Weeks 9 & 10

Emotions
When I entered this unit, I believed that I would find the emotion section of the topic much mroe interesting than that of motivation.  So far I've found some intriguing things throughout the motivation topic, and I hope that I'll be even more interested in the emotion portion of the unit.

Emotions and motivation are closely related; emotions can be a form of motivation, leading us to action, or they can be seen as a way to measure how well we are doing at achieving our goals.  When we experience something that is significant to us, we go through biological and cognitive processes; these are bodily arousal, feelings, social-expressive and a sense of purpose.  There are differing opinions on where emotion actually originates from, the cognitive or the biological.

In the case of biological, there is a heavy emphasis on the more basic primary emotions, as these are much easier to link to a biological theory of psychology.  The four basic negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust and sadness; an individual is motivated to reduce these emotions so they shall not cause harm.  The positive basic emotions are joy and interest, and people are motivated towards these emotions as they shall make them feel satisfied.  Though a cognitive approach does acknowledge these basic emotions, the wider spectrum of complex secondary emotions.

Most of our emotions can be attributed to a specific coping function, such as fear preparing us to flee, or anger preparing us to fight; however they also work in as a social function, allowing us to build relationships, let others know how we feel and change how others interact with us.  Through these two functions, our emotions serve as a feedback system which allows us to keep behaviour regulated.

Moods are different to emotions in many ways; they last longer than emotions do, and usually do not originate from a specific stimulus.  This means that moods influence what the person thinks about, but does not lead to immediate action.  Moods can either be positive or negative in affect.  Positive mood leads to more enjoyable engagement in activities, a high approach level of motivation and being easier to get on with.  Negative affect leads to unpleasant engagement, avoidance motivation and moving away from social situations.


Aspects of emotion
There are three main aspects of emotion: biological, cognitive and social and cultural aspects.  These larger categories are made up of smaller effects, for example the biological aspects of emotion are effected by the autonomic nervous system, brain activity, facial feedback and more.

James and Lange, both working separately, came to the conclusion that emotions are actually a reaction to physical experience.  They also theorised that the body reacts differently to unique emotional events, and that non-emotional yet stimulating events shall not gain a response.  This theory has been criticised since, for a few reasons, including that emotions are actually experienced faster than physiological reactions.

Another theory is that of differential emotions.  This theory states that the principal motivation system of humans is actually made up of ten emotions, and that each of these emotions has a unique feeling, facial expression, firing of neurons and reason for occurring.

Paul Ekman provided seven reasons as to why biological theorists focus on a smaller number of basic emotions; non-basic emotions are actually experience based, many terms used better describe moods, attitudes, personality, disorders, specific aspects of emotions or a combination of emotions.

Facial feedback hypothesis is based on a few assumptions, that emotions rise from movements in facial muscles, the temperature of the face and glandular reactions in the faces skin.  It has been found that there is a two-way relationship between feeling and expressing emotions, though the level of facial feedback is small.


The appraisal theory of emotion is a cognitive one, based on the idea that a cognitive appraisal of an event is actually what causes an emotion.  Complex appraisal theories are only accurate about three quarters of the time, due to other contributing factors including developmental differences and biology.

As humans grow, we learn to identify a larger range of emotions.  The number of emotions we can distinguish is known as our emotional knowledge.