Lecture 2: Emotions, Feelings, Moods, & Personalities

Emotion: 

brief episode (~ 6 sec) of verbal, autonomic, behavioral and neural changes in response to internal or external significant events.

Emotions are affective state often accompanied by specific physiological characteristics, with the power to impact thoughts and behaviors.

Emotions manifest themselves in non-verbal communication.

Emotions result from a multidimensional process that occurs at:

• Psychophysiological: changes in physiological activity
• Behavioral: preparation for action or behavior mobilization
• Cognitive: the analysis of situations and their subjective interpretation in function of the personal history of the individual

Emotional states are the result of the release of hormones and neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline, cortisol, oxytocin), which are converted into feelings.

What are the functions of emotions?

• Adaptive function: prepare the individual for action
• Social: communicate our state of mind
• Motivational: facilitate motivated behavior

Feeling: subjective experience of an emotion

The ability to perceive these bodily responses will affect the subjective affective experience

• Interoception: ability to perceive what is going on in the body
• Alexitamia: ability to label an emotion

Heartbeat discrimination

• Above-chance discrimination of own heartbeat (Katkin et al.)
• Better heartbeat detectors = more intense emotional experience
• But men > women, opposite to detection of social affect

Insula may be responsible for creation of the subjective experience of an emotion based on somatic markers

Feelings (compared to emotions)

• Long lasting
• are the conscious experience of emotions (i.e., subjective interpretations of emotions)
• in feeling there is always a conscious process (feelings can be regulated by our thoughts)
• A feeling may be produced by a complex mixture of emotions (e.g., we can feel love and anger towards one person at a time)

Mood:

Diffuse affective state of lower intensity than emotions, but long-lasting (e.g., minutes, hours, or days)

• no specific or single cause (whereas emotions develop from a known cause; directed to that cause)
• made up of a mix of feelings and emotions
• Diffuse affective state emotions can be built on
• affect our thoughts/cognition, everyday thinking (less actions) -> Moods can be more impactful than emotions because they last much longer
• heavily influenced by our environment (weather, lighting, color, people around us), by our physiology (what we’ve been eating, how we’ve been exercising, if we have a cold or not, how well we slept), by our thinking (where we’re focusing attention)….

How do you elicit mood?

• Reading series of statements about positive or negative mood
• Listening to music (and lyrics) related to positive or negative mood
• Autobiographic memories
• Film clips
• Giving grades
• Hypnosis
• Funny versus annoying confederate

Mood can affects your thoughts/cognition, everyday thinking

Mood dependent memory: (mood --> mood)

Neutral words learned in a specific mood state are more likely to be recalled when the individual is again in the same mood state

Mood congruent memory: (mood --> stimulus)

 Emotional words learned in a specific mood state are more likely to be recalled when they are congruent with the mood state.

e.g., It can affect memory

e.g., It  can affect creativity and cognition

e.g., information processing strategies

Mood (compared to emotion)

• Less intense, generalized and long lasting
• Unknown cause
• no specific target
• Affect mainly thoughts and cognitive processes (e.g., memory, creativity, information-processing strategies)
• More generalized (a good mood, a bad mood)

Emotions and moods are distinct BUT can also occurs in parallel (intermixed). Emotions “sit on the top” of moods

Temperament:

Predefined predispositions (mental, physical and emotional traits) of a person to process and react in certain ways to emotional events

Inborn => difficult to change (part of the personality that comes from the genes; biological part of the personality)

Can be measured in infants as well and give some insights into what the infant might be as she grows

Temperament in humans: Cloninger’s temperament type

1. Harm avoidance (bias towards inhibition of behaviors, worry, rumination, shyness, fear of uncertainty)
2. Novelty seeking (bias towards activation of behaviors, e.g., exploration of new situations, impulsive decision-making, quick loss of temper, avoidance of frustration)
3. Reward dependence (bias towards maintenance of ongoing behaviors, dependence on the approval of others)

Personality traits

Enduring predispositions of a person in thinking, feeling and behaving that remain relatively stable over time and across different situations

It is acquired on the top of temperament, and develops over the years

Resulting from temperament, and other factors such as education, socialization, culture, experiences, etc

5 CORE TRAITS:

1. Openess to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)
2. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless)
3. Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved)
4. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached)
5. Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident)

Eyesneck theory: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Psychoticism

Gray’s model:

Link between personality and sensitivity to reinforcement (reward and punishement)

Three fundamental systems that regulate the interaction with the environment:

• FFS: fight/flight system
• BIS: behavioral inhibition system
• BAS: behavioral activation system

FFS: fight/flight system:

• Solution to (direct) danger
  • Fight --> approach behavior
  • Flight --> avoidance behavior
     
• The sympathetic nervous system prepares the muscles to react
• Amygdala is involved in this process

BIS: behavioral inhibition system

• Monitors a potential conflict:
  • Active --> inhibition on ongoing behavior, increased vigilance toward threat, increased arousal (-> avoidance)
  • De-active --> exploration (e.g., continue feeding)
  • Anti-anxiety drugs have effect on this system: shift the balance towards approach (but not in the case of pure fear -> active avoidance, defensive attach, or freezing)
• Septo-hippocampal region is involved (area crucial for anxiety)

BAS: behavioral activation system

• Weighs rewards (e.g.: food)
  • Active à approach behavior
  • De-activate à avoidance
• Basal ganglia and dopaminergic tracts are involved
• Is activated by the presence of a rewards and the absence of a punishment (no imminent danger)

BIS vs. BAS

High BIS --> worry (inhibit/avoid)

High BAS -->  risky (approach)

Testing BIS vs. BAS

Humans with high BIS score are sensitive to punishment

Humans with high BAS score are sensitive to reward

Personality trait (compared to emotion)

• Develops at young age, on the top of temperament
• Role for environment and later experiences
• Less stable

Affective style:

• Predefined predispositions of a person to appraise (positive/negative) and react to affective situations
• Emotional reactivity; dispositional mood
• Associated with temperament and personality
• Vulnerability to psychopathology
• Differs across individuals (Davidson, 1998)
  • Threshold (response is elicited fast or slow)
  • Peak/Amplitude/Strength (intensity of response)
  • Duration (time till peak)

  • Recovery (time it takes to recover and return to the baseline)

• Measure: Positive and negative affective scale (PANAS)

Amygdala & Affective Styles:

• Affective style depends on amygdala activation in reaction to valenced stimuli
• Magnitude of MR signal change correlates with dispositional negative affect (increased signal intensity – higher levels of negative affects)

PFC & Affective Styles:

• Left PFC is involved in the experience of PA
• Right PFC is involved in the experience of NA

Individual differences in prefrontal asymmetry are considered a kind of trait-like measure.

• PA (higher left PFC) : Trait propensity to approach or engage with an emotional stimulus --> Higher BAS scores, very sociable
• NA (higher right PFC): Trait propensity to withdraw or disangage from an emotional stimulus --> Higher BIS scores, tend to be shy