Presentation Abstracts
Symposium on Neurobiological Aspects of Emotion
Physiological thriving: Neuroendocrine and cardiovascular concomitants of valence and motivation
Wendy Berry Mendes, Harvard University
Since Cannon (1929) distinguished fight-flight motivation, researchers have sought to identify distinct physiological responses that represent different emotional and motivational states. Several theories have focused on activation of the sympathetic adrenal medullary (SAM) and the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal cortical (HPA) axes to differentiate these “emotivational” states. These primary stress systems and their regulatory and counter-regulatory capacities are integrated to provide a model that describes underlying differences in responses based on valence and motivation. In a series of studies, we show evidence for distinct patterns of neuroendocrine and autonomic nervous systems responses that differentiate approach-positive states from avoidant-negative states. Attempts to disentangle emotion from motivation resulted in evidence for the primacy of motivation over valence such that approach-negative states (e.g., anger) produced responses more consistent with thriving than threat. These emotivational states appear to influence and have consequences for executive functioning, experienced affect, non-verbal behavior, and person-perception.
The Frontal Asymmetry of Emotion: Insights from Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
Jack van Honk, Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University; Barak Morgan, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Utrecht University; and Dennis JLG Schutter, Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University
Electrophysiological studies have provided evidence for the frontal asymmetry of emotion. The emotions of approach are lateralized to the left frontal region while the emotions of withdrawal are lateralized to the right frontal region. During the symposium two studies which use Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) will be presented. The first study uses TMS to measure frontal cortical excitability and relates this to frontal electrophysiological activity and to self-reported approach and withdrawal motivation. The data strongly support the theory of the frontal asymmetry of emotion and provide novel insights into its biological foundation. In the second study, TMS is used to alter frontal cortical excitability and it is demonstrated that the left prefrontal cortex processes anger but not happiness. These data fit the notion that anger is an approach emotion and also indicate that the direction of motivation that underlies happiness might be of a more balanced nature.
The Social Regulation of Neural Threat Responding
James Coan, University of Virginia
Social soothing and support can enhance health and well being, likely regulating emotional responding during life stress. For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 16 married women were subjected to the threat of electric shock while either holding their husbands hands, holding the hands of anonymous male experimenters, or holding no hand at all. Results indicated a pervasive attenuation of activation in the neural systems underlying response to threat as a function of spousal hand holding, and a more limited attenuation of activation in these systems as a function of stranger hand holding. Effects of spousal hand holding on the neural response to threat varied as a function of marital quality, with higher marital quality predicting less threat-related neural activation specifically during the spousal hand holding condition. These results hold implications for our understanding of emotion regulation, social bonding and attachment.
Symposium on Intergroup Emotions
Intergroup Emotions
Diane M. Mackie, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Eliot R. Smith, Indiana University, Bloomington
What are intergroup emotions (IEs)? IEs are acute or chronic emotional reactions directed toward ingroups and/or outgroups as a result of identification with a salient social categorization. We discuss evidence for our claims that IEs a) are distinct from individual emotions b) are shared among members of the social group, c) uniquely predict intergroup behavior, d) affect information processing in predictable ways and e) that all these effects depend on identification with the group.
I-feel versus we-feel: The distinction between individual, group-based and collective emotions
Agneta Fischer, University of Amsterdam
Distinctions between individual and group-based emotions have usually been made on the basis of identification processes and identity concerns. Because individuals identify with a group, they appraise situations on the basis of their group membership and thus experience group-based or intergroup emotions. In other words, the group-based nature of the emotional experience is based on the group-based appraisal of antecedents. A question that is still unanswered, however, is what the collective nature of such emotions is. I will therefore make a distinction between group-based emotions and collective emotions, by focusing on the emotional reactions of group members. Collective emotions are defined by the fact that similar emotions are expected from and shared with one’s group members and I will show some evidence that collective emotions can become more intense than group-based emotions.
