(2001). Most people have had an experience like this and can see that determining these values would not take any conscious effort. With respect to the non-cognitive theories themselves, there are two different approaches. The non-cognitive position has also been motivated by skepticism about the cognitive theories. In R. Harré (Ed.). Ekman, P. (1992). The first emotion listed in each row (e.g., fear, anger, joy) is the basic emotion, the second is the same emotion except at a greater intensity (that is, terror, rage, ecstasy) (1980, 1984). A word of clarification before proceeding: what James and Prinz call the emotion, Damasio refers to as a feeling. The five appraisal components are described as follows: Just like the judgment theorists, Roseman and the other appraisal theorists say that these appraisals do not have to be deliberate, or even something of which the individual is consciously aware. Kalayam, B., Alexopoulos, G. S., Merrell, H. B., & Young, R. C. (1991). These theories are: The evolutionary theory of emotion; Lazarus theory of emotion (cognitive appraisal theory) James-Lange theory of emotion; Let’s see what some of the world’s brightest minds have to say about why we feel the way we feel. Mauss and her colleagues studied automatic emotion regulation (AER), which refers to the non-deliberate control of emotions. Thus, a change in an individual’s beliefs—in his or her way of seeing the world—entails a different emotion, or none at all. Further research is needed in these areas to better understand patterns of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation (Aldao & Dixon-Gordon, 2014). One tentative conclusion that can now be drawn is that it is unlikely that any single theory will prevail anytime soon, especially since not all of these theories are in direct competition with each other. Zajonc asserted that some emotions occur separately from or prior to our cognitive interpretation of them, such as feeling fear in response to an unexpected loud sound (Zajonc, 1998). Nussbaum, M. (2004). Averill, J. R. (1980). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. As a result, different emotions would be elicited. In brief, Parkinson describes emotion as: something that emerges directly through the medium of interaction. Parkinson, B., Fischer, A., & Manstead, A. S. R. (2005). However, another way of considering emotions challenges our entire understanding of emotions. Emotions typically occur in social settings and during interpersonal transactions—many, if not most, emotions are caused by other people and social relationships. Even if you do not enjoy speaking in public, you probably could manage to do it. Emotion is one type of affect, other types being mood, temperament and sensation (for example, pain). In this example, fear is the mental state caused by feedback from the body (that is, the perception of the bodily changes). In her “exclusively non-cognitive” theory, Robinson claims that any cognitive processes that occur in an emotion-causing situation are in addition to the core process, which is non-cognitive. The evolutionary approach focuses on the historical setting in which emotions developed. There is much less agreement, however, about most of these other features that the emotions may (or may not) have. An affect program emotion is, “no different from a trait like the human arm, which has unique features but can be homologized more or less broadly with everything from a chimpanzee arm to a cetacean fin” (1997, p. 230). The idea of emotions as transitory social roles is distinct from the notion of a syndrome, but characterizes the same phenomena, in particular, the eliciting conditions and the responses for an emotion. Thus, instead of any sort of evaluation or judgment about the stimulus, the early part of the emotion process is thought to be reflex-like. Griffiths also suggests that there is a separate affect program for each of several emotions: surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy (1997, p. 97). According to Cosmides and Tooby, the emotion of sexual jealousy, deals with these problems in the following ways: Physiological processes are prepared for such things as violence, sperm competition, and the withdrawal of investment; the goal of deterring, injuring, or murdering the rival emerges; the goal of punishing, deterring, or deserting the mate appears; the desire to make oneself more competitively attractive to alternative mates emerges; memory is activated to reanalyze the past; confident assessments of the past are transformed into doubts; the general estimate of the reliability and trustworthiness of the opposite sex  (or indeed everyone) may decline; associated shame programs may be triggered to search for situations in which the individual can publicly demonstrate acts of violence or punishment that work to counteract an (imagined or real) social perception of weakness; and so on (2000, p. 101). In contrast to theories that claim that the emotions are the result of natural selection that occurred in early hominids, another position is that the selection occurred much earlier, and so the adaptations are shared by a wider collection of species today. Armon-Jones, C. (1986a). A consequence of this view is that without a bodily response there cannot be an emotion. 