11 Motivation and Emotion · 11.1 Motivation and emotion
11.1.2 Emotion: physiology and theories
An emotion is a complex state with three parts, bodily arousal, conscious experience (appraisal) and outward expression; strong emotions switch on the sympathetic nervous system (faster heart, more sweating, adrenaline) under the control of the hypothalamus, limbic system (amygdala) and cortex, and the main theories differ on the order of events: James–Lange (body first), Cannon–Bard (body and feeling together), Schachter–Singer (arousal plus a cognitive label) and Lazarus (appraisal first). The brain structures themselves are in PSY-BB-02; emotional intelligence and coping are in MAB-EI-01 and MAB-EI-02; the link between motive and arousal (Yerkes–Dodson) is in PSY-MO-01.
- APPSC Paper I
- Standard level
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Core facts
- Emotion comes from Latin emovere, "to stir up, to move out". It is a complex pattern of arousal, subjective feeling and cognitive interpretation that moves us to act.
- Three components (NCERT): physiological (bodily changes), cognitive (appraisal, the felt experience) and behavioural (expression: face, voice, posture, action).
- Feeling: the pleasant or unpleasant tone of an experience. Mood: weaker, longer-lasting, often without a clear cause. Emotion: intense, brief, aimed at a definite object or event.
- Physiological changes in strong emotion (fear, anger, excitement): produced by the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and the adrenal medulla (adrenaline / epinephrine, noradrenaline):
- heart rate and blood pressure rise; breathing becomes fast;
- sweating increases (measured as galvanic skin response, GSR);
- pupils dilate; mouth goes dry (less saliva); digestion slows;
- blood sugar rises; blood shifts to the muscles; muscles tense, limbs tremble; hair stands on end (goose flesh); temples throb.
- Walter Cannon called this the "fight or flight" response. The parasympathetic branch calms the body afterwards.
- Polygraph (lie detector): records heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and GSR; it measures arousal, not lying.
- Brain and emotion (details in PSY-BB-02):
- Hypothalamus: drives the autonomic and hormonal changes of emotion. Cats with the cortex removed showed "sham rage" (Cannon and Britton, 1925); Philip Bard (1928) showed it needs the hypothalamus.
- Limbic system: amygdala (fear and aggression; reads threat in faces), hippocampus, cingulate gyrus. Papez circuit (James Papez, 1937).
- Klüver–Bucy syndrome (1937–39): monkeys with the temporal lobes (including the amygdala) removed became tame and fearless.
- Thalamus: relays sensory input to the cortex and to the amygdala.
- Cerebral cortex: the conscious experience and appraisal of emotion; the prefrontal cortex regulates and controls emotion.
- Reticular activating system: general arousal (Lindsley's activation theory).
- Theories of emotion:
| Theory | Who, when | Order of events | Key claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| James–Lange | William James (1884), Carl Lange (1885) | stimulus → bodily change → feeling | we feel afraid because we tremble |
| Cannon–Bard | Walter Cannon (1927), Philip Bard | stimulus → thalamus → cortex (feeling) and hypothalamus / body (arousal) at once | arousal and feeling are simultaneous and independent |
| Schachter–Singer (two-factor) | Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962) | arousal + cognitive label from the situation → emotion | the label decides which emotion |
| Cognitive appraisal | Richard Lazarus (1966, 1991) | appraisal of the event → arousal and feeling | how we judge an event decides the emotion |
- Basic (primary) emotions: Paul Ekman: six with universal facial expressions: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust. Carroll Izard: ten. Robert Plutchik (1980): eight primary emotions in a wheel (joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation), mixed like colours to make others.
- J.B. Watson: newborns show three emotions: fear, rage and love. K.M.B. Bridges (1932): at birth there is only general excitement, which soon splits into distress and delight and then into finer emotions.
- Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872): expressions are inherited and helped survival.
- Display rules (Ekman): cultural norms on when, where and how much an emotion may be shown.
Explained
1. The three components in one scene. A youth sees a police jeep stop outside his house. Physiological: his heart races and palms sweat. Cognitive: he thinks "they have come for me" and feels fear. Behavioural: his face goes pale, his voice shakes, he tries to slip out of the back door. Change the thought ("they are asking for directions") and the whole emotion changes: this is why appraisal matters.
