Module 28: Expressing and Experiencing Emotion

1. Module 28: Expressing and Experiencing Emotion

2. Detecting Emotion • All of us communicate non-verbally as well as verbally. • We are particularly adept at reading threats: - When hearing emotions expressed in another language most people can detect anger. - When viewing subliminally flashed words we more often sense the presence of a negative word, such as snake or bomb. - In a crowd of faces a single angry face stands out more than a single happy one.

3. Detecting Emotion

4. Detecting Emotions • Our brains are can detect subtle expressions... - A mere 10 second clip of either a teacher's voice or face provided enough clues for both young and old viewers to determine whether the teacher liked and admired the child she was addressing. - A glimpse of a face for even one-tenth of a second was enough for people to judge a person's trustworthiness. • However, despite our brain's emotion detecting skill, we find it difficult to detect deceiving expressions.

5. Detecting Emotions • Experience can sensitize us to particular emotions. • Abused children, for example, are much quicker than other children at identifying signals of anger. • Shown a face that is 60 percent fear and 40 percent anger, abused children are as likely to perceive anger as fear. • Hard to control facial muscles reveal signs of emotions you may be trying to conceal. - Lifting just the inner part of your eyebrows, which few people do consciously, reveals distress or worry.

6. Detecting Emotions

7. Detecting Emotions • A feigned smile, such as the one we make for a photographer, often continues for more than 4 or 5 seconds. • Most authentic expressions have faded by that time. Feigned smiles are switched on and off more abruptly that genuine happy smiles.

8. Detecting Emotions • Non-verbal cues – gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice – are absent in computer based communication, except for ;-) and :-(. • It is easy to misread computer based communications. The absence of expressive emotion, including vocal nuances through which we signal a statement is serious, kidding, or sarcastic can make for ambiguous emotion. • People may think their “just kidding” intent is equally clear, whether emailed or spoken, but they commonly exhibit ego-centrism by not foreseeing misinterpretations.

9. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior • Women surpass men at reading people's emotional cues in thin slices of behavior. • Women are also superior in telling whether a male-female couple is a genuine romantic couple or a posed, phony couple and in telling which of two people in a photo is the other's superior. • Women express more complex emotions than men. Ask some people how they might feel when saying good-bye to a friend after graduation. Men are more likely to say, “I'll feel bad,” whereas women might say, “It will be bittersweet; I'll feel both happy and sad.”

10. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior • In both positive and negative situations women tend to display greater emotional responsiveness. • Studies of 23,000 people from 26 cultures around the world have found that women more than men report themselves open to feelings. This explains the strong perception that emotionality is more true of women, a perception expressed by nearly 100 percent of 18 to 29 year old Americans. • However, one exception is anger...

11. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior • Anger strikes people as a more masculine emotion. When asked to imagine an angry face, 3 out of 4 Arizona State University students imagined the angry person was male. • Researchers also found that if a gender neutral face is made to look angry, most people will perceive it as male. If it is a smiling face, people are more likely to perceive it as female. • Women and men also differ whether they describe themselves as empathic.

12. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior

13. Gender, Emotion, and Nonverbal Behavior • However, physiological measures of empathy, such as heart rate while seeing another's distress reveal a much smaller gender gap than is found in self-reports in surveys. • Nevertheless, females are more likely to express empathy- to cry and report distress when observing someone in distress. • Women tend to experience emotional events more deeply with more brain activation in areas sensitive to emotion and then to remember the scenes better three weeks later.

14. Culture and Emotional Expression • The meaning of gestures varies within cultures. - Psychologist Otto Klineberg (1938) observed that in Chinese literature people clapped their hands to express worry or disappointment, laughed “Ho-Ho” to express anger, and stuck out their tongues to show surprise. • North American “thumbs up” and “A-OK” signs are considered insults in certain other cultures. • North Korea publicized photos of supposedly happy officers from a captured U.S Navy ship. In the photo, three of the men raised their middle fingers- they told their captors it was a Hawaiian good luck sign.