2.  Experience of emotion is awareness of physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli James-Lange Theory of Emotion Fear (emotion) Pounding heart (arousal) Sight of oncoming car (perception of stimulus) Resistance to such approaches is motivated by the claim that emotions possess a sui generis phenomenology. 60–61). The two most well-known cognitive theories are the two-factor and the cognitive-mediational theories of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.). The second also claims that emotions are adaptations, but suggests that the selection occurred much earlier. The effects of divorce and separation on mental health in a national UK birth cohort. Social theories explain emotions as the products of cultures and societies. Schachter and Singer believed that physiological arousal is very similar across the different types of emotions that we experience, and therefore, the cognitive appraisal of the situation is critical to the actual emotion experienced. These and other conflicting features of the emotions make constructing a theory difficult and have led to the creation of a variety of different theories. Affect programs are explained further in section 4. 2. In R. Harré (Ed.). Hope this helps, A For example, the possible responses for anger may include pouting, yelling, hitting, or perhaps no overt behavior at all. Russell, J. Nonetheless, the central claim made in these theories is that the social influence is so significant that emotions are best understood from this perspective. 1. Scherer, K. R. (2001). Cosmides and Tooby, and others who have similar theories, stress that these emotions are responses that enhanced fitness when the selection occurred—whenever that was in the past. It must be constructed so that it quickly attends to some stimuli, determining not only that they pertain to emotion, but to which emotion, and then activating the appropriate part of the affect programme (1977, p. 58). (1996). According to the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, humans feel emotions and experience physiological reactions (sweating, trembling, muscle tension, etc.) These emotions, it is suggested, have been selected to deal with the types of problems indicated. Two other prominent views arise from the work of Robert Zajonc and Joseph LeDoux. Ekman, P. (1977). (1984). On the other hand, some of the theories are simply inconsistent, like the cognitive and non-cognitive theories, and so the natural expectation is that one of these positions will eventually be eliminated. Nussbaum has a similar, but more detailed, description of anger as the following set of beliefs: “that there has been some damage to me or to something or someone close to me; that the damage is not trivial but significant; that it was done by someone; that it was done willingly; that it would be right for the perpetrator of the damage to be punished” (2004, p. 188). Other emotions, he says, are either combinations of two or three of these basic emotions, or one of these eight emotions experienced at a greater or a milder intensity. You would purposefully control your emotions, which would allow you to speak, but we constantly regulate our emotions, and much of our emotion regulation occurs without us actively thinking about it. Mood states may not be consciously recognized and do not carry the intentionality that is associated with emotion (Beedie, Terry, Lane, & Devonport, 2011). Table 1. Rather than emotions being something over which you have no control, you can control and influence your emotions. Finally, cognitive theories argue that thoughts and other mental activity play an essential role in forming emotions. William James (1884) was the first to develop a somatic feedback theory, and recently James’ model has been revived and expanded by Antonio Damasio (1994, 2001) and Jesse Prinz (2004a, 2004b). For example, sometimes an individual’s fear is in response to cognitively complex information such as the value of one’s investments suddenly dropping. In book: The Wiley Handbook on the Theories, Assessment, and Treatment of Sexual Offending (pp.245-264) The first develops an explanation of the non-cognitive process, but claims that only some emotions are non-cognitive. Roseman, I. J., Antoniou A. The attractiveness of this approach is easy to see. The second approach describes the non-cognitive process in a very similar way, but defends the idea that all emotions are non-cognitive. Levenson, R. W., Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1990). What Selye found was that under such conditions the rats were forced to adapt to their environment, a process known as the general adaptation syndrome (GAS). This table lists the eight basic emotions in Robert Plutchik theory. Ekman, P. (1999). It also consists of beliefs about the nature of the eliciting stimuli and perhaps some natural (that