2. Body changes in emotion: sympathetic vs parasympathetic
| Body part | Sympathetic (emotion, stress) | Parasympathetic (calm) |
|---|---|---|
| Heart, blood pressure | faster, higher | slower, lower |
| Sweat glands | more sweating | less |
| Pupils | dilate | constrict |
| Digestion, saliva | slows, dry mouth | resumes, more saliva |
3. James–Lange theory. Common sense says: I see a snake, feel afraid, and run. James reversed it: I see a snake, my body reacts (heart pounds, I run), and my awareness of these bodily changes is the emotion. "We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike." Each emotion should then have its own pattern of bodily change.
4. Cannon's criticisms of James–Lange (1927)
- Very different emotions (fear, anger, even fever or exercise) show much the same bodily arousal, so arousal alone cannot tell us which emotion we feel.
- Internal organs have few sensory nerves, so their changes are hard to feel.
- Internal organs react slowly (one to two seconds), but emotions can be felt at once.
- Animals whose internal organs were cut off from the brain still showed emotional behaviour.
- Injecting adrenaline produces arousal but not a true emotion (people say they feel "as if" afraid).
5. Cannon–Bard theory. The thalamus receives the stimulus and sends signals at the same time to the cerebral cortex, which produces the subjective experience of emotion, and to the hypothalamus, which produces bodily arousal. Neither causes the other. (Modern research gives the hypothalamus and limbic system, not the thalamus, the central role, but the "simultaneous" idea is what exams test.)
6. Schachter–Singer two-factor theory
- Emotion = physiological arousal + a cognitive label for that arousal. The experience of emotion grows out of our awareness of present arousal and our explanation of it.
- Experiment (1962): men were injected with adrenaline (told it was a vitamin). Some were told the true side effects, some were not. They then waited with a stooge acting either euphoric or angry. The uninformed men, with unexplained arousal, tended to "catch" the stooge's mood; the informed men, who could blame the injection, were less affected.
- Misattribution of arousal: arousal from one source is wrongly credited to another. Dutton and Aron (1974): men crossing a high, swaying suspension bridge were more attracted to a woman interviewer than men on a low, firm bridge.
7. Lazarus: cognitive appraisal
- Primary appraisal: is this event relevant to me, and is it a threat, harm or challenge?
- Secondary appraisal: what resources do I have to cope with it?
- Reappraisal: the judgement is revised as things change.
- Appraisal can be quick and unconscious. Robert Zajonc argued the opposite, that some emotional reactions (liking, fear) come before any thinking (affective primacy); this is the Lazarus–Zajonc debate.
8. The four theories compared
| Question | James–Lange | Cannon–Bard | Schachter–Singer | Lazarus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What comes first? | bodily change | both together | arousal, then label | appraisal |
| Role of thinking | none | little | labels arousal | central |
| Key brain part | body feedback to cortex | thalamus | cortex (interpretation) | cortex (judgement) |
| Example | I tremble, so I am afraid | I tremble and feel afraid at once | I tremble; a dog is near, so it is fear | I judge the dog a threat, then fear and tremble |
9. Facial feedback hypothesis (Silvan Tomkins, Carroll Izard): the face does not only show emotion, it also feeds back to shape it. In a well-known study (Strack and colleagues, 1988), people holding a pen in their teeth (forcing a smile) rated cartoons as funnier than people holding it in their lips (preventing a smile). A large multi-laboratory repeat of this study (2016) did not find the effect, so the size of facial feedback is still debated. The idea is a modern descendant of James–Lange.
10. Expression of emotion
- Verbal: words, and paralanguage: tone, pitch, speed, pauses.
- Non-verbal: facial expression (the richest channel), eye contact and gaze, gestures, posture and body movement, touch, and personal space.
- Edward Hall's zones of personal space (proxemics), for North Americans: intimate (up to about 45 cm), personal (45 cm to 1.2 m), social (1.2 to 3.6 m), public (beyond 3.6 m).
11. Culture and emotion
- Universal: Ekman and Friesen (1971) showed photographs of faces to the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who had little contact with outsiders; they recognised the six basic expressions much as Westerners did.
- Culture-specific: display rules differ (in many Asian cultures strong negative emotion is hidden before elders; in public grief, open crying is expected in some cultures and not in others). Words for emotions and what causes them also differ.
- Indian tradition: Bharata's Natyashastra describes rasas (aesthetic emotions) and bhavas; with shanta (peace) added later, they make the nine rasas (navarasa): love, humour, compassion, anger, heroism, fear, disgust, wonder and peace.
12. Managing emotions (NCERT's suggestions)
- Self-awareness: notice your emotions and what triggers them.
- Appraise the situation objectively; look at it from another angle (reappraisal).
- Self-monitoring and self-modelling (recall a past time you handled it well).
