Human Behavior in Military Contexts (2008) / Chapter Skim
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The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett
The Science of Emotion: What People Believe, What the Evidence Shows, and Where to Go From Here--Lisa Feldman Barrett
Pages 189-216
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From page 189... ...
Anger, sadness, and fear causes behavior, just as lightning causes thunder. This folk conception of emotion -- with varying degrees of elaboration and complexity -- forms the basis of a consensual view that guides the scientific study of emotion.
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From page 190... ...
, in which James argued that bodily activity causes emotion, not the other way around. James, in turn, was criticized by Cannon in his 1927 paper, The James-Lange Theory of Emotions: A Critical Examination and an Alternative Theory, in which Cannon argued that the body cannot cause emotion because visceral changes are too slow and too difficult to feel and that the same visceral changes occur in both emotional and nonemotional states.
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From page 191... ...
The core assumption of appraisal models is that a person's interpretation of an event or situation is necessary for an emotional response; emotions are not triggered merely by a stimulus in a reflexive or habitual way. In Arnold's terms, a meaning analysis is performed on the situation that is thought to evoke or triggers emotion.
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From page 192... ...
Many of these works are grounded in the observation that empirical evidence had thus far failed to produce clear and consistent evidence for the biobehavioral distinctiveness of as the events that people colloquially call anger, sadness, and fear. The only universal element in any emotional situation is the use by all the subjects of a common term of report, i.e., "fear." That is, while stimu lus conditions and actual experiential content may vary from subject to subject, all decide upon the emotion and give it a common label, "fear" (Hunt, 1941, p.
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From page 193... ...
, a caricature departs from the central tendency of its category in a way that will make it maximally distinctive from other categories. For example, an anger prototype would depict the average set of facial movements that have been identified as naturally occurring in actual anger episodes; in contrast, an anger caricature depicts facial movements that are exaggerated to maximally distinguish it from facial depictions of other emotion categories, such
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From page 194... ...
. Production-based studies of emotion in the face and voice (in which researchers measure facial muscle movements and vocal behaviors during emotionally evocative events)
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From page 195... ...
. Individuals high in granularity use the words "angry," "sad," and "afraid" to represent distinct experiences; those low in granularity use the words to represent a more general state of feeling "unpleasant." The same is generally true for pleasant emotional states, with those in high in granularity using the words "happy," "calm," and "excited" to refer to distinct experiences, while those lower in granularity use these words to refer to a more general "pleasant" affective state.
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From page 196... ...
What the Evidence Shows Even as scientific studies of emotion do not provide clear evidence for the biological or behavioral distinction between emotion categories, they do give clear and consistent evidence for a distinction between positive and negative affective states. Objective measurements used in the study of emotion, such as peripheral nervous system activation (Bradley and Lang, 2000)
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From page 197... ...
. Valuation can be thought of as a simple form of meaning analysis in which something is judged as helpful or harmful in a given instance, producing some change in a person's core affective state.
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From page 198... ...
THE EMOTION PARADOX The evidence presented thus far frames a fundamental emotion paradox: people seem compelled by their own experiences to believe that emotions are biological categories given by nature, but objective, instrument-based measures of emotion provide evidence only of a person's core affective state. How this dilemma is resolved depends on how seriously the evidence that is inconsistent with the commonsense view is treated.
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From page 199... ...
Facial muscle measurements are too coarse-grained to capture complex sets of facial movements, and perceiver-based judgments of facial movements provide stronger evidence for the commonsense view. Most psychophysiological studies measure only a few output channels, providing a less than optimal test of the question of autonomic specificity.
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From page 200... ...
. In social psychology, we call it "naïve realism." Abandoning a commonsense view would mean being free from a basic form of essentialism that captures well how people think about the events and objects in their everyday lives (Bloom, 2003)
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that researchers try to identify in human behavior, perhaps researchers could concentrate their empirical efforts on identifying which observable or measurable phenomena (e.g., cardiovascular changes, facial expressions, startle responses, EEG recordings, subjective experience, conscious thoughts) are implicated across instances of emoting and observe, rather than prescribe, their relationships in varying circumstances and time frames.
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From page 202... ...
If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger, sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emotion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary state of core affect (Barrett, 2006b; Barrett et al., 2007)
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From page 203... ...
Taken together, the basic propositions of the conceptual act model of emotion map a novel research agenda for the psychological construction of emotion with several distinctive features. First, it hypothesizes that the basic building blocks of emotional life are conceptual and affective, and so understanding each of the processes and how they constrain one another would be central to the study of emotion.
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From page 204... ...
Finally, the conceptual act model leads to reflections on why scientists typically theorize about and focus their empirical efforts on prototypical emotional episodes, that is, what most people consider the clearest cases of emotion that necessarily have all of the component parts (Russell, 2003; Russell and Barrett, 1999) , even though such episodes are quite rare and the nonprototypical cases are more frequent in our everyday lives.
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From page 205... ...
Research Implications The research agenda motivated by the conceptual act model can be framed as two broad of domains of inquiry, each of which contains several different questions. Many of these would be relevant to research that may be of interest to the military; this section discusses several examples.
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From page 206... ...
Biological measures of semantic processing (the N400 ERP signal and increased activity in the inferior frontal cortex) indicate that conceptual knowledge participates in emotion perception as early as 200 milliseconds after the presentation of an emotional face (Balconi and Pozzoli, 2005; Nakamura et al., 1999; Streit et al., 1999, 2003)
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From page 207... ...
It is not just what a person knows, but how he or she uses that knowledge that determines whether an emotion perception is adaptive and effective. The conceptual act model suggests that functional emotional behavior will depend in part on the resources that people have to use the conceptual knowledge they possess, especially when emotion perception is occurring in stressful situations (i.e., under cognitive load)
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From page 208... ...
Second, the conceptual act model also has important psychological and philosophical implications for the relativity of social perception. If conceptual knowledge of categories shapes the perception of social reality, and if learning shapes conceptual development, then learning may play a much larger role in shaping social reality than previously assumed.
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. Morphed facial expressions elicited a N400 ERP effect: A domain-specific semantic module?
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From page 210... ...
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 28, 95-160. Brenner, C
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From page 211... ...
. Do facial expressions signal specific emotions?
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From page 212... ...
. Innate and universal facial expressions: Evidence from developmental and cross-cultural research.
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. Positive and negative: Infant facial expressions and emotions.
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. Facial expressions of emotion: what lies beyond minimal universality?
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 513-523. Seyfarth, R.M., and Cheney, D.L.
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From page 216... ...
. Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions: Modulate amygdala activity with out explicit knowledge.
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