is, non-social) elements. Here, Damasio’s account differs from Prinz’s because Damasio takes it that the emotion process does include cognitive evaluations, at least for most emotions. Thus, you can construct two different emotions from the same physiological sensations. U. S. A. Adaptations Shared by All Animals: Plutchik, Historical, but Not Adaptationist: Griffiths, Emotions Are Transitory Social Roles: Averill, Some Emotions Are Non-Cognitive: Ekman and Griffiths. Theories of emotion can be categorized in terms of the context within which the explanation is developed. Accidie was a negative emotion that Harré and Finlay-Jones describe as “boredom, dejection, or even disgust with fulfilling one’s religious duty” (Harré & Finlay-Jones, 1986, p. 221). The second mechanism that Ekman describes, what he calls the affect programme, governs the various elements of the emotion response: the skeletal muscle response, facial response, vocal response, and central and autonomic nervous system responses (1977, p. 57; see also Griffiths, 1997, p. 77). Every individual who understands this syndrome may at different times have the following grief responses: shock, crying, refusing to cry (that is, keeping a stiff upper lip), declining to eat, neglecting basic responsibilities, and so on. Yelling at the umpire would have been another role the player could have adopted. If my hands and feet were cold or warm, sweaty or dry, again this would be of no critical value (2004, p. 195). The third category of theories contains those that attempt to describe the emotion process itself. Adaptive AER leads to better health outcomes than maladaptive AER, primarily due to experiencing or mitigating stressors better than people with maladaptive AERs (Hopp, Troy, & Mauss, 2011). Mood, on the other hand, refers to a prolonged, less intense, affective state that does not occur in response to something we experience. This description is sufficient to begin an analysis of the emotions, although it does leave out some aspects of the process such as the subjective awareness of the emotion and behavior that is often part of the emotion response (for example, fighting, running away, hugging another person). Roseman and Smith provide an example using sadness and comment on the consequence of this example for a theory of emotion: sadness may be elicited by the death of a parent (see Boucher & Brandt, 1981), the birth of a child (see, for example, Hopkins, Marcus, & Campbell, 1984), divorce (for example, Richards, Hardy, & Wadsworth, 1997), declining sensory capacity (Kalayam, Alexopoulos, Merrell, & Young, 1991), not being accepted to medical school (Scherer, 1988), or the crash of one’s computer hard drive … These examples pose problems for theories claiming that emotions are unconditioned responses to evolutionary specified stimulus events or are learned via generalization or association (2001, p. 4). For example, different emotions will occur depending on whether an individual evaluates being laid-off as consistent with her current goals or inconsistent with them. (Eds.). In R. C. Solomon (Ed.). Change to a trait can occur because of natural selection, chance, genetic drift, or because the trait is genetically linked with some other trait. Studying the emotion-antecedent appraisal process: An expert system approach. Someone trained in reading these tests would look for answers to questions that are associated with increased levels of arousal as potential signs that the respondent may have been dishonest on those answers. Emotion theory includes attempts to reduce or assimilate emotions to states such as bodily feelings, beliefs-desire combinations, and evaluative judgements. We’d love your input. In R. C. Solomon (Ed.). On a more general level, however, there are similarities among the elicitors for each emotion. Or one person may, as a young woman, be excited to be laid-off from her job, but several years later find being laid-off frightening. Roseman, I. J., & Smith, C. A. . In a particular situation, say a baseball game, a player may adopt a social role that includes pushing the umpire as an anger response. A number of anthropological studies have found discrepancies among the emotion words used in different languages. An illustration of Prinz’s somatic feedback theory. Roseman suggests that once the appraisals have been made, a response that has the following parts is set in motion: (1) “the thoughts, images, and subjective ‘feeling’ associated with each discrete emotion,” (2) “the patterns of bodily response,” (3) the “facial expressions, vocal signals, and postural cues that communicate to others which emotion one is feeling,” (4) a “behavioral component [that] comprises actions, such as running or fighting, which are often associated with particular emotions,” and (5) “goals to which particular emotions give rise, such as avoiding some situation (when frightened) or inflicting harm upon some person (when angered)” (1984, pp. Most of the existing theories take as axes the valence or the arousal (intensity of the activation). An outline of the social