EMOTION AS BEHAVIOUR

EMOTION AS BEHAVIOUR
Those who take a behavioural perspective on emotion view it as something that we do rather than something that we feel. Hull and Skinner, for example, adopted three main approaches when tackling emotion (although these had petered out by the 1970s).
1. Emotionality The openfield test was used to study emotionality in rats. Levels of emotionality, [emotionality the extent to which we react emotionally – akin to a personality trait, and thought to be partly inherited.] reflected in changes in defecation and urination, increase when rats are placed in a large, brightly lit space. This is perhaps an evolutionary precursor to the reactions of many people to strange environments.
Within a few generations, rats can be bred to be either less or more emotional in this situation, showing that emotionality is at least partly under genetic control. Emotionality was also studied by observing the perseverative effects of noxious stimuli. Typically, rats were given an electric shock prior to their normal time of eating, drinking or pressing of a lever to obtain food. The perseverative emotional effects of shock were increased food and water intake but the suppression of instrumental behaviour such as lever-pressing. In more detail, the effects depended on the quality of the food and the duration of the shock. The intake of food adulterated with quinine was lowered even further, whereas the intake of food enhanced by sucrose was actually elevated. On the other hand, prolonged durations of prior shock always led to the suppression of intake.
2. The frustration effect Think of how you feel and what you do if you put money into a vending machine, press the button or pull the drawer, and nothing happens. Amsel (1958, 1962) trained rats to run down an alley to food in a goal box and, from there, along a second alley to a second goal box. When the first goal box was left empty, the rats ran faster along the second alley.
This increase in vigour is known as the frustration effect. [frustration effect an increase in the vigour of responding, following the absence of reward, in a place where reward was experienced previously] It is reasonable to regard an increase in behavioural vigour following the frustration of experiencing non-reward, where reward was previously experienced, as an indirect measure of emotion.
3. Conditioned emotional response Again using laboratory animals, the procedures that demonstrate conditioned emotional response involve a mixture of classical and instrumental conditioning.
Picture a rat in a Skinner box pressing a bar for food reinforcement. Sometimes a light comes on and is followed by an unavoidable electric shock. The rat soon learns to associate light and shock. When the light is on, it will decrease its rate of barpressing. After the shock, it will increase it again. This effect is sometimes known as conditioned anxiety and sometimes as conditioned suppression.
Much of everyday life appears to be characterized by this type of mixture of instrumental and classical conditioning. Unconditioned stimuli are frequently emotional and influence other behaviour. Millenson (1967) used these ideas to suggest a three-part behavioural model of emotion, in which all emotions are seen as deriving from various intensities and combinations of anxiety, elation and anger. As we have seen, a neutral stimulus that leads to a negative unconditioned stimulus leads in turn to anxiety. Moreover, a neutral stimulus that leads to an unconditioned positive stimulus (say, free food to a hungry rat) leads to elation, and a neutral stimulus that leads to the removal of an unconditioned positive stimulus results in anger. Variations in intensity and duration of the stimuli and the links between them are thought in the terms of this model to lead to variations in the intensity of these types of emotion.