15. Gestures Vary Between Cultures

16. Culture and Emotional Expression • Regardless of cultural background, facial expressions are the same everywhere (i.e. there is no culture where people frown when they are happy). • People can judge emotions better from their own culture. Still, the telltale signs of emotion generally cross cultural boundaries.

17. Culture and Emotional Expression

18. Culture and Emotional Expression • People blind from birth spontaneously exhibit common facial expressions associated with such emotions as joy, sadness, fear, and anger. Even blind children, who have never seen a face, display these facial expressions. • Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) speculated that before our prehistoric ancestors communicated in words, their ability to convey threats, greetings, and submission with facial expressions helped them to survive. • This shared heritage is why all humans express emotions with similar facial expressions. • A sneer retains elements of an animal bearing its teeth to snarl. Surprise raises the eyebrows and widens the eyes, enabling us to take in more information. Disgust wrinkles the nose closing it from foul odors.

19. Culture and Emotional Experience • Smiles are social phenomena. Bowlers seldom smile when they score a strike - they smile when they turn around to face their companions. • Although cultures share a universal facial language for basic emotions, they differ in how much emotion is expressed. • Cultures that encourage Individuality, like Western Europe, Australia, and North American display mostly visible emotions. • However, in Chinese culture, which encourages people to adjust to others, personal emotions are less visibly displayed In Japan, people read emotions by looking at the difficult-to-contol eyes rather than the more easily controlled mouth.

20. The Effects of Facial Expression • As William James struggled with feelings of depression and grief, he came to believe that we can control emotions by going through the outward movements of any emotion we want to experience. • Expressions not only communicate emotions; they also amplify and regulate them. • Darwin hypothesized, “the free expression of outward signs of an emotions intensifies it. He who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage.”

21. The Effects of Facial Expressions • People instructed to mold their faces in the ways that express other basic emotions also experience those emotions. • For example, people reported feeling more fear than anger, disgust, or sadness when made to construct a fearful facial expression: “Raise your eyebrows, open your eyes wide, move your whole head back, so that your chin is tucked in a little bit, and let your mouth relax or hang open a little bit.”

22. The Effects of Facial Expressions • The face is more than a billboard that displays for feelings; it also feeds our feelings. • In the absence of competing emotions, this facial feedback is subtle yet detectable. Students induced to smile have felt happier and recalled happier memories than did frowners. • Behavior feedback- Going through the physical motions of something can shift your mood. • One small way to become empathic is to let your own face mimic another's expression. Acting as another helps us feel what another feels. Natural mimicry of emotions may explain why emotions are contagious (i.e. Mirror Neurons).

23. Experienced Emotion • How many distinct emotions are there? • Carrol Izard isolated 10 basic emotions (joy, interest excitement, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt) most of which are present in infancy. • Some people have proposed that pride is a distinct emotion signaled by a small smile, head slightly tilted back, and an open posture... • However, Izard argued that other emotions such as pride are a combination of these 10. • Love, for example, is a mixture of joy and interest-excitement.

24. Anger • What makes us angry? • Sometimes, anger is a response to a friend or loved one's perceived misdeed, especially when the act seems willful, unjustified, and avoidable. • However, small hassles and blameless annoyances, foul odors, high temperatures, a traffic jam, aches and pains, also have the power to make us angry.

25. Anger • Sometimes when people retaliate against a provoker, they may indeed calm down, however this is true only if their counterattack is directed against the provoker, their retaliation is seems justifiable, and their target is not intimidating. Expressing anger can be temporarily calming if it does not leave one feeling guilty or anxious. • More often catharsisfails to cleanse rage and instead breeds more anger. For one thing expressing anger may provoke further retaliation, escalating minor conflicts into major confrontations.

26. Anger • Yet people who keenly recognize their interdependence with others see anger as a threat to group harmony. - For example, In Tahiti people learn to be considerate and gentle. In Japan, from infancy on, angry expressions are less frequent than in Western cultures. • Catharsis- The idea of “venting your anger” presumes that through aggressive action or aggressive fantasy one can achieve emotional release.

