Emotions, Judgements and Decisions Flashcards Preview

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Flashcards in Emotions, Judgements and Decisions Deck (21)
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1
Q

What is an individual perspective?

A

How our emotions influence us

2
Q

What are emotions?

A

Motivated states with various compartments - physiological arousal (nervous system and hormones), expressive behaviours (facial expressions) and conscious experience (feeling a certain way)

3
Q

What words do people use for types of emotional states?

A

Emotion - intense, short lived, specific feelings about something - can go quick

Mood - less intense, longer lasting, more general, not clearly linked to an event or cause

Affect - generic term covering above, usually good or bad

4
Q

Why do we have emotions?

A

Evolutionary perspective - they promote the right response to situations of adaptive significance, such as fighting, falling in love, escaping predators, losing status - positive, signals us it is safe, enable to us to survive long term

5
Q

Are the effects of emotion undesirable?

A

Laughing in an awkward situation - uncontrollable

6
Q

When do we make bad decisions?

A

When we are in states which aren’t best - we underestimate the hot cold empathy gap - don’t go food shopping when you’re hungry

7
Q

What is the hot cold empathy gap?

A

Tendency to neglect the impact that an emotional state will have on our future behaviour e.g. hungover - never drink again
if in hot or cold state - can’t predict what we will do in other states

8
Q

Are the effects of emotions irrational?

A

People regret how they behave when angry - might be rational when not emotional, but irrational when we have emotions

9
Q

Can we separate emotions from cognition?

A

Zajonc - emotion comes first
Lazarus - cognition comes first, triggers emotions
maybe the way it is defined which changes these
emotion and cognition aren’t located in separate neural systems; the view that emotions battle with cognition to control behaviour isn’t how the brain works

10
Q

Do emotions influence memory?

A

Mood congruent recall: more likely to retrieve memories consistent with current mood
State-dependent memory: we remember best when mood at encoding matches mood at recall
We are also better at recalling emotional memories

11
Q

What is Bower’s network theory?

A

Emotional arousal spreads through a network and primes other nodes its associated with, making them more accessible and more likely to be retrieved - bad mood increases activation of all the things it is connected with in the brain

12
Q

How do emotions affect the judgements we make about ourselves?

A

Mildly depressed people make more accurate self-ratings - don’t show the usual self-serving biases (fundamental attribution error, better than average effect)
Depressed people show a positive bias when rating others, so they’re not more accurate overall, just make self-judgements differently

13
Q

How do emotions influence the judgements we make about other people?

A

If in an aroused state, attribute this to someone else

14
Q

Bridge study

A

Attractive women stand on a bridge, asked people to complete questionnaire. then they had to write dramatic story based on picture, almost all men did it even if scary. Gave number, ring to find out more. Did it again on the non scary bridge.
high bridge: 39% called researcher
low bridge: 9% called the researcher
ppts who just crossed the bridge, had higher physiological arousal, seemed to misattribute that arousal as attraction for the experimenter - thought they fancied her cos heart was pounding but attributed it to the wrong thing

15
Q

How does the weather influence emotions?

A

People are often in a better mood on sunny days

16
Q

How does the weather influence how people judge others?

A

University tutors make different decisions on cloudy days vs sunny days
People report being more satisfied with their lives on sunny days, although asking people about the weather first eliminates this effect

17
Q

Feeling as information model

A

Emotions are used as a source of information when we make judgements, we experience our feelings as reactions to whatever we are focussed on and assume that they provide info relevant to the decision we are making - use our current mood as extras information about what we are considering

18
Q

How do emotions influence our decisions about how to behave?

A

Asked people about sexual behaviours, when in a cold state, and then gave them a laptop with images of sexual women, asked them to self-stimulate
when aroused, asked them the questions again
they rated themselves as being more likely to engage in unsafe sexual behaviours and more likely to engage in date rape like behaviours

19
Q

Are we better off without them?

A

Hard to find evidence that emotions are good, but if they were bad, people without them would do better - evidence that people without emotions are psychopaths

20
Q

What happens if people don’t have emotions?

A

Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex impairs emotional processing, but doesn’t make people more rational, instead it impairs their ability to make decisions and learn from mistakes

21
Q

Overall, are emotions good?

A

Choosing on the basis of ones current emotional state is not an effective decision making strategy for humans, but decision making that makes use of lessons learned from motional experiences and consideration of anticipated emotional states may be beneficial and successful for decision making - short term, may not be helpful, long term, help decision making