quickly and take actions that
will maximize our chances for success.
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Functions of Emotion (Cont.)
 Help us make decisions
• Our emotions have a major influence on the
decisions we make.
• Researchers have found that people with certain
types of brain damage that impairs their ability to
experience emotions also have an decreased
ability to make good decisions.
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Functions of Emotion (Cont.)
 Allow other people to understand us
• When we interact with other people, it is
important to give cues to help them understand
how we are feeling.
• These cues might involve emotional expression
through body language, such as various facial
expressions connected with the particular
emotions we are experiencing
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Functions of Emotion (Cont.)
 Allow us to understand others
• Social communication is an important part of our
daily lives and relationships
• Allows us to respond appropriately and build
deeper, more meaningful relationships with
others
• Also allows us to communicate effectively in a
variety of social situations
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Are human emotions universal?
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Universal Emotions
• Margaret Mead believed that facial expressions and
the emotions are determined by culture
• Charles Darwin argued that human expressions of
emotion were both innate and universal across
cultures.
• Ekman set out to test this notion and found that
facial expressions are cross-cultural
• Ekman's research revealed that there is a universal
set of certain facial expressions used in both the
Western and Eastern worlds.
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Six Basic Emotions
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Theories of Emotion
• The James-Lange Theories of Emotions
• The Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotions
• Schachter & Singer’s Theories of Emotions
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The James-Lange Theories of Emotions
• Proposed by psychologist William James and
physiologist Carl Lange
• Emotions occur as a result of physiological reactions
to events
• Our brains interpret specific physiological changes
as feelings or emotions and that there is a different
physiological pattern underlying each emotion.
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The James-Lange Theories of Emotions
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Criticisms
• Different emotions are not necessarily associated with
different patterns of physiological responses
• Some complex emotions may require a considerable
amount of interpretation or appraisal of the situation.
• People whose spinal cords have been severed at the
neck are deprived of most of the feedback from their
physiological responses, still experience emotions.
• Emotions alter more rapidly than those physiological
reactions.
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James- Lang Theory Is Not Totally Wrong
I’m very happy.
I’m really sad.
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The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial
movement can influence emotional experience.
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The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• Strack, Martin, & Stepper devised an ingenious way
to get the subjects to flex certain muscles of their
face without knowing why.
• They told participants that the experiment related
to how people learn to write after amputation or
paralysis of their arms.
• They had subjects hold a pencil in one of three
ways.
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The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• The first group held the pencil widthwise between
their teeth, forcing a smile.
• The second group held the pencil in their lips
lengthwise, which means they couldn’t smile, and
were actually making kind of a frown.
• The control group held the pencil in their hand.
• Then the subjects looked at some cartoons, and
rated how funny they were.
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The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• The “smile” group gave the cartoons much higher
“funny” ratings than the “frown” group, while the
control group was somewhere in the middle.
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The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• Andreas Hennenlotter and
colleagues, asked
participants to perform a
facial expression imitation
task in an fMRI scanner
before and two weeks
after receiving botox
injections.
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The Facial Feedback Hypothesis
• During imitation of angry facial expressions, botox
decreased activation of brain regions implicated in
emotional processing and emotional experience
relative to activations before botox injection.
• These findings show that facial feedback modulates
neural processing of emotional content, and that
botox changes how the human brain responds to
emotional situations.
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The Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotions
• Developed by Walter Cannon and Philip Bard.
• We feel emotions and experience physiological
reactions such as sweating, trembling and muscle
tension simultaneously.
• Emotions result when the thalamus sends a
message to the brain in response to a stimulus,
resulting in a physiological reaction.
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The Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotions
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Schachter & Singer’s Theories of
Emotions
• Proposed by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer
known as the two-factor theory of emotion.
• There are two key components: physical arousal and
a cognitive label.
• Focuses on the interaction between physical arousal
and how we cognitively label that arousal.