EMOTION AS FEELING

EMOTION AS FEELING
Imagine that you are sitting at the dinner table on a visit to our family. You bear them no ill will but did not really want to make the visit, having other things you would have preferred to do. The conversation ebbs and flows in much the usual way as your parents start talking to your younger brothers about their clothes and their school grades. You eat quietly, letting the conversation lap around you, but it is impossible to remain indifferent. You feel little bursts of empathy and sympathy for your brothers, remembering what you had to go through at their age. You feel old naggings of resentment. You look at your parents and feel sad at their lack of change as they become older. You worry about the work that you have to do and keep feeling needles of concern about a relationship that might be going wrong. None of this shows on your face as you calmly eat your meal. How might different schools of psychological thought seek to appraise this scenario? Well, phenomenological psychologists, for example, emphasize the study of consciousness and subjective experience, and argue that psychologists should study what people experience, here and now, at this moment, in their present state. This is very much a holistic view, considering the whole, integrated person. Phenomenologists such as Giorgi (1970) argue that the foremost study of human beings should involve their consciousness. Of course, there are then considerable difficulties of measurement in the material of interest. How is it possible to work out what Rodin’s Thinker might be feeling (see figure 6.2)? The questionnaire as an assessment method Recently, the experiential aspects of emotion have been investigated in a series of diary studies. These either involve keeping emotion diaries (Oatley & Duncan, 1992) or analysing previously published diaries (Haviland & Goldston, 1992). But the main way of assessing emotional experience is by reports, often in response to a questionnaire.
A strong argument in favour of assessing emotional experience by questionnaire has been put forward by Scherer, Wallbott and Summerfield (1986) in a book entitled Experiencing Emotion. They focused on four of the basic universal emotions – joy, sadness, fear and anger – and asked participants to describe significant episodes involving these emotions that they had experienced during the previous few weeks. Being particularly interested in cultural differences in the experience of these emotions, Scherer et al. conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study throughout Europe (Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and West Germany) and Israel.
The research was concerned with:
1. the antecedent situation (e.g. what types of situation elicit different emotions? what are the important social settings?);
2. differentiated actions (e.g. are different behaviour patterns reported for different emotions? do the various response patterns differ in importance?);
3. person specificity (e.g. are there differences in the experience of emotion due to age, gender, social and occupational background?); and
4. social regulation and control (e.g. are different amounts of regulation or control reported with respect to the different emotions? are there individual differences in control?).

As an illustration of the investigators’ analysis, they found clear differences in the duration of the experienced emotions. Fear appears to last from a few seconds to about an hour, anger between a few minutes and a few hours, joy from an hour to a day, and sadness from a day to many days. Although there were some cultural differences in the emotional experiences, the similarities across cultures were more marked .

FIVE PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION

FIVE PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION
Emotion is a combination of all these functions, although the balance between them varies from time to time. If any one of them is left out, the richness of emotion decreases. Together they define emotion, and emotion defines the colour of our lives. Any definition of emotion must therefore be intricate. Kleinginna and Kleinginna (1981) reviewed many definitions of emotion and integrated them into the following: Emotion is a complex set of interactions among subjective and objective factors, mediated by neural/hormonal systems, which can (a) give rise to affective experiences such as feelings of arousal, pleasure/displeasure; (b) generate cognitive processes such as emotionally relevant perceptual effects, appraisals, labeling processes; (c) activate widespread physiological adjustments to the arousing conditions; and (d) lead to behaviour, that is often, but not always, expressive, goal-directed, and adaptive.
The five perspectives on emotion described above have given rise to five approaches to its investigation. There is not an exact mapping, but, as will become clear, each of these approaches embraces particular types of measurement, empirical research and theory.

PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION

PERSPECTIVES ON EMOTION
Emotions colour and enrich our lives, and help to energize us so that we can deal with whatever comes our way. They are adaptive and basic to human existence. In spite of its fundamental importance to life, emotion is hard to define because it can be viewed from five distinct but nevertheless interrelated perspectives.
1. In the everyday sense, it is the subjective experience of emotion that seems to be most important to us. You feel happy and I feel sad, you feel angry and I feel embarrassed. Subjectively, these experiences give emotion its urgency, an urgency that can range from pleasant to unpleasant, from exciting to debilitating. Of course, feeling extends beyond emotion: as well as feeling happy, disgusted or ashamed, we can also feel pain, sick, ill, an ache. Nevertheless, it is the feeling aspect of emotion that seems to be so significant in everyday life.
2. Emotion has its behavioural aspects. An angry conversation takes a different course from a calm conversation. If you were extremely anxious in an examination, you would perform differently than if you were only mildly anxious. You can see emotional behaviour in the facial expressions of other people. You also know that not only does a smile feel different from a frown, but it also has different social consequences. In other words, emotion prepares us for action; it has an ‘action readiness’ associated with it that frequently translates into behaviour.
3. Physiological changes are involved in emotion. Narrowly escape a road accident and you can feel your heart beating faster and your muscles trembling. You can feel your face blush as you tip too far back and fall off your chair in class.
4. Emotion involves cognition, thought and emotion being intertwined. We perceive things and appraise their value to us – and it is this value that is thought to generate the emotion. This is a significant (perhaps even a necessary) forerunner to our emotional reactions. Whether or not emotion and cognition are necessary to each other, they are certainly strongly linked. Spend a moment or two thinking of a close friend and then thinking of a close competitor and compare the emotional reactions that begin to occur.
5. Emotion occurs in a context that is usually social, although it is possible to experience emotion when alone. Emotion tends to have a social communication function even when its biological significance is paramount, as with certain types of fear.