- Perception re-orientation and positive self-talk; challenge irrational thoughts.
- Be creative, keep good relationships, show empathy, do community service.
- Managing anger: recognise early signs, delay the response (count, leave the place), find the thought behind the anger, express it assertively, not aggressively.
- Managing anxiety and stress: relaxation, breathing, exercise, sleep, social support (see MAB-EI-02).
Common traps
- ✗ "During excitement perspiration decreases." ✓ Sweating increases (GSR rises); it is saliva and digestion that decrease.
- ✗ "In Cannon–Bard theory the hypothalamus produces the subjective experience." ✓ The cerebral cortex produces the felt experience; the hypothalamus produces bodily arousal; the thalamus sends to both at once.
- ✗ "James–Lange: we tremble because we are afraid." ✓ We are afraid because we tremble: the bodily change comes first.
- ✗ "Cannon–Bard: arousal causes the feeling." ✓ Arousal and feeling are simultaneous and independent.
- ✗ "Two-factor theory: Lazarus." ✓ Schachter and Singer (1962): arousal + cognitive label. Lazarus = cognitive appraisal.
- ✗ "Schachter–Singer says arousal alone decides the emotion." ✓ The label (interpretation of the situation) decides which emotion; arousal sets its intensity.
- ✗ "The polygraph detects lies." ✓ It records arousal (heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, GSR).
- ✗ "Emotion and mood are the same." ✓ Mood is weaker, longer and diffuse; emotion is intense, brief and has an object.
- ✗ "Ekman's six basic emotions include love and shame." ✓ Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust.
- ✗ "Plutchik proposed six primary emotions." ✓ Eight, arranged in a wheel.
- ✗ "Removing the amygdala makes animals more fearful." ✓ They become tame and fearless (Klüver–Bucy).
- ✗ "Facial expressions are entirely learnt from culture." ✓ Basic expressions are universal; display rules are cultural.
Quick revision
- Emotion: emovere; physiological + cognitive + behavioural components.
- Sympathetic arousal: heart, BP, breathing up; sweating up (GSR); pupils dilate; dry mouth; adrenaline.
- Hypothalamus (arousal, sham rage), amygdala (fear; Klüver–Bucy), Papez circuit 1937, cortex (experience).
- James–Lange (1884–85): body first, then feeling.
- Cannon–Bard (1927): thalamus → cortex (feeling) + hypothalamus (body) at the same time.
- Schachter–Singer (1962): arousal + cognitive label; adrenaline and stooge; bridge study (Dutton and Aron 1974).
- Lazarus: primary appraisal (threat?), secondary appraisal (coping?); Zajonc: affect can come first.
- Basic emotions: Ekman 6; Izard 10; Plutchik 8 (wheel); Watson: fear, rage, love; Bridges: excitement → distress, delight.
- Darwin 1872; Ekman and Friesen 1971 (Fore); display rules are cultural.
- Manage emotions: self-awareness, reappraisal, positive self-talk, empathy, relationships.
Go deeper: Deeper (beyond what APPSC Paper I usually asks)
Deeper Advanced
1. Two routes to fear (Joseph LeDoux). A sensory signal goes from the thalamus straight to the amygdala (the fast, rough "low road", which makes you jump at a rope that looks like a snake) and also via the sensory cortex to the amygdala (the slower, accurate "high road", which tells you it is only a rope). This explains why fear can start before we know what we saw, partly supporting Zajonc.
2. Hemispheres and emotion. Richard Davidson's studies link greater left prefrontal activity with positive, approach emotions and greater right prefrontal activity with negative, withdrawal emotions. Damage to the prefrontal cortex (the case of Phineas Gage, 1848) can leave a person impulsive and socially careless.
3. Different emotions, different patterns? Later work (Ekman, Levenson and Friesen, 1983) found small differences in heart rate and skin temperature between emotions (anger warms the hands, fear cools them), which gives James–Lange partial support. Brain imaging shows that different emotions use partly different networks, but no single "centre" for each emotion.
4. Emotion regulation (James Gross). Reappraisal (changing how you think about a situation before the emotion builds) lowers both the feeling and the arousal. Suppression (hiding the expression after the emotion has started) hides the face but leaves the arousal high and taxes memory. For counselling offenders and victims, teaching reappraisal is more useful than telling them to "control yourself".
5. Emotion and the probation officer. Anger and poor emotion regulation are linked with violent offending; fear and shame affect how a victim or an offender tells his story; lie detection by body signs is unreliable because the polygraph records arousal from any cause (fear of being disbelieved looks like guilt).
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