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Schachter & Singer’s Theories of
Emotions
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Biological Basis of Emotion
• Any stimulus that arouses an emotion alters the
activity of the autonomic nervous system (ANS)
• The autonomic nervous system consists of the
sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems,
which sometimes act in opposing ways and
sometimes cooperate.
• The sympathetic nervous system readies the body for
emergency action; the parasympathetic nervous
system supports digestive and other nonemergency
functions.
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Biological Basis of Emotion
• Researchers often measure activity of the
sympathetic nervous system as an indicator of
emotional arousal.
• Physiological measurements do not tell us which
emotion someone is feeling.
• Neuroscientists use brain scanning or imaging
techniques to identify structures and neural activities
in the living brain.
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Brain and Emotion
• Researchers aroused emotions in various ways and
then used PET (Positron Emission Tomography) or
fMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging ) scans
to identify which brain areas became aroused.
• No brain area appears specific to one type of
emotion.
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Brain and Emotion: The Case of
Whitman
• Charles Whitman served as a
Marine before enrolling in the
University of Texas.
• Whitman killed his mother and
wife and on August 1, 1966, went
atop a 300-foot tower, targeting
people in the vicinity.
• He killed 16 and injure many
others before he was killed by
police, who stormed the tower.
Charles Whitman
• Charles had left a note. It read: “If my life insurance
policy is valid please pay off my debts... donate the
rest anonymously to a mental health foundation.
Maybe research can prevent further tragedies of
this type”.
• Post-mortem autopsy of his brain revealed a
glioblastoma multiforme tumor the size of a
walnut, erupting from beneath the thalamus,
impacting the hypothalamus, extending into the
temporal lobe and compressing the amygdaloid
nucleus
Limbic System and Emotion
• Amygdala
• Hippocampus
• Thalamus
• Hypothalamus
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Amygdala
• Plays an important role on
the mediation and control
of major affective activities
like friendship, love and
affection, on the expression
of mood and, mainly, on
fear, rage and aggression
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Hippocampus
• Plays an important role in
consolidating information
from short-term memory into
long-term memory.
• Damage to both sides of the
hippocampus can impede the
ability to form new memories,
known as anterograde
amnesia.
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Thalamus
• Processes and transmits
movement and sensory
information.
• Essentially a relay station, taking in
sensory information and then
passing it on to the cerebral
cortex.
• The cerebral cortex also sends
information to the thalamus,
which then sends this information
to other systems.
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Hypothalamus
• Connects with many other regions of the brain and is
responsible for controlling hunger, thirst, emotions,
body temperature regulation, and circadian
rhythms.
• The hypothalamus also controls the pituitary gland
by secreting hormones, which gives the
hypothalamus a great deal of control over many
body functions.
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Emotion and Decision Making: The Case of Elliot
• Elliott excelled in college and rose rapidly through the
ranks of a building firm to become comptroller at the
age of 32.
• At the age of 35, doctors diagnosed Elliot with a brain
tumor.
• Elliot had undergone a radical personality change after
an operation to remove a brain tumor on the surface
of his frontal lobes.
• Testing of Elliot revealed that his intelligence,
attention and memory were unaffected.
• Elliot, however, had lost the ability to experience
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emotion.
Emotion and Decision Making: The Case of Elliot
• Antonio Damasio found that the operation to remove
the tumor was successful, but the surgery left Elliot
with bilateral damage to his orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).
• OFC extensively connects with the limbic system.
• It can also influence the autonomic nervous system
through its connections with the hypothalamus and
other brainstem structures.
• Neuroscientists believed that OFC might use autonomic
signals to guide decision-making.
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Emotion and Decision Making: The Case of Elliot
• Bodily states corresponding to the emotions produced
while evaluating different courses of action help to
facilitate normal decision-making.
• The role of OFC is to store associations between
patterns of environmental inputs and the somatic
states that those inputs produce.
• Damage to OFC destroys patients’ ability to activate
the somatic states so that the patient must rely on a
cognitive appraisal of a decision.