27. Anger • Expressing anger can also magnify anger. • Researchers interviewed 100 people recently laid off from an aerospace company during an economic downturn and asked them to fill out a questionnaire assessing their attitude towards the company. First, though, they asked the workers questions released hostility, such as, “What instances can you think of where the company has been unfair with you?” • Rather than “draining off” their hostility, it amplified it.

28. Anger • When provoked people hit a punching bag believing it will be cathartic, the effect is theopposite, leading people to exhibit more cruelty. • Angry outbursts that temporarily calm us are dangerous in that they can become habit forming. • If stressed managers find they can “drain off” some of their tension by taking it out on an employee, the next time they feel irritated the more likely the they are to do it again.

29. Anger • What is the best way to handle anger? 1. Wait- One can bring down one's level of physiological arousal by waiting. 2. Approach the anger constructively- Being chronically angry only serves to increase it. • Different strategies for handling anger successfully are used by different genders. - Boys more than girls reported walking away from the situation or working it off with exercise. - Girls more often reported talking to a friend, listening to music, or writing.

30. Anger • Civility means not only keeping silent about trivial irritations but also communicating important ones clearly and assertively. • Controlled expressions of anger are more adaptive than either hostile outbursts or pent-up angry feelings. • When people were asked to recall or keep careful records of their experiences with anger, they often recalled reacting assertively rather than hurtfully. • Grievances expressed in ways that promote reconciliation rather than retaliation can benefit a relationship.

31. Anger • What should we do if expressing grievances constructively fails? • Research recommends the age-old response of forgiveness. • Without letting the offender off the hook or inviting further harm, forgiveness releases anger and calms the body. • To explore the bodily effects of forgiveness, Charlotte Witvliet invited college students to recall an incident in which someone had hurt them. • As students mentally rehearsed their forgiveness, their negative feelings – perspiration, blood pressure, heart rate, and facial tension became lower when they rehearsed their grudges.

32. Happiness

33. Happiness • William James observes, “How to gain, how to keep, and how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive for what they do.” • People who are happy perceive the world as safer, feel more confident, make decisions more easily, rate job applicants more favorably, are more cooperative and tolerant, and live healthier more energized and satisfied lives. • When one's mood is gloomy, life as a whole seems depressing and meaningless.

34. Happiness • College students' happiness helps predict their life course. • In one study, women who smiled happily in 1950's college yearbook photos were more likely to be married, happily so, in middle age. • In another study, which surveyed thousands of U.S. college students in 1976 and restudied them at age 37, happy students had gone on to earn significantly more money than their less-happy-than-average peers.

35. Happiness • Feel Good, Do Good Phenomenon- People's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood. • Subjective Well Being- Self perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well being (for example, physical and economic indicators) to evaluate people's quality of life.

36. Happiness • We often exaggerate in imagining the long-term emotional effects certain events will have on us. • Most of us tend to have a basic level of happiness which we revert to eventually. • People generally err in imagining what will make them happy. • People tend to find ways of rationalizing unhappy outcomes so as to make them more acceptable to themselves.

37. Happiness • People tend to repeat the same errors in imagining what will make them happy. • Events and outcomes which we dread may when they come about turn into new opportunities for happiness. • Many of the most productive and creative people are those who are continually unhappy with the world - and thus strive to change it. • Happiness is rarely as good as we imagine it to be, and rarely lasts as long as we think it will. The same mistaken expectations apply to unhappiness.

38. The Short Life of Emotional Ups and Downs • Over the course of an average day, our emotions vary, with positive emotion rising over the early to middle hours. • Stressful events – an argument, a sick child, a car problem – can trigger a bad day but by the next day the gloom nearly always lifts. • In the long run our emotional ups and downs tend to balance out... • However, after being struck by a severe disability, we may not rebound all the way back to our former emotions.

39. The Short Life of Emotional Ups and Downs • Learning one is HIV positive is devastating. But after 5 weeks of adapting to the grim news, those who have tested positive have reported feeling less emotionally distraught than they had expected. • Kidney dialysis patients recognize that their health is relatively poor, yet their moment-to-moment experiences report being just as happy as healthy non-patients. A major disability often leaves people less happy than average, yet happier than people able bodied people with depression. • Faculty members up for tenure expect their lives would be deflated by a negative decision. Actually 5 to 10 years later, those denied were not noticeably less happy than those who were awarded tenure.