The promise (and the problems) of guilt about group inequality
Colin Wayne Leach, University of Sussex
People can feel guilty about harming individuals they care about. A good deal of emotion research shows that this kind of individual-level guilt is associated with wanting to make restitution. Partly in response to political efforts at restitution, recent theory and research has focused on group-based guilt as an explanation of individuals’ wanting restitution to harmed out-groups. This is the promise of guilt. However, there are at least two problems with extrapolating work on individual-level guilt to the group level (for a review, see Leach, Snider, & Iyer, 2002). First, to feel group-based guilt individuals must perceive themselves as part of an in-group that has harmed an out-group. In essence, individuals must share in a collective sense of agency for harm. As this is likely to be unpleasant, individuals seem likely to distance themselves from in-groups that harm others. Such (easy) avoidance should make group-based guilt rare. Second, restitution to an out-group requires individual in-group members to engage in collective political action rather than individual action. Thus, to be effective at the group level, guilt must explain more than the abstract goal of wanting restitution (Leach, Iyer, & Pedersen, in press). Group-based guilt must explain a willingness to engage in the concrete political action required to bring about group-level restitution. I review recent research of group-based guilt to clarify its promise and its problems. Special emphasis is placed on our recent studies in Santa Cruz (California), Perth (Australia), and Amsterdam (the Netherlands) that illustrate the two problems identified above.
Symposium on Emotional Development
Functionalist and Dynamic Systems Approaches to Emotion and its Development
David C. Witherington and Jennifer A. Crichton, University of New Mexico
In recent years, both functionalist and dynamic systems approaches have assumed increasing prominence in the study of emotion and its development, but the similarities and differences between these perspectives remain largely unexplored and open to more systematic examination. In this talk, I will argue that both approaches share a systems view of emotion and regard emotion in process, not product, terms. However, each approach adopts a distinct level of analysis and distinct types of explanation for emotion and its development. Whereas the functionalist approach appeals to formal and final causes to explain patterning in emotion at the level of organism-environment relations, the dynamic systems approach appeals to efficient and material causes to explain emotion at the specific content level of behavior in context. Whether these approaches complement or conflict with one another depends on the extent to which the dynamic systems approach admits abstraction into its explanatory framework.
Do Infants Show Distinct Negative Facial Expressions for Fear and Anger? Emotional Expression in European-American, Chinese, and Japanese Infants
Linda A. Camras, DePaul University; Joseph J. Campos, University of California, Berkeley; Harriet Oster, New York University, and Roger Bakeman, Georgia State University
Considerable controversy exists regarding whether infants experience and express discrete emotions. According to one position, discrete emotions emerge during infancy along with their prototypic facial expressions. These expressions are thought to closely resemble adult emotional expressions and be invariantly concordant with their corresponding emotions. In contrast, we propose that the relation between expression and emotion during infancy is more complex. Some infant emotions and emotional expressions may not be invariantly concordant. Furthermore, negative emotional expressions may be less differentiated that previously proposed. We present recent cross-cultural research to support this view. European American, Chinese, and Japanese 11-month-olds were videotaped during procedures designed to elicit mild anger/frustration and fear. Facial behavior was coded using Baby FACS, an anatomically-based scoring system. Infants’ nonfacial behavior differed across procedures suggesting that the target emotions were successfully elicited. However evidence for distinct emotion-specific facial configurations corresponding to fear vs. anger was not obtained.
Disentangling emotions from the goals that emotions subserve: What babies teach us about adult emotions
Carl Frankel, Stanford University
In one common and commonsense narrative, emotions are bundles of impulses that slowly mature, by virtue of being managed by an overlay of emotion regulation that holds emotions in check. In that storyline, what slowly develops in emotional development is primarily emotion regulation. The data, however, such as they are, suggest something quite different. The goal-structures that emotions subserve mature slowly throughout childhood and across the lifespan. However, most of the functional capacities evident in adult emotions unfold relatively quickly in the first year of life. Even in the one-year-old, emotional appraisals are regulating the goal-situation relationship, so as to prevent goal-harms and to promote goal-benefits. By reviewing the relevant theory and findings to disentangle phenomena that are typically conflated in the adult, this talk proposes how a developmental sensibility can usefully inform the way we think about and investigate emotional processes over the lifespan.
Emotional development: The acquisition of an “ecological self,” and its implications for the ontogeny of fear in infancy
Joseph J. Campos, University of California, Berkeley
Fear of heights is one of the most intense, most enduring, and most biologically-adaptive fears. Once thought innate in the human, fear of heights is now known to be acquired. But how? Falling accidents and social referencing explanations cannot account for much of the variance of its origins. In this presentation, we will show findings from a collaborative international research project that is revealing a link between visual proprioception (the visually-induced sense of self-motion) and fear of heights as assessed on a visual cliff. Visual proprioception is one aspect of the ecological self described by Neisser as at the core of self-development. Unexpectedly, this project has found that via visual proprioception the ecological self (a) becomes effective in infancy as a function of locomotor experience, and (b) predicts the acquisition of fear of heights in the human infant.
