Feldman-Barrett suggests that mindfulness —attending to thoughts and sensations without judgment—can produce a state of mind where learned expectations have less influence on current experience.
For example, we might expect to feel increasingly angry during an escalating argument; this is how it has played out before. Without that expectation, we might actually hear the other person and have a better chance at constructive resolution.
Perhaps we can at least agree on something: Emotions are important to human experience. As the story of Phineas Gage famously showed, emotions are essential to reason, and, according to research on how people handle emotions, suppressing emotions is harmful to well-being and social interactions. Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, Ph. Become a subscribing member today.
Scroll To Top How do emotions work? Are we born with them or do we learn them, like we do the names of colors? Get the science of a meaningful life delivered to your inbox.
While the study of emotional psychology is vast and complex, researchers have discovered quite a bit about what constitutes our emotions and our behavioral and physical reactions to them. Emotions are often confused with feelings and moods, but the three terms are not interchangeable. Emotional experiences have three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response and a behavioral or expressive response.
Feelings arise from an emotional experience. Because a person is conscious of the experience, this is classified in the same category as hunger or pain.
A feeling is the result of an emotion and may be influenced by memories, beliefs and other factors. For example, insults can trigger the emotion of anger while an angry mood may arise without apparent cause. Defining emotions is a task that is not yet complete.
Many researchers are still proposing theories about what makes up our emotions, and existing theories are constantly being challenged. While there is debate about sequence, there is general agreement that emotions, as mentioned earlier, are made up of three parts: subjective experiences, physiological responses and behavioral responses.
All emotions begin with a subjective experience, also referred to as a stimulus, but what does that mean? While basic emotions are expressed by all individuals regardless of culture or upbringing, the experience that produces them can he highly subjective.
Subjective experiences can range from something as simple as seeing a color to something as major as losing a loved one or getting married. No matter how intense the experience is, it can provoke many emotions in a single individual and the emotions each individual feel may be different.
For example, one person may feel anger and regret at the loss of a loved one while another may experience intense sadness. We all know how it feels to have our heart beat fast with fear. The autonomic nervous system controls our involuntary bodily responses and regulates our fight-or-flight response.
According to many psychologists, our physiological responses are likely how emotion helped us evolve and survive as humans throughout history. In other words, facial expressions play an important role in responding accordingly to an emotion in a physical sense. The behavioral response aspect of the emotional response is the actual expression of the emotion.
Behavioral responses can include a smile, a grimace, a laugh or a sigh, along with many other reactions depending on societal norms and personality.
While plentiful research suggests that many facial expressions are universal, such as a frown to indicate sadness, sociocultural norms and individual upbringings play a role in our behavioral responses. For example, how love is expressed is different both from person to person and across cultures.
A study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that while watching negative and positive emotional films, suppression of behavioral responses to emotion had physical effects on the participants. The effects included elevated heart rates. This suggests that expressing behavioral responses to stimuli, both positive and negative, is better for your overall health than holding those responses inside.
Thus, there are benefits of smiling, laughing and expressing negative emotions in a healthy way. The physiological and behavioral responses associated with emotions illustrate that emotion is much more than a mental state. Emotion affects our whole demeanor and our health. Theories and hypotheses about emotions date back centuries. In fact, basic or primary emotions are referenced in the Book of Rights , a first-century Chinese encyclopedia. Emotion is much harder to measure and properly define than many other human responses.
Much of the study that has been done in emotional psychology is about basic emotions, our psychological and behavioral responses, and the role of emotional intelligence in our lives.
Basic emotions are associated with recognizable facial expressions and tend to happen automatically. Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that emotion-induced facial expressions are universal. This suggestion was a centerpiece idea to his theory of evolution, implying that emotions and their expressions were biological and adaptive. Saad , and Aamir S. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer.
Malik, ym. This article was submitted to Emotion Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Received Nov 29; Accepted Aug The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author s or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice.
No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Abstract Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Keywords: emotional valence, arousal, learning, memory, prefrontal cortex PFC , medial temporal lobe MTL , amygdala, neuroimaging.
Introduction Emotional experiences are ubiquitous in nature and important and perhaps even critical in academic settings, as emotion modulates virtually every aspect of cognition. Emotions, Moods, Feelings, Affects and Drives Subjective terms used in affective neuroscience include emotions, moods, feelings, affects and drives. A review of 92 putative definitions and nine skeptical statements Kleinginna and Kleinginna, suggests a definition with a rather broad consensus: simple.
Recent Evidence Regarding the Role of Emotion in Learning and Memory The impact of emotion on learning processes is the focus of many current studies. The Evolutionary Framework of Emotion and The Seven Primary Emotional Systems Evolution built our higher minds the faculty of consciousness and thoughts on a foundation of primary-process of emotional mechanism that preprogrammed executive action systems the prototype emotions rely on cognitive processing interpretation and appraisal in the organisms attempt to decipher the type of situation they might be in; in other words, how to deal with emotionally challenging situations, whether it is a play situation or a threat situation where RAGE and FEAR might be the appropriate system to recruit.