EMOTION

EMOTION
The complexity of emotion sets limits on how psychologists can set about its scientific investigation and measurement. This has led different investigators to emphasize different aspects of emotion and to develop measurement techniques that spring from each of these approaches. As we will see, these range from self-report, diary-keeping and questionnaires, through coding of facial expressions, to the intricacies of psychophysiological and neurophysiological measurement.

Psychologists have also developed quite distinct descriptive languages, depending on their perspective. To speak of the feelings of anger is quite different from describing its typical facial expression, or its characteristic physiological changes. A particular problem comes from the existence of a strong folk psychology of emotion. Because we are used to observing emotion and thinking about it in everyday life, over time, cultures and subcultures have developed their own language for communicating about emotion. The language used in the scientific study of emotion is simply another of these.

There are important differences between a measurement-based science and an everyday folk psychology. The layperson might argue that if something as complex as emotion is studied through scientific methods, then much of its richness is lost. On the other hand, the psychologist/ scientist would argue that if something cannot be studied using the methods of science then it will not be possible to say anything useful about it. In practice, it is possible both to measure emotion and to make firm science-based statements about it. However, emotion as understood in everyday terms and as portrayed in fiction offers insights that should not be ignored. The fundamental problem in the study of emotion concerns the links between subjectivity and objectivity. In everyday life, feeling, or the subjective side of emotion, is central.

OLFACTORY PATHWAYS - TASTE + SMELL

OLFACTORY PATHWAYS - TASTE + SMELL
Flavour refers to a combination of taste and smell. The connections of the taste and olfactory (smell) pathways in primates suggest that the necessary convergence may also occur in the orbitofrontal cortex. Consistent with this, Rolls and Baylis (1994) showed that some neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex (10 per cent of those recorded) respond to both taste and olfactory inputs. Some of these neurons respond equally well to, for example, both a glucose taste and a fruit odour. Interestingly, others also respond to a visual stimulus representing, say, sweet fruit juice. This convergence of visual, taste and olfactory inputs produced by food could provide the neural mechanism by which the colour of food influences what we taste. For example, experimental participants reported that a red solution containing sucrose may have the flavour of a fruit juice such as strawberry, even when there was no strawberry flavour present; the same solution coloured green might subjectively taste of lime. There is also another olfactory area in the orbitofrontal cortex. Some of these olfactory neurons respond to food only when the monkey is hungry, and so seem to represent the pleasantness or reward value of the smell of food. These neurons therefore function in a similar manner with respect to smell as the secondary taste neurons function with respect to taste. The orbitofrontal cortex also contains neurons that respond to the texture of fat in the mouth. Some of these fat-responsive neurons also respond to taste and smell inputs, and thus provide another type of convergence that is part of the representation of the flavour of food. A good example of a food that is well represented by these neurons is chocolate, which has fat texture, sweet taste and chocolate smell components.

