Examining the interplay between cognition and peripheral nervous activity is crucial for understanding the individual experience of human emotion. Schachter and Singer (1962) demonstrated that the cognitive attribution made by an individual to explain his or her heightened state of arousal following mimicked excitation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) influences the resultant emotional state he or she experiences. Furthermore, previous research has demonstrated that residual excitation from a prior stimulus is open to misattribution to a different source (Cantor, Zillmann, & Bryant, 1975; Rickwood & Price, 1988; White, Fishbein, & Rutstein, 1981; Zillmann, 1971). Informed by these observations, excitation-transfer theory (Zillmann, 1971; …show more content…
Confederate teachers first instigated participant learners by means of either mild-intensity or high-intensity electric shocks, depending on condition. Participants then pedaled an exercise bike in a high-excitation condition or performed a monotonous sewing task in a low-excitation condition. After either pedaling or sewing, the learning scenario resumed with teacher/learner roles reversed. Participants freely selected the intensity of punishment shocks delivered to confederates while researchers recorded shock intensities as a measure of aggressive response. Illustrating the role of attribution in excitation transfer, analysis revealed no main effect for the excitation produced by exercise alone but a significant interaction effect when participants had both exercised and been highly instigated. Participants who had been highly instigated and had exercised began to deliver significantly stronger shock intensities compared to participants who had been highly instigated but had not exercised, with the significant enhancement appearing midway through the scenario. Theoretically, as SNS excitation from exercise decayed and the intensity of bodily arousal faded from participant awareness, salience shifted from the exercise task to the confederate instigator as the implicit source of excitation. The study supported the theory that a transfer of excitation enhanced responses only when the physiological and the cognitive conditions were met: excitation produced by an initial stimulus, and a comparatively more salient stimulus to which the residual portion of prevailing excitation is
The study was set up as a "blind experiment" to capture if and when a person will stop inflicting pain on another as they are explicitly commanded to continue. The participants of this experiment included two willing individuals: a teacher and a learner. The teacher being the real subject and the learner is merely an actor. Both were told that they would be involved in a study that tests the effects of punishment on learning. The learner was strapped into a chair that resembles a miniature electric chair, and was told he would have to learn a small list of word pairs. For each incorrect answer he would be given electric shocks of increasing intensity ranging from 15 to 450 volts. The experimenter informed the teacher's job was to administer the shocks. The...
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Stanley Milgram selected 40 college participants aged 20-50 to take part in the experiment at Yale University. Milgram says, “The point of the experiment is to see how far a person will proceed in a concrete and measureable situation in which he is ordered to inflict increasing pain on a protesting victim” (632). Although the 40 men or women thought that they were in a drawing to see who would be the “teacher” and the “learner,” the drawing was fixed. The learners were a part of Milgram’s study and taken into a room with electrodes attached to their arms. The teachers were to ask questions to the learners and if they answered incorrectly, they were to receive a 15-450 voltage electrical shock. Although the learners were not actually being shocked, the teachers believed t...
Friedman, B. H. Feelings and the body: The Jamesian perspective on autonomic specificity of emotion(2010). Biological Psychology.
...e Morree, H. M., Szabó, B. M., Rutten, G. J., & Kop, W. J. (2013). Central nervous system involvement in the autonomic responses to psychological distress. Netherlands Heart Journal, 21(2), 64-69.
Metaphorically, emotional energy begins with what Peterson (2007) calls a “thud” and causes a feeling in the gut, such as anger, excitement, jealousy, or happiness. This feeling, whether it is positive or negative, grows and puts pressure on the heart, hardening it and closing the openness one may have earlier had towards what other people feel or ideas they may have. When the heart hardens, the brain becomes “flat” and causes the ears to become barred from hearing anything besides what is inside the mind. This process, called th...
The first section explores the “flat-brain theory of emotions, flat-brain syndrome, and flat-brain tango” (Petersen, 2007, pp. 2-45). All three are interrelated (Petersen, 2007). The flat-brain theory of emotions “demonstrates what’s occurring inside of us when things are going well, and how that changes when they are not” (Petersen, 2007, p. 11). Petersen’s (2007) theory “explains how our emotions, thinking, and relating abilities work and how what goes on inside us comes out in the ways we communicate and act” (p. 8). The “flat-brain syndrome” describes what happens when an individual wears their emotions on their sleeve. This “makes it
Cultural based explanations posit that emotions are acquired via socialisation and recognise that cultural beliefs play an important role since research has indicated cultural variations amongst individualistic (USA) and collectivists (Japan) cultures. Studies have also focused on recognition rates of emotions and in relation to age.