Open in a separate window. Primary-Process Emotions Prototype Emotional States The emotional operating system is an inherited and genetically encoded circuitry that anticipates key survival and homeostatic needs.
Tertiary-Process Emotions Higher Cognitive Functions Higher cognitive functions operate within the cortical regions, including the frontal cortex for awareness and consciousness functions such as thinking, planning, emotional regulation and free-will intention-to-act , which mediate emotional feelings.
Amygdala—Hippocampus Interactions The findings of previous studies suggest that the amygdala is involved in emotional arousal processing and modulation of the memory processes encoding and storage that contribute to the emotional enhancement of memory McGaugh et al.
Table 1 The prefrontal cortex PFC sub-regions, corresponding Brodmann areas, and associated cognitive-emotional functions. Controls social-emotional interaction to coordinate rapid action selection processes, detection of emotional conflicts and inhibition of emotionally driven responses. Disruption leads to loss of control over automatic emotional tendencies and more errors in rule-driven responses Volman et al. The pursuit of higher behavioral goals, with specialized roles in the explicit processing of internal mental states in WM, relational integration, and memory retrieval Ramnani and Owen, Reward processing Haber and Knutson, Emotion regulation Ochsner and Gross, Emotion regulation Opialla et al.
Right VLPFC supports memory encoding and retrieval of visuospatial stimuli, action imitation and motor inhibition Levy and Wagner, Dorsal-caudal mPFC involved in appraisal-expression of negative emotion; ventral-rostral PFC generates emotional regulation-responses Etkin et al.
OFC 11, 12, 14 Decision making Bechara et al. Emotional processing and responses Northoff et al. Reward processing and reinforcement learning Rolls, Effects Deriving From Different Modalities of Emotional Stimuli on Learning and Memory As discussed above, evidence indicates the neural mechanisms underlying the emotional processing of valence and arousal involve the amygdala and PFC, where the amygdala responds to emotionally arousing stimuli and the PFC responds to the emotional valence of non-arousing stimuli.
Table 2 Comparison of different emotional stimulus categories. ERP Frontal, central and posterior regions Faces enhanced N amplitude reflecting that spatial attention modulates face encoding at lateral posterior electrodes.
However, N was insensitive to emotional expression. Reported the importance of valence and arousal in emotion-related ERP effects.
Neuroimaging Techniques for the Investigation of Emotional-Cognitive Interactions The brain regions associated with cognitive-emotional interactions can be studied with different functional neuroimaging techniques fMRI, PET, and fNIRS to examine hemodynamic responses indirect measurement.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a widely used functional neuroimaging tool for mapping of brain activation as it provides a high spatial resolution a few millimeters. Positron Emission Tomography PET Positron emission tomography is another functional neuroimaging tool that maps CNS physiology and neural activation by measuring glucose metabolism or regional cerebral blood flow rCBF.
Electroencephalography EEG Electroencephalography obtains high temporal resolution in milliseconds, portable, less expensive, and non-invasive techniques by attaching scalp electrodes to record brain electrical activity. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy fNIRS Functional near-infrared spectroscopy is an emerging and relatively low-cost imaging technique that is also portable and non-invasive.
Factors Affecting the Effect of Emotion on Learning and Memory The preceding section described neuroimaging techniques used to examine brain responses to emotional stimuli during WM processing leading to LTM. Individual Differences A number of studies have reported numerous influences in addition to a range of individual differences in emotional processing.
Age-Related Differences Studies have also shown that older adults are associated with the greater familiarity with psychological stress and emotional experiences, thus causing positivity biases in emotional processing and better emotional control than in younger adults Urry and Gross, ; Allard and Kensinger, Emotional Stimulus Selection The selection of emotional stimuli for experimental studies is generally divided into two streams: 1 discrete emotional, and 2 dimensional emotions of valence, arousal, dominance and familiarity Russell, ; Barrett, Self-assessment Techniques There are numerous self-assessment techniques used to measure individual emotional states Bradley and Lang, Neurocognitive Research Design The neuroscience of cognition and emotion requires appropriate task designs to accomplish specific study objectives Amin and Malik, Concluding Remarks, Open Questions, and Future Directions Substantial evidence has established that emotional events are remembered more clearly, accurately and for longer periods of time than are neutral events.
Author Contributions CMT drafted this manuscript. Conflict of Interest Statement The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Footnotes Funding. References Aftanas L. Human anterior and frontal midline theta and lower alpha reflect emotionally positive state and internalized attention: high-resolution EEG investigation of meditation.
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