constructionist viewpoint. Meanwhile, all of the non-cognitive theorists agree that bodily changes are part of the emotion process. Damasio’s somatic feedback theory. In Prinz’s theory, the mental state (the emotion) is caused by bodily activity, but, rather than being about the bodily activity, the emotion is about something else, namely these simple pieces of information that the mental state represents. . A. Griffiths adopts a slightly different way of describing the model; he treats Ekman’s two mechanisms as a single system, which he calls the affect program. ... Two-dimensional emotion representation in Thayer’s model. She acknowledges that in some cases, an emotion might be caused by cognitive activity, but this is explained as cognitive activity that precedes the non-cognitive emotion process. According to Damasio, these feelings are crucial in helping us make decisions and choose our actions (see Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, 1994, 1996). Ekman’s automatic appraisal mechanism and Robinson’s affective appraisals are both supposed to determine which emotion is generated. 93–95). He suggested that people can experience physiological reactions connected to emotions without actually feeling those emotions. Modification, adaptation, and original content. In T. Dalgleish & M. J. The prospects for an evolutionary psychology: Human language and human reasoning. Today, although people still get bored and dejected, this emotion no longer exists because our emotions are, according to Harré and Finlay-Jones, “defined against the background of a different moral order” (p. 222). In the following section, we will look more closely at the neuroscience of emotional response. (1984). Armon-Jones, C. (1986b). Notice also that the different emotions all use the same appraisal components, and many emotions take the same values for several of the components. In the past forty years, a vast amount of data has been collected by cognitive and social psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and ethologists. Emotion and memory: The second cognitive revolution. November 2016; DOI: 10.1002/9781118574003.wattso012. The transitory social roles are useful for explaining how the emotion responses relate to the society as well as the specific social context. The causal order is important, emotion is a psychosomatic state, a bodily state caused by an attitude, in this case an evaluative attitude (1980, pp. (credit a: modification of work by Kerry Ceszyk; credit b: modification of work by Kerry Ceszyk). Barrett extended that to include emotions as concepts that are predictions (Barrett, 2017). Some judgment theorists are, however, more accommodating and allow that the bodily response is properly considered part of the emotion, an effect of the judgments that are made. Elicitors can vary by culture, as well as from individual to individual. The part of this process that includes (B) and (C) is what Damsio calls the emotion. Armon-Jones, C. (1985). This section will review the way in which Ekman and Griffiths describe the non-cognitive process. One of the factors that has been studied more within these theories is the cognitive valuation of the emotion, that is to say the meaning that we give to the events. Of course, one can make judgments that are not themselves emotions. Many theories have been developed from the social perspective, but one that has been particularly significant is James Averill’s, which will be reviewed in this section (1980, 1982, 1986). The Theories of multiple components They consider that emotions are not fixed, since the same emotion can feel more or less intense depending on certain factors. In R. B. Felson & J. T. Tedeschi (Eds.). Deonna and Teroni argue that both judgmentalist and perceptual theories of emotion make the mistake of identifying emotions in terms of content rather than in terms of attitude or mode. According to this theory, we laugh (a physiological response to a stimulus), and consequently we feel happy (an emotion); we cry, and consequently we feel sad. These principles are what allow the various elements to be construed coherently as one particular emotion (1982). However, your brain predicting a churning stomach while you were waiting for medical test results could lead your brain to construct worry. According to Roseman’s theory, in the first case, the agency appraisal would most likely be circumstance-caused. Gregory Johnson The angry response should be proportional to the instigation; that is, it should not exceed what is necessary to correct the situation, restore equity, or prevent the instigation from happening again. The non-cognitive process might generate an anger response, but then subsequent cognitive monitoring of the response and the situation causes the emotion to be labeled as jealousy. Drexel University These are some of the examples that Ekman offers: Disgust elicitors share the characteristic of being noxious rather than painful; … fear elicitors share the characteristic of portending harm or pain. 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