UNIT 4-EMOTION AND STRESS

Emotion: Meaning – Basic emotions-

Components - Physiology of emotion -
Expression of emotion – Theories of
Emotions, Stress: Definition – Four
variations - Stressors – Effects –
General Adaptation Syndrome – Individual
differences - Coping mechanism.
Emotion- the “feeling” aspect of consciousness,
characterized by a certain physical arousal, a
certain behavior that reveals the emotion to
the outside world, and an inner awareness of
feelings.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
Emotions cannot be considered as good and bad as each
emotion has a specific role to play in colouring our life.
Emotions expressed by humans can be divided into two
broad categories and are called as positive and negative
emotions.
In positive emotions an attempt or an intention to
include is expressed. They are fueled by an underlying
desire for enjoyment and unity. Interest, enthusiasm,
boredom, laughter, empathy, action, curiosity are the
examples of positive emotions.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
Emotions cannot be considered as good and bad as each
emotion has a specific role to play in colouring our life.
Emotions expressed by humans can be divided into two
broad categories and are called as positive and negative
emotions.
In positive emotions an attempt or an intention to
include is expressed. They are fueled by an underlying
desire for enjoyment and unity. Interest, enthusiasm,
boredom, laughter, empathy, action, curiosity are the
examples of positive emotions.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
In negative emotions an attempt or intention to
exclude is expressed.
They are fueled by an underlying fear of the
unknown, a fear of the actions of others, and a
need to control them or stop them to avoid being
harassed.
Apathy, grief, fear, hatred, shame, blame, regret,
resentment, anger, hostility are examples of
negative emotions.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
The negative emotions are helpful and act as a
motive in moving away from what one doesn’t want
and positive emotions are useful for moving
towards what one wants.
John Watson who is considered as leader of
behaviourism examined this belief and concluded
that there are three basic emotional patterns
which are found even in infants and therefore can
be regarded that emotions are inherited. Watson
identified fear, anger and love as the three basic
emotions.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
Paul Ekman has dedicated his career to researching
emotions, focusing primarily on the following
seven basic emotions.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
According to Daniel Goleman, the basic families of
emotions are:
Fear: (Safety) anxiety, apprehension, nervousness,
concern, consternation, misgiving, wariness, qualm,
edginess, dread, fright, terror and in the extreme
cases phobia and panic.
Anger: (Justice) fury, outrage, resentment, wrath,
exasperation, indignation, vexation, acrimony,
animosity, annoyance, irritability, hostility, and perhaps
these are manifest in the extreme as hatred and
violence.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
Sadness: (Loss) grief, sorrow, cheerlessness, gloom,
melancholy, self-pity, loneliness, dejection, despair,
and depression in the extreme case.
Enjoyment: (Gain) happiness, joy, relief, contentment,
bliss, delight, amusement, pride, sensual pleasure, thrill,
rapture, gratification, satisfaction, euphoria, whimsy,
ecstasy, and at the far edge, mania.
Love: (Attraction) acceptance, friendliness, trust,
kindness, affinity, devotion, adoration, infatuation, and
agape.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
Disgust: (Repulsion) contempt, distain, scorn,
abhorrence, aversion, distaste, and revulsion. Surprise:
(Attention) shock, astonishment, amazement, and
wonder.
Shame: (Self-control) guilt, embarrassment, chagrin,
remorse, humiliation, regret, mortification, and
contrition.
 BASIC EMOTIONS
Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman (1992) do not agree
with the categorisation of emotions instead they think
emotions in terms of families or dimensions, the main
families’ being anger, sadness, fear, enjoyment, love,
shame and so on.
 COMPONENTS OF EMOTIONS
Most psychologists would agree that an emotion is a
complex pattern of changes that include physiological
arousal, subjective feelings, cognitive processes and
behavioural reactions, all in response to a situation we
perceive to be personally significant.
