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Hemisphere Specialization
- Right Hemisphere
- Left
Hemisphere
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Right Hemisphere (Hemisphere Specialization)
- Responds more readily to the emotional content of stimuli
- Unconcious; Automatic
- "Primary Appraisal"
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Primary Appraisals
- One system provides an immediate, unconcious evaluation of whether the stimulus is good or bad
- Automatic emotion reactions to events and objects in the environment, which motivate rapid approach or avoidance responses
- Probably involves the amygdala
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Left Hemisphere (Hemisphere Specialization)
- Is more ready to interpret experience in terms of language
- Concious; though-like; gives rise to specific emotions
- "Secondary Appraisal"
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Secondary Appraisal
Provide more deliberate, concious, complex assessments in terms of such matters as what caused the event and what to do about it
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Murphy & Zajonc (1993) Experiment
- Subjects are shown photos of people smiling or displaying facial anger
- "Suboptimal" subliminal condition, viewed photos for 4 min and had no idea what face they had seen
- "Optimal" sondition, viewed photos fo 1 sec and were clearly aware of which faces they had viewed
- After viewing faces, all subjects viewed Chinese ideographs and rated how much the liked them
- For the suboptimal faces, smiling face led subjects to express greater liking for the Chinese ideographs that followed them
- No such priming appeared with the opitmally presented faces
- When we are conciously aware of emotionally charged stimuli, they are less likely to sway our judgements of other stimuli
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Negative Evaluations
- Appear to be more potent than our positive evaluations
- Makes evolutionary sense, since it is better to pay attention danger than safety
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Discrete Approaches
- Emphasizes that unique appraisals give rise to different emotions
- Primary appraisal is not just positive or negative; each mode is a state of readiness
- Secondary appraisal --> core relational theme (the essential meaning for each emotion)
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Dimensional Approaches
- Focus on the many components of appraisals that relate to different emotions
- Dimensions are the basic units of the meaning ascribed to events in your life
- Emotions are found to be defined by a distinct pattern of appraisals
- Certain demensions stand out in their ability to differentiate among related emotions
- Causality is important in emotion-related appraisal
- ... the same negative event may happento you but which emotion you experience will depend on how you appraise the causes
- EX. Not doing well on exam- whether it was your fault (guilt) or someone else's fault (anger) will determine your emotion
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Emotional Lexicon Properties
- Emotional words
- Applying a label to an emotional experience helps identify the intentional onject of an experience
- Many emotion words have metaphorical content
- Our emotional lexicon has structure
- Broadest (superordinate) level, basic level of knowledge, subordinate level
- Culture differences (hyperrecognized emotions)
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Concept of Emotions as Prototypes
- People tend to to think about emotions in term of prototypes (something like a script)
- Implies that there are no sharp boundaries between emotion categories
- Helps account for the varieties of experiences that are represented by one category of emotion
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