Table of Contents
What are emotions psychology research?
According to the American Psychological Association (APA), emotion is defined as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements.” Emotions are how individuals deal with matters or situations they find personally significant. Researchers at University of California, Berkeley identified 27 categories of emotion: admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, … More recently, Carroll Izard at the University of Delaware factor analytically delineated 12 discrete emotions labeled: Interest, Joy, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Self-Hostility, Fear, Shame, Shyness, and Guilt (as measured via his Differential Emotions Scale or DES-IV). Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust & Enjoyment Understanding our emotions is an important part of good mental health. Below is a diagrammatic representation of the five basic emotions, which contains different words to describe the varying intensity of feelings in these five domains. Facial expressions that give clues to a person’s mood, including happiness, surprise, contempt, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger.
What is the study of emotions called?
Affective science is the scientific study of emotion or affect. This includes the study of emotion elicitation, emotional experience and the recognition of emotions in others. Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Emotion has a particularly strong influence on attention, especially modulating the selectivity of attention as well as motivating action and behavior. Emotions drive our actions – for example, a fight, flight or freeze response. Emotions tell others that we’re dealing with stressors and may need support. Emotions have wisdom. They tell us something important in our life is changing or needs attention. The patterns of emotion that we found corresponded to 25 different categories of emotion: admiration, adoration, appreciation of beauty, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, … The two-factor theory of emotion states that emotion is based on two factors: physiological arousal and cognitive label. The theory was created by researchers Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer.
How do researchers measure emotion?
Most researchers measure emotions of people based on their affective display, that is, their emotional expressions. Affective display includes facial expressions, bodily postures and vocal expressions. To measure affective display, researchers generally use observation techniques and self-report via questionnaires. Facial expressions that give clues to a person’s mood, including happiness, surprise, contempt, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger. Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the brain’s subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. Positive emotions could be indicated by play, barks and tail movements, while negative emotions could be indicated by freezing, defecating, urinating, escape attempts, high-pitched vocalizations (screams, squeals or grunt-squeals), tail low, ears back and ear movements. Emotional information is stored through “packages” in our organs, tissues, skin, and muscles. These “packages” allow the emotional information to stay in our body parts until we can “release” it. Negative emotions in particular have a long-lasting effect on the body. Paul Ekman (born February 15, 1934) is an American psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He was ranked 59th out of the 100 most cited psychologists of the twentieth century.
What causes emotions in psychology?
Scientists have discovered that our emotions are often caused by our thoughts [1]. This means two people could be in the same situation, but they might feel different emotions because they have different thoughts (see Figure 1). Maybe you have noticed this with your own friends and family. A fundamental difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously. Some people may spend years, or even a lifetime, not understanding the depths of their emotions. This leaves us with four basic emotions, according to this study: happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted. According to Aristotle, emotions are an original and integral part of (virtue) ethics. Emotions are an inherent part of our moral reasoning and being, and therefore they should be an inherent part of any moral deliberation.
How do researchers distinguish between emotions and feelings?
A fundamental difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously. Happiness. Of all the different types of emotions, happiness tends to be the one that people strive for the most. Basic emotion theory proposes that human beings have a limited number of emotions (e.g., fear, anger, joy, sadness) that are biologically and psychologically “basic” (Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2013), each manifested in an organized recurring pattern of associated behavioral components (Ekman, 1992a; Russell, 2006). The Six Basic Emotions A widely accepted theory of basic emotions and their expressions, developed Paul Ekman, suggests we have six basic emotions. They include sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. This theory is one of the earliest attempts to explain what causes emotions. 1 Proposed independently by psychologist William James and physiologist Carl Lange, the James-Lange theory of emotion suggested that emotions occur as a result of physiological reactions to events.
How do psychologists classify emotions?
Emotion classification can be divided into two classes, primary emotion such as joy, sadness, anger, fear disgust, and surprise, and secondary emotion, which evokes a mental image that correlates to memory or primary emotion [8]. Emotions are physical and instinctive, instantly prompting bodily reactions to threat, reward, and everything in between. The bodily reactions can be measured objectively by pupil dilation (eye tracking), skin conductance (EDA/GSR), brain activity (EEG, fMRI), heart rate (ECG), and facial expressions. Modeling Six Universal Emotions Psychological research has classfied six facial expressions which correspond to distinct universal emotions: disgust, sadness, happiness,fear,anger, surprise[Black,Yacoob,95]. It is interesting to note that four out of the six are negative 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. The James–Lange theory proposes that emotional stimuli first induce peripheral physiological variations, which occur without consciousness of affect. These bodily responses are further interpreted by the brain to produce the feeling state of an emotion (Critchley, 2009). Emotional intelligence (EI) most commonly incorporates concepts of emotional expression and regulation, self-awareness, and empathy. The concept has been criticized by some for its loose definition and parallels to personality traits.
What is an emotion test?
Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) is an ability-based test that measures the four branches of Mayer and Salovey’s EI model. Test-takers perform tasks designed to assess their ability to perceive, identify, understand, and manage emotions. Abilities-based EQ tests, such as the MEIS and the MSCEIT assess the actual emotional ‘ability’ of a person, in the same way that an IQ test measures cognitive ability. American psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who together introduced the concept in 1990 [69], define emotional intelligence “as the ability to monitor one’s own and other’s emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use the information to guide one’s thinking and actions”. The literature finds women have higher emotional intelligence ability than men based on common ability tests such as the MSCEIT. Physiological measures and behavioral tests also support this finding.