"Introduction to Psychology" Notes (10) -- Emotions

Lecture 11&12 Emotions

In these 2 lectures, Paul Bloom described evolutionary explanations for several important emotional responses, discusses some interesting case studies which I encountered previously in different places, such as Malcom Gladwell's books 《Outlier》 (A culture of Hornor), 《Blink》 (Paul Ekman's FACS introduction), the prisoner dilemma and the ultimate game.

Why emotion exist:

• Emotions are basically mechanisms that set goals and priorities. Without emotions to drive us we would do nothing at all: supported by some unusual and unfortunate cases like Phineas Gage.
• Emotions like fear, love, anger, gratitude are not aberrations or noise in the system. Rather, they're exquisitely complicated motivational systems that are crafted to deal with the natural and social environment.
• Motivation is the general term for all the physical and psychological processes that start behavior, maintain it, and stop it. Motivational currents that shape the flow of our daily lives; motivations that are constantly reflected in our preferences for some activities over others, the intensity of what we do, and the persistence of our actions.
  

Facial expressions are ways in which we communicate our emotions.
Paul Ekman's FACS: some expression are universal; some are subtle and interestingly different across countries and across people.

Smile:

• smiles are universal.
• Smiles are social signals: people smile when they wish to communicate happiness
• different types of smiles:
• Pan Am smile: a greeting smile, a smile to communicate "hello"
• Duchenne smile: a smile to communicate genuine happiness. (eyes moving)
• a coy smile:an appeasement smile, a smile of embarrassment or stress.
• Smiles are extremely contagious.

Nonsocial emotion —— Fear:
We are afraid of these things that through the course of human evolution have been dangerous to us.

Social emotions can be broken down into two categories:

1. emotions towards your kin (genetic relatives):
   
• Gene need to be reproduced.
  
• People invest in quality, not quantity. We produce very few children in our life, and our evolutionary trick is to focus very intently on them and make sure they survive, to form a long period of dependence and deep bonds between the parent and the child.
2. emotions towards the people you're not related to but interact with —— Altruism:
   

• Individuals benefit more by working together than working alone -- the benefits outweigh the costs of altruism.
• It can only evolve if the cheaters can be recognized and punished.

The benefit of irrational:

• A rational person is easily exploited. (The Ultimatum Game)
• People are forced, by dint of your irrationality, to treat you better.
• Head over heels in love is irrational but it's also, within certain parameters, endearing because the irrationality of the person means you could trust them more in the long run.

Psychologist Robert Plutchik has proposed that we are born with eight basic emotions, depicted here in the inner circle: