Feeling All the Feels in Psychology.

  INTRODUCTION: EMOTION

Mel Gibson did it, Tom Cruise nearly busted Oprah's couch doing it, and Kanye pretty much has owned it for years now. Talking about expressing too much emotion, usually in public, and in weird and often insensitive ways. Such regrettable outbursts are not unique to celebrities, of course, and they can be enough to make us think of our emotions as irrational. But they're not. Well, not usually. When they're not getting the better of us, they have work to do. Part of their job is to provide the energy and motivation that lets us meet our goals and our needs, and despite the occasional public failure, they often improve our performance in a given situation. So emotions play an important role in how we think and behave. 

Of course, when they blow up and someone screams at a flight attendant or punches a paparazzo, or jumps on stage and grabs the mic away from a teenager in the middle of her acceptance speech to say that someone else deserved the honor more, all hail Beyonce! you're kind of off the rails of normal emotional function. Okay, definition time, general idea. Emotion is a mind and body's integrated response to a stimulus of some kind. Emotions involve physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. These can be short flashes or long, lingering responses, and they can be very clear or very confusing. Say you're walking home at night and you hear footsteps behind you. Physiological arousal occurs in the form of your heart pounding. Your expressive behaviors could be like quickening your pace or moving toward a streetlight. 

And your conscious experience may include thinking, oh, I'm gonna get mugged now. Is this, like, a werewolf behind me, feeling, you know, fear and panic? We know those three pieces are there, but psychologists are still puzzling out exactly how they fit together. How do thinking and feeling interact? Which one comes first? And do these bodily reactions, the pounding heart, the need to pee, the sweaty palms, come as a result of the thought, I'm scared? Or did my tweaking out body trigger the thought in my brain? These are just some of the questions that we'll be looking at in this messy, exhilarating, and terrifying world of emotions. No one gets out unscathed. Our emotions represent and construct a big part of who we are. Think of how boring we would be, how boring the world would be without joy, embarrassment, heartache, or fear. What would motivate us to make decisions, be cautious or bold, or strive to understand each other? What would keep our humanity intact? Where would punk rock come from? No doubt, we need our emotions. But how do they work?

Theories of Emotion

 Well, like apparently everything in psychology, there are a few different theories. In the late 1800s, pioneering American psychologist William James suggested that our feelings follow our bodily reactions to external situations. , for example, you feel sad because you are crying, or you're scared because you're shaking like a leaf. This idea was also proposed by Danish psychologist Carl Lange, and so this concept that physiological arousal precedes emotion is called the James Lange theory. 

But American physiologist Walter Cannon wasn't feeling it. He thought that too many of the body's reactions were too similar. A racing, heart-fluttering stomach and sweaty hands could be attributed to passion, fear, excitement, or anger, so how could they cause such different emotions? His colleague Philip Bard agreed, concluding that bodily responses and emotions occur separately but simultaneously. And this idea is the base of the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. In other words, a racing heart doesn't cause fear, nor does the feeling of fear result in a racing heart. Rather, both things just happen together. Today, most psychologists agree that our emotions are also tangled up with our cognition. Whether or not we're afraid of a dog on the sidewalk depends a lot on whether we're interpreting the animal's behavior as threatening or friendly, and probably also what our personal history with dogs is. 

In the 1960s, American psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer interpreted this idea that cognition can define emotion into what they called their two-factor theory. They believed that to experience emotion, you must both feel physiological arousal and cognitively label that arousal. And again, please remember that in psychology, arousal is different from how you're used to using it. Here, arousal can be thought of as activation or stress or even energy, an increase in reactivity or wakefulness that primes us for some kind of action. So sometimes arousal can spill over from one event to the next. Say you just watched a heated soccer match and you're all revved up and someone looks at you funny. Suddenly, you might label that lingering arousal as anger. And the next thing you know, the whole stadium is one big rioting aggro chain reaction. 

Schachter and Singer examined this so-called spillover effect with an experiment that involved an unusual combination of college guys and drugs. First, they injected a bunch of college guys with the hormone epinephrine. This is basically adrenaline, and as you have probably experienced, it induces a level of physiological activation that can go any number of ways emotionally. But then they threw a curveball. Some of the subjects were told to expect symptoms of feeling all revved up, while others were told the injection wouldn't produce any effects at all. Then, after being injected, each subject was left in a waiting room, and with them in the room was an actor, pretending to wait as well. and acting either all jerky and irritated or super happy and euphoric. 