Bandura did an experiment with an aim to show that imitative learning could take place despite the absence of reinforcement and award. In one experiment he used a film showing an inflatable doll being jumped, kicked and sat upon. The nursery children who watched the film displayed much more imitative aggression than those who had not seen it. It was also seen that the children who had seen the film were still imitating the aggressive responses when re-observed six months later.
3). By drawing on more advanced biological knowledge of the brain’s activities in different areas, Storbeck and Clore (2007) concluded that the visual cortex could actually identify subliminal stimuli (which is regarded as a kind of cognitive activities) without its being consciously aware of by the subject. The only difference between a conscious and unconscious cognitive processing, they argued, was the strength of firing of the neurons which determined whether such information entered the subject’s consciousness, and leading to a more confident identification of the stimuli. Hence an unconscious processing doesn’t rule out cognitive activities and implies a preferential processing of affective components. Furthermore, they argued that amygdala was not the essential part in the mere exposure effect by citing the case of a patient GY whose amygdala has been severed from his visual cortex (Greve & Bauer, 1990) yet who was still shown to have the mere exposure effect. Therefore, they concluded that emotion and cognition should be treated as interdependent faculties functioning alongside with each other. This advocate was supported by a later meta-analytical review of the brain basis of emotion (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett,
Sutton, D., Wilson, M., Van Kessel, K., & Vanderpyl, J. (2013). Optimizing arousal to manage aggression: A pilot study of sensory modulation.International Journal Of Mental Health Nursing, 22(6), 500. doi:10.1111/inm.12010
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory
The psychologist B. F Skinner believed that “changes in behavior are the result of an individual’s response to events (stimuli) that occur in the environment” (All About Operant Conditioning, 2006, Para 2). The following paper will discuss a learning situation in which an exercise routine is thought. The paper will evaluate the application of instrumental conditioning to this learning situation. As part of the analysis the learning situation will be described, the paper will compare and contrast the concepts of positive and negative reinforcement as related to learning situation, and explain the role of reward and punishment in learning an exercise routine. Finally, the paper will explain which form of instrumental conditioning would be most effective in teaching someone an exercise routine. Instrumental conditioning is the learning procedure that believes that “the organism must act in a certain way before it is reinforced; that is, reinforcement is contingent on the organism’s behavior” (Hergenhahn & Olson, 2005, pg 23). The major contributors of Instrumental conditioning are B.F Skinner, John Watson, and Edward Thorndike. These three theorists believed that “learning is the result of the application of consequences; that is, learners begin to connect certain responses with certain stimuli” (Huitt & Hummel, 1997, Para 1). In society the behaviors individuals manifest are learned behaviors which are learned through some form of conditioning.
One scientist, Damasio, provided an explanation how emotions can be felt in humans biologically. Damasio suggested, “Various brain structures map both the organism and external objects to create what he calls a second order representation. This mapping of the organism and the object most likely occurs in the thalamus and cingulate cortices. A sense of self in the act of knowing is created, and the individual knows “to whom this is happening.” The “seer” and the “seen,” the “thought” and the “thinker” are one in the same.” By mapping the brain scientists can have a better understandi...
As discussed in class, submission of your solutions to this exam will indicate that you have not communicated with others concerning this exam. You may use reference texts and other information at your disposal. Do all problems separately on clean white standard 8.5” X 11” photocopier paper (no notebook paper or scratch paper). Write on only one side of the paper (I don’t do double sided). Staple the entire solution set in the upper left hand corner (no binders or clips). Don’t turn in pages where you have scratched out or erased excessively, re-write the pages cleanly and neatly. All problems are equally weighted. Assume we are working with “normal” pressures and temperatures with ideal gases unless noted otherwise. Make sure you list all assumptions that you use (symmetry, isotropy, binomial expansion, etc.).