Debate on Culture and Emotion: Going Beyond Universality and Cultural Specificity
Chair: David Matsumoto, San Francisco State University
Participants: Dacher Keltner, University of California, Berkeley; David Matsumoto, San Francisco State University; Batja Mesquita, Wake Forest University; and Jeanne Tsai, Stanford University
Moderator: James Gross, Stanford University
The study of culture and emotion has come a long way since Darwin’s original ideas and the seminal research of Ekman and Izard. Recent studies cast new light on the nature and function of both culture and emotion, and their relationship. In this symposium, four leading researchers in this area of study participate in a structured debate to present their ideas about this topic. The session will open with participants presenting their views on the relationship between culture and emotion, followed by a prepared question and answer session, a brief dialogue among the interactants, and then questions and comments from the audience. We hope that this debate-structured symposium will elucidate grounds of both similarity and differences in perspectives and approaches.
Symposium on New Evidence about Positive Emotions
The Role of Mood in the Experience of Meaning in Life: A Competition of Cues Model
Laura King, University of Missouri
Meaning in life is commonly considered a crucial component of the good life. What is it that makes life feel meaningful? In this talk, I will review a variety of studies implicating the experience of positive affect in judgments of life’s meaning. Like other abstract qualities of life, meaning in life judgments are subject to “mood as information” effects. A number of theoretically derived mediators of these effects have been suggested. However, a variety of studies will be presented that demonstrate that rather than mediate the relationship between PA and meaning in life, cognitive (e.g., global/local focus) and motivational variables (e.g., religiosity, need satisfaction) moderate that relationship, suggesting that “Man’s search for meaning” involves a biased search for information providing an affirmative answer. Nuances of the competition of cues model of meaning in life judgments will be discussed.
Positive Affect Facilitates Incidental Learning and Divided Attention While Not Impairing Performance on a Focal Task
Alice M. Isen and Eugenia Shmidt, Cornell University
Several programs of research have demonstrated that positive affect tends to increase people’s cognitive breadth and flexibility, so that they are better able to process more information in a situation. There is some debate about whether this broadening comes at the cost of distractibility, ability to maintain focus on a given task. Results of the present studies showed, however, that people in the positive affect conditions performed better on an incidental-learning task (Study 1) and a divided-attention task (Study 2), while nonetheless also out-performing controls on the simultaneous main task. In Study 3, even where the stimuli of the potentially interfering/distracting task were items that had previously been correct items in the main task, people in positive affect performed better on the focal task than controls. These results indicate that positive affect enables flexible consideration of more aspects of situations, but not at the cost of impaired performance on a focal task.
The Pleasures of Uncertainty
Timothy D. Wilson, University of Virginia
It is well known that uncertainty about the nature of an event, or why it occurred, increases the intensity and duration of negative emotions. It is often assumed that the same is true of positive emotions, namely that uncertainty lowers people’s enjoyment of positive events. Under some conditions, however, uncertainty may prolong positive reactions, by impeding the process of affective adaptation. I will present evidence for this pleasure of uncertainty hypothesis, and discuss it in the context of an approach to affective adaptation call the AREA model, which holds that people attend to self-relevant, unexplained events, react emotionally to these events, explain or make sense of the events, and thereby adapt to them (i.e., they attend to the events less and have weaker emotional reactions to them).
Positive Emotions, Induced Through Meditation, Build Resources
Barbara L. Fredrickson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The broaden-and-build theory holds that positive emotions are evolved adaptations that, over time, transform people for the better by building their personal resources. We tested this “build hypothesis” in a volunteer sample of 146 working adults. Each was randomly assigned to participate in a 6-week meditation workshop or serve in a waitlist control group. We measured mental, psychological, social, and physical resources before the workshop began, and again 8 weeks later. In the intervening weeks, we gathered daily reports of emotions and compliance. The meditation workshop was successful in elevating people’s daily positive emotions, as well as their satisfaction with life. Structural equation modeling showed that time spent meditating increased positive emotions, which in turn led to increases in personal resources, which in turn enhanced life satisfaction. This first experimental evidence for the build hypothesis suggests that positive emotions can set people on a positive trajectory of growth.