So the dude's just sitting there, jacked up on this hormone, and his heart is racing, and his cheeks are all flushed. In the case where the subject was told not to expect any effects, the study found that the guy would actually adopt the emotion of the actor in the room, becoming happy or testy, depending on how the person was acting. His body was having a physiological response to the hormone, but he ended up effectively deciding which emotion he was feeling. But if the subject had been told that the injection would make him feel all pumped up, he'd actually report very little emotion, just because he was blaming that racing heart and flushed face on the drug. not a particular state of mind. 

So in terms of the two-factor theory, the cause of physiological arousal had to be identified before a person could feel and label the response as a particular emotion. To Schachter, Singer, and their disciples, this meant that arousal spurs emotion, but cognition directs it. And yet, some researchers, like Polish-born American psychologist Robert Zieentz, contend that all emotions are the result of just putting a name to our arousal. He suggests that many of our emotional reactions occur separately or even before our cognition kicks in. If you hear a sudden crash outside your window, you'll automatically react with a jolt before your brain has the chance to think, gee, what was that crazy noise? Should I feel startled? This is in part because when it comes to emotions, it's thought that our brains process sensory input by two different kinds of routes. 

top-down or bottom-up approaches and neuroscientists can actually chart these two pathways in action. Some bigger, more complex feelings like love and hatred take what we call the high road. Say you read a love letter from your sweetie. You can pin that mushy feeling in your heart to the sensory stimulus of reading, traveling from your eyes all the way through your thalamus to your brain's cortex. There, it can be analyzed utilizing your cognitive process, perhaps consciously, perhaps implicitly, and labeled with, like, Oh, it's so sweet! At this point, it heads to your limbic system, the central brain region that drives emotion and motivation. At that point, you respond with all the warm fuzzies. Other emotions like simple likes, aversions, and fears don't have to involve actual thinking and take a sort of low-road neural path. 

like that crash outside or a baseball flying at your head. Such jump-out-of-your-chair stimuli bypass the cortex and zip right from the ear, the eye, to the amygdala, and the limbic system. It's a knee-jerk reaction that allows us to react quickly, often in the face of potential danger. In other words, that slower, high-road cortex route allows thinking about feeling, while the quick, low-road shortcut allows instant emotional reaction. The stomach flip that happens when you see your ex, or the 10,000 pee breaks you gotta take before you give a speech, or your heart racing after a really good kiss, it's hard to argue with the fact that we often feel emotions with our bodies as much as with our brains. And you can thank your autonomic nervous system the next time you're freaking out or trying to calm yourself down. 

Perhaps you recall when we talked about the roles of the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of our autonomic nervous systems. The sympathetic division is what arouses you in a crisis. It makes you hyper-aware, makes your heart rate and breathing increase, spikes your blood sugar for extra energy, all that fun stuff. It's like a pit crew readying you for action. And once it's done its job and the danger has passed, the parasympathetic division steps in and talks you back down from the edge, slowing down your heart and breathing rates and shutting off those stress hormones, generally rubbing your back and being all, everything's gonna be okay, baby. What you need is the right degree of arousal for the situation. For example, if you're navigating through fast-moving traffic in an unfamiliar city, you'll want to hit the sweet spot of optimal arousal that allows you to focus your attention 

without either freaking out or getting all mellow and sleepy. As we said before, there's a lot of overlap in the symptoms of different emotions. If you monitor the heart rate, breathing, and perspiration of a group of people who are watching three different movies, you probably couldn't tell who was watching the grisly horror movie, an angry fight, or a hot sex scene. Fear, anger, and sexual arousal often deliver some of the same biological signals. But those emotions certainly feel different to the people experiencing them, just as they usually look different to others observing their expressions. And though differences in emotion can appear subtle or even undetectable on brain scans, many of them do show distinctive patterns. For most people, Positive feelings tend to show more activity in the left frontal lobe, while negative ones show up more in the right frontal lobe. 

And someone who's very afraid will show increased activity in the amygdala, our more primal emotional center. Emotions are fascinating things that drive us to do all sorts of brilliant and weird stuff. Understanding them and being able to read them both in yourself and others is vital if you want to make it through even an average day. But misreading your emotions, or someone else's, can be confusing, even dangerous, and it's just one of the things that we'll be looking at next week. Today, you learned about what emotions are, how they work, and why we need them. We talked about James Longa, Cannon-Bard, Schachter and Singer, and Zientz's theories. And we also looked at the relationship between cognition and emotion, and how the autonomic nervous system mobilizes emotion.