 COMPONENTS OF EMOTIONS
Accordingly, an emotion has four components: i)
Physiological arousal: Emotions involve the brain,
nervous system and hormones, so that when you’re
emotionally aroused the hormone secretion is more to
give us instant energy. Each emotion has a specific
characteristic of physiological aspects.
For example: When angry, the blood rushes to our hands
in order to fight. When afraid, the blood rushes to our
skeletal system and leg to facilitate the fight or flight
responses.
 COMPONENTS OF EMOTIONS
Subjective feelings: Emotions also include subjective
awareness, or ‘feeling’ that involves elements of
pleasure, liking and disliking. Thus, in studying emotion
or knowing another person’s feelings, we must rely
heavily on that person’s own self reports.
 COMPONENTS OF EMOTIONS
iii) Cognitive processes: Emotions also involve
cognitive processes such as perceptions, expectations
and interpretations. Our appraisal of an event plays an
especially significant role in the meaning it has for us.
iv) Behavioural reactions: Emotions also involve
behavioural reactions, both expressive and
instrumental. Facial expressions such as smiles and
frowns, as well as gestures, all serve to communicate
our feelings that may enhance our chances for survival.
 PHYSIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
Physically, when a person experiences an emotion, an
arousal is created by the sympathetic nervous system
The heart rate increases, breathing becomes more
rapid, the pupils dilate, and the mouth may become dry.
Although facial expressions do differ among various
emotional responses emotions are difficult to
distinguish from one another on the basis of
physiological reactions alone.
 PHYSIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
However, in the laboratory using devices to measure the
heart rate, blood pressure, and skin temperature,
researchers have found that different emotions may be
associated with different physiological reactions:
Sadness, anger, and fear are associated with greater
increases in heart rate than is disgust;
higher increases in skin conductance occur during disgust
as compared to happiness;
and anger is more often associated with vascular measures,
such as higher diastolic blood pressure, as compared to
fear.
 PHYSIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
the amygdala, a small area located within the limbic system
on each side of the brain, is associated with fear in both
humans and animals and is also involved in the facial
expressions of human emotions.
When portions of the amygdala are damaged in rats, the
animals cannot be classically conditioned to fear new
objects—they apparently cannot remember to be afraid.
In humans, damage to the amygdala has been associated
with similar effects and with impairment of the ability to
determine emotions from looking at the facial expressions
of others
 PHYSIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS
Fear conditioning has been very helpful in relating
behaviors to brain function because it results in
stereotypical autonomic and behavioral responses. It is
basically a classical conditioning procedure where an
auditory stimulus (conditioned stimulus) is paired with
foot shock (unconditioned stimulus) to elicit autonomic
and behavioral conditioned responses
 EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
Facial expressions can vary across different cultures,
although some aspects of facial expression seem to be
universal.
Charles Darwin (1898) was one of the first to theorize
that emotions were a product of evolution and, therefore,
universal—all human beings, no matter what their culture,
would show the same facial expression because the facial
muscles evolved to communicate specific information to
onlookers.
 EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
For example, an angry face would signal to onlookers that
they should act submissively or expect a fight.
 EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
Although Darwin’s ideas were not in line with the
behaviorist movement of the early and middle twentieth
century, which promoted environment rather than heredity
as the cause of behavior, other researchers have since
found evidence that there is a universal nature to at least
seven basic emotions, giving more support to the
evolutionary perspective within psychology
 EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
Display rules learned ways of controlling displays of
emotion in social settings.
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE: LABELING EMOTION
The label a person applies to a subjective feeling is at least
in part a learned response influenced by their language and
culture. Such labels may differ in people of different
cultural backgrounds.
 EXPRESSION OF EMOTIONS
For example, researchers in one study found that Chinese
Americans who were still firmly rooted in their original
Chinese culture were far more likely to use labels to
describe their emotions that referred to bodily sensations
(such as “dizzy”) or social relationships (such as
“friendship”) than were more “Americanized” Chinese
Americans and European Americans, who tended to use
more directly emotional words (such as “liking” or “love”).