A matter of taste And Brain

A matter of taste And Brain
How are taste signals (which provide one of the most significant rewards for eating) processed through different stages in our brains, to produce (among other effects) activation of the lateral hypothalamic neurons described above .
Some of the brain connections and pathways in the macaque monkey. The monkey is used to illustrate these pathways because neuronal activity in non-human primates is considered to be especially relevant to understanding brain function and its disorders in humans. During the first few stages of taste processing (from the rostral part [rostral towards the head or front end of an animal, as opposed to caudal (towards the tail)] of the nucleus of the solitary tract, through the thalamus, to the primary taste cortex), representations of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and protein tastes are developed (protein represents a fifth taste, also referred to as ‘umami’). The reward value or pleasantness of taste is not involved in the processing of the signal as yet, because the primary responses of these neurons are not influenced by whether the monkey is hungry or satiated. The organization of these first few stages of processing therefore allows the primate to identify tastes independently of whether or not it is hungry. In contrast, in the secondary cortical taste area (the orbitofrontal cortex), [orbitofrontal cortex above the orbits of the eyes, part of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the frontal lobes in front of the motor cortex and the premotor cortex] the responses of taste neurons to a food with which the monkey is fed to satiety decrease to zero (Rolls et al., 1989, 1990). In other words, there is modulation or regulation of taste responses in this tasteprocessing region of the brain. This modulation is also sensoryspecific (see, for example, figure 5.6). So if the monkey had recently eaten a large number of bananas, then there would be a decreased response of neurons in this region of the orbitofrontal cortex to the taste of banana, but a lesser decrease in response to the taste of an orange or melon. This decreased responding in the orbitofrontal cortex neurons would be associated with a reduced likelihood for the monkey to eat any more bananas (and, to a lesser degree, any more orange or melon) until the satiety had reduced.
So as satiety develops, neuronal activity in the secondary taste cortex appears to make food less acceptable and less pleasant – the monkey stops wanting to eat bananas. In addition, electrical stimulation in this area produces reward, which also decreases in value as satiety increases (Mora et al., 1979). It is possible that outputs from the orbitofrontal cortex subsequently influence behaviour via the connections of this region to the hypothalamus, where it may activate the feeding-related neurons described earlier.

BRAIN CONTROLS EATING

BRAIN CONTROLS EATING
Since the early twentieth century, we have known that damage to the base of the brain can influence food intake and body weight. One critical region is the ventromedial hypothalamus. Bilateral lesions of this area (i.e. two-sided, damaging both the left and right) in animals leads to hyperphagia (overeating) and obesity (see Rolls, 1999). By contrast, Anand and Brobeck (1951) discovered that bilateral lesions (that is, damage) of the lateral hypothalamus can lead to a reduction in feeding and body weight. Evidence of this type led, in the 1950s and 1960s, to the view that food intake is controlled by two interacting ‘centres’ – a feeding centre in the lateral hypothalamus and a satiety centre in the ventromedial hypothalamus. But problems arose with this dual centre hypothesis. Lesions of the ventromedial hypothalamus were found to act indirectly by increasing the secretion of insulin by the pancreas, which in turn reduces plasma glucose concentration, resulting in feeding. This has been demonstrated by cutti ng the vagus nerve, which disconnects the brain from the pancreas, preventing ventromedial hypothalamic lesions from causing hypoglycaemia, and therefore preventing the consequent overeating. So the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus is now thought of as a region that can influence the secretion of insulin and, indirectly, affect body weight, but not as a satiety centre per se. On the other hand, the hypothesis that damage to the lateral hypothalamus produces a lasting decrease in food intake and body weight has been corroborated by injecting focal neurotoxins (agents that kill brain cells in a very specific manner, such as ibotenic acid), into rats. These damage the local cell bodies of neurons but not the nerve fibres passing nearby. Rats with lateral hypothalamus lesions also fail to respond to experimental interventions that normally cause eating by reducing the availability of glucose (Clark et al., 1991).