40. Wealth and Well-Being • Do you think you would be happier if you made more money? 73 percent of American's said “Yes.” • 3 in 4 students rate their top two objectives as being “very well off” financially and “raising a family.” • To a point wealth does correlate with well being. • Within most countries, though especially in poor countries, individuals with lots of money are typically happier than those who struggle to afford life's basic needs. They also often have better health than those stressed by poverty and lack of control in their lives.

41. Wealth and Well Being • People in rich countries are also somewhat happier than people in poor countries. • Those who have experienced a recent windfall from a lottery, an inheritance, or a surging economy feel some elation. • Once one has enough comfort and security, piling up more and more affects happiness less and less. • During the last 4 decades, the average U.S. Citizen's buying power almost trippled. • In 1957 some 35 percent of Americab said they were happy compared with 32 percent in 2008.

42. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Adaptation: Happiness and Prior Experience • Comparison: Happiness and Other's Attainments

43. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Adaptation-level Phenomena- Our tendency to judge various stimuli relative to those we have previously experienced. As Harry Helson described we adjust our neutral levels - the point at which temperatures are neither hot nor cold, events neither pleasant or unpleasant – based on previous experiences. • Could we ever create a permanent social paradise? “No,” says Donald Campbell.

44. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Just as comparing ourselves with those who are better off creates envy, so counting our blessings as we compare ourselves with those who are worse off boosts our contentment.

45. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Relative Deprivation- The sense that we are worse off than those with whom we compare ourselves. - During WWII many U.S. Air Corps soldiers were frustrated by their promotion rates, not in spite of the faact but rather because there was a high promotion rate. - Once people reach a moderate level of income, further increases buy little more happiness since people tend to compare themselves with peers who are at or above their current level. - The economic surge in China that has made some urban Chinese newly affluent appears to have fueled among others a sense of relative deprivation.

46. Two Psychological Phenomenon: Adaptation and Comparison • The concept of Relative Deprivation originated from the biological concept of relative fitness, where an organism that successfully outproduced its competitors leaves more copies in the gene pool. • Social scientists, particularly political scientists and sociologists, have cited 'relative deprivation' (especially temporal relative deprivation) as a potential cause of social movements and deviance, leading to extreme situations to political violence such as rioting, terrorism, civil wars and other instances of social deviance such as crime.

47. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • For example, some scholars of social movements explain their rise by citing grievances of people who feel deprived of what they perceive as being entitled to. Similarly, individuals engage in deviant behaviors when their means do not match their goals. • In one of the first formal definitions of the relative deprivation, Walter Runciman noted that there are four preconditions of relative deprivation (of object X by person A): - Person A does not have X - Person A knows of other persons that have X - Person A wants to have X - Person A believes obtaining X is realistic

48. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Walter Runciman distinguishes between egoistic and fraternalistic relative deprivation. • The former is caused by unfavorable social position when compared to other, better off members of a specific group A is the member of). • The latter, by unfavorable comparison to other, better off groups. • Egoistic relative deprivation can be seen in the example of a worker who believes he should have been promoted faster and may lead to that person taking actions designed to improve his position within the group; those actions are however unlikely to affect many people.

49. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Fraternalistic can be seen in the example of racial discrimination, and are much more likely to result in the creation and growth of large social movement, like the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. • Another example of fraternalistic relative deprivation is the envy teenagers feel towards the wealthy characters who are portrayed in movies and on television as being "middle class" or "normal" despite wearing expensive clothes, driving expensive cars, and living in mansions.

50. Two Psychological Phenomena: Adaptation and Comparison • Marshal Dermer asked University of Wisconsin women to study other's deprivation and suffering. • After viewing vivid descriptions of how grim life was in Milwaukee in 1900, or after imagining and then writing about various personal tragedies,college age women expressed greater satisfaction with their own lives. • Similarly, when mildly depressed people read about someone who was even more depressed, they feel somewhat better.