 STRESS
Stress is the term used to describe the physical,
emotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to events
that are appraised* as threatening or challenging.
Stress can show itself in many ways. Physical problems can
include unusual fatigue, sleeping problems, frequent colds,
and even chest pains and nausea.
 STRESS
People under stress may behave differently, too: pacing,
eating too much, crying a lot, smoking and drinking more
than usual, or physically striking out at others by hitting or
throwing things.
Emotionally, people under stress experience anxiety,
depression, fear, and irritability, as well as anger and
frustration. Mental symptoms of stress include problems in
concentration, memory, and decision making, and people
under stress often lose their sense of humor
 STRESS

tYPES
Eustress
distress
 STRESS
Stressors
Physiological
lifestyle
Major life changes
organizational
finalcial
social
environmental
reference- https://www.betterup.com/blog/types-of-stressors
 STRESS
The Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) Thomas
Holmes and Richard Rahe (1967) believed that any life
event that required people to change, adapt, or adjust
their lifestyles would result in stress.
Holmes and Rahe devised a scale to measure the amount of
stress in a person’s life by having that person add up the
total “life change units” associated with each major event
in their Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS
 STRESS
The researchers sampled 394 people, giving them a list of
events, such as divorce, pregnancy, or taking a vacation.
The people in the sample were told that, on a scale of 0 (no
changes required of the person experiencing the event) to
100 (extreme changes required), marriage represented
50 “life change units.” This gave those being sampled a
“yardstick” of sorts, by which they could assign a number
to each event, and these numbers became the life change
units associated with each event on the SRRS.
 STRESS
When an individual adds up the points for each event that
has happened to him or her within the past 12 months (and
counting points for repeat events as well), the resulting
score can provide a good estimate of the degree of stress
being experienced by that person.
 STRESS
General adaptation syndrome (GAS)
Psychologist Hans Selye was the founder of the field of
research concerning stress and its effects on the human
body. He studied the sequence of physiological reactions
that the body goes through when adapting to a stressor.
 STRESS
General adaptation syndrome (GAS)
Alarm: When the body first reacts to a stressor, the
sympathetic nervous system is activated. The adrenal glands
release hormones that increase heart rate, blood pressure,
and the supply of blood sugar, resulting in a burst of
energy. Reactions such as fever, nausea, and headache are
common.
 STRESS
General adaptation syndrome (GAS)
Resistance: As the stress continues, the body settles into
sympathetic division activity, continuing to release the
stress hormones that help the body fight off, or resist,
the stressor. The early symptoms of alarm lessen and the
person or animal may actually feel better. This stage will
continue until the stressor ends or the organism has used
up all of its resources.
 STRESS
General adaptation syndrome (GAS)
Exhaustion: When the body’s resources are gone,
exhaustion occurs. Exhaustion can lead to the formation
of stress-related diseases (i.e., high blood pressure or a
weakened immune system) or the death of the organism if
outside help is unavailable.
When the stressor ends, the parasympathetic division
activates and the body attempts to replenish its
resources.
 STRESS
Dr Albrecht defined four common types of stress:
1. Time stress
2. Anticipatory stress
3. Situational stress
4. Encounter stress (Dealing With People)
https://worldofwork.io/2019/02/albrechts-four-
types-of-stress/
 STRESS
Coping
Problem focused coping- coping strategies that try to
eliminate the source of a stress or reduce its impact
through direct actions.
emotion-focused coping coping strategies that change the
impact of a stressor by changing the emotional reaction to
the stressor
 STRESS
Coping
meditation mental series of exercises meant to refocus
attention and achieve a trancelike state of consciousness.
concentrative meditation form of meditation in which a
person focuses the mind on some repetitive or unchanging
stimulus so that the mind can be cleared of disturbing
thoughts and the body can experience relaxation.