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KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Emotions are the normally adaptive mental and physiological feeling states that direct our attention and guide our
behavior. - Emotional states are accompanied by arousal, our experiences of the bodily responses created by the sympathetic
division of the autonomic nervous system. - Motivations are forces that guide behavior. They can be biological, such as hunger and thirst; personal, such as the
motivation for achievement; or social, such as the motivation for acceptance and belonging. - The most fundamental emotions, known as the basic emotions, are those of anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness,
and surprise. - Cognitive appraisal allows us to also experience a variety of secondary emotions.
- According to the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, the experience of an emotion is accompanied by physiological
arousal. - According to the James-Lange theory of emotion, our experience of an emotion is the result of the arousal that we
experience. - According to the two-factor theory of emotion, the experience of emotion is determined by the intensity of the
arousal we are experiencing, and the cognitive appraisal of the situation determines what the emotion will be. - When people incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing, we say that they have
misattributed their arousal. - We express our emotions to others through nonverbal behaviors, and we learn about the emotions of others by
observing them.
EXERCISES AND CRITICAL THINKING
- Consider the three theories of emotion that we have discussed and provide an example of a situation in which a
person might experience each of the three proposed patterns of arousal and emotion. - Describe a time when you used nonverbal behaviors to express your emotions or to detect the emotions of others.
What specific nonverbal techniques did you use to communicate?
[1] LeDoux, J. E. (2000). Emotion circuits in the brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 23, 155–184.
[2] Ekman, P. (1992). Are there basic emotions? Psychological Review, 99(3), 550–553; Elfenbein, H. A., & Ambady, N. (2002).
On the universality and cultural specificity of emotion recognition: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 128, 203–23;