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Emotional Intelligence: EI
• The capacity for
recognizing our own
feelings and those in
others, for motivating
ourselves, for managing
emotions well in ourselves
and in our relationships.
(Daniel Goleman)
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Why Emotional Intelligence Matters?
• It has been said that your IQ can land you a job
but your lack of EQ can get you fired.
• EQ predicts higher work performance better
than IQ.
• Your emotional intelligence and social
intelligence are much greater determinants of
the success you will achieve in life.
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Why Emotional Intelligence Matters?
• It has been estimated that over 80% of our
health problems are stress related.
• Our emotional skills have a direct and
important bearing on our relationships with
others.
• There is a direct connection between poor
emotional skills and mental disorders
• EI is one of the best predictors of divorce and
marital satisfaction.
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The 4 Branches of Emotional Intelligence
• Perceiving Emotions: The first step in understanding
emotions is to accurately perceive them. In many
cases, this might involve understanding nonverbal
signals such as body language and facial expressions.
• Reasoning With Emotions: The next step involves
using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive
activity. Emotions help prioritize what we pay
attention and react to; we respond emotionally to
things that garner our attention.
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The 4 Branches of Emotional Intelligence
• Understanding Emotions: The emotions that we
perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings. If
someone is expressing angry emotions, the observer
must interpret the cause of their anger and what it
might mean.
• Managing Emotions: The ability to manage emotions
effectively is a key part of emotional intelligence.
Regulating emotions, responding appropriately and
responding to the emotions of others are all
important aspect of emotional management.
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Gender and Emotional Intelligence
• Women experience
positive and negative
emotions more
intensely than men.
• Women are more
expressive of sadness,
disgust, fear, surprise,
happiness or smiling
and anger.
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Gender and Emotional Intelligence
• Women are more capable of decoding nonverbal
emotional information, have greater emotional
understanding, are more sensitive to the emotions of
others, and are more expressive and show greater
interpersonal competencies .
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Gender and Emotional Intelligence
• Men serving as hunter-gatherers needed to take more
risks and be more dominating, while women who stayed
home and cared for young needed to be more nurturing
and cautious.
• Social and culture provides structure, guidelines,
expectations, and rules to help people understand and
interpret emotions.
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Emotional and Physical Pain Activate
Similar Brain Regions
• When people feel emotional pain, the same areas of
the brain get activated as when people feel physical
pain: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate
cortex.
• These regions were activated when people
experienced an experimental social rejection from
peers.
• The same regions were activated when people who
had recently broken up with romantic partners
viewed pictures of the former partner.
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Why Emotional Pain Is Worse Than
Physical Pain?
• Memories trigger emotional pain
• Physical pain garners far more
empathy from others than
emotional pain
• Emotional pain echoes in ways
physical pain does not
• Emotional pain can damage our
self-esteem and long-term
mental health
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How to Improve Emotional Intelligence?
• Observe how you react to
people.
– Do you rush to judgment
before you know all of
the facts?
• Try to put yourself in their
place, and be more open
and accepting of their
perspectives and needs.
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How to Improve emotional intelligence
• Do a self-evaluation.
- What are your weaknesses?
- Are you willing to accept that
you're not perfect and that you
could work on some areas to
make yourself a better person?
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How to Improve emotional intelligence
• Examine how you react to
stressful situations.
- Do you become upset every
time there's a delay or
something doesn't happen the
way you want?
- Do you blame others or
become angry at them, even
when it's not their fault?
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How to Improve emotional intelligence
• Take responsibility for your actions. If you hurt
someone's feelings, apologize directly – don't
ignore what you did or avoid the person.
• People are usually more willing to forgive and
forget if you make an honest attempt to make
things right.
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How to Improve emotional intelligence
• Examine how your actions will affect others
• If your decision will impact others, put yourself in
their place.
- How will they feel if you do this?
- Would you want that experience?
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