Emotions
What are the emotions that you've felt today since you woke up?
German Emotions
Hygge (Cozy) - The feeling of peacefulness when you are at home
SchadenFreude - The joy you take in your enemy’s misery
What are emotions?
Inside Out film
Emotional overlap in Inside Out - Incorrect Theory
Emotional Misconceptions
- Emotions are Conscious Homunculi
- The brain is a machine with a little person inside. This way we can say me anger made me do it.
- Humans being are entirely emotional beings
- Top-Down emotional regulation
- Development of prefrontal cortex allows us to think logically, without being solely under the control of our emotions
- There are a few primary emotions
- Primary emotions are irreducible. Essentialism, joy, and fear cannot mix. Primary emotions correspond to those for which we have names for in English. Are emotions limited to the words we have for them? What about other cultures?
- Emotions are rigidly triggered by external stimuli
- Emoting is just like a reflex. What determines whether an external stimulus will evoke an emotion or not? What determines what kind of emotion is evoked? What do development and learning play in determining an organism’s response to a given stimulus?
Primary Emotions
- Emotions control our behavior
- If certain emotions always caused certain behavior it would be very simple to deduce someone’s emotions by looking at their behavior. How can we identify emotions in the absence of behavior?
- Pavlovian Conditioning
- Different emotions are located in different discrete brain regions
- Different emotions must correspond to anatomically distinct modules, just like each emotion is represented by a different person. Fear is not in the amygdala but involves amygdala. Specificity exists but there are no macroscopic brain structures dedicated to one single emotion.
What is EMOTION then?
Emotions are internal brain states that cause observable external changes in behaviopr, observable internal physiological changes in the state of the body, changes in other mental states and under some conditions and in some species changes in what we are consciously aware of. - Adolphs and Anderson, 2014
Emotions are specific and consistent collections of physiological repsonses triggered by certain brain systems when the organism represents certain objects …
Emotion / Feeling and Mood
Emotion is a shorter duration - comes and goes within 45 seconds
Mood is a longer duration
Valence and Arousal
Emotional Valence:
the value associated with a stimulus as expressed on a continuum from pleasant to unpleasant or from attractive to aversive. For example, happiness is typically characterized by pleasant valence and relatively high arousal, whereas sadness or depression is typically characterized by unpleasant valence and relatively low arousal. (association of psychology)
Pleasant vs. unpleasant activation
Emotional Arousal:
Arousal is the physiological state of being awoken or of sense organs stsimulated to a point of perception.
Where do we feel emotions?
Bodily Maps of Emotions - Lauri N.
Bodily topography of basic and nonbasic emotions associated with words
Interplay between emotion and memory leads to successful art
Need to trigger emotional valence and arousal
Art of Agony - Negative Valence
Scale
- A bunch of little things that outnumber you
- One very big thing, that dwarfs you
Space
- Open space, vast space, agoraphobia
- Closed space, claustrophobia
Light/Color
- Dark, poor visibility, controlled light
Touch
- Exteroception
- Interoception
Faces
- Facial and Bodily Expression
Heironymous Bosch
Perfected the art of agony
Heaven and hell theme
Alfons de Goya
Painted attractive females and war
Contracted a mysterious illness and became permanently deaf
Switched to style of despair
Satan devouring his son
Edward Munch
Suffered from an illness and had depression and anxiety disorder
Created a style to express his negative effects to the world
Anxiety
Scream - A silent scream of nature - the beginning of industrialization
Vampire
Kathe Kollwitz
Witnessed and lived through WW1 Germany
Drew death and hunger
Self portrait at a very old age, a few months before she died
Pablo Picasso
Lived through war
Guernica: painting of SS Nazis going through his studio