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 emotion | reactions involving 1.) physiological arousal, 2.) expressive behaviors, and 3.) conscious experience |
| James-Lange Theory | the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological responses to emotion-arousing stimuli |
| Cannon-Bard Theory | the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1) physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion |
| Schachter's Two Factor Theory | the idea that people use two things to identify emotion; physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation; people search the environment for an explanation for reactions & look for external cues to help label emotions |
| valence | a dimension often used to describe and classify emotions that concerns the extent to which an emotion is pleasant or unpleasant (positive or negative) |
| facial feedback | the effect of facial expressions on experienced emotions, as when a facial expression of anger or happiness intensifies feelings of anger or happiness. |
| spillover effect | when one emotion continues from one situation to another; more happy about getting job after running as opposed to just waking up |
| autonomic nervous system | The part of the peripheral nervous system that controls the glands and the muscles of the internal organs (such as the heart). Its sympathetic division arouses; its parasympathetic division calms. |
| sympathetic nervous system (SNS) | The component of the autonomic nervous system that responds to stressful situations by initiating the fight-or-flight response. |
| parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) | Division of the autonomic nervous system that slows down body functions, activated when you relax or when SNS stimulated too long. |
| Yerkes-Dodson Law | states that there is an optimal level of arousal for the best performance of any task; the more complex the task, the lower the level of arousal that can be tolerated before performance deteriorates |
| biofeedback | a system for electronically recording, amplifying, and feeding back information regarding a subtle physiological state, such as blood pressure or muscle tension |
| Hans Selye | psychologist who researched a recurring response to stress that he called General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) |
| General Adaptation Syndrome | Selye's concept of the body's adaptive response to stress in three stages--alarm, resistance, exhaustion |
| Type A | Friedman and Rosenman's term for competitive, hard-driving, impatient, verbally aggressive, and anger-prone people who were more susceptible to heart attacks |
| Type B | Friedman and Rosenman's term for easygoing, relaxed people who had lower heart attack risk |
| polygraph | a machine, commonly used in attempts to detect lies, that measures several of the physiological responses accompanying emotion |
| guilty knowledge test | a modified version of the polygraph test, produces more accurate results by asking questions that should be threatening only to someone who knows the facts of a crime that have not been publicized |
| microexpressions | brief (1/25 - 1/15 of a second), involuntary facial expression in response to stimulus; Psychologist Paul Ekman studied these extensively as a potential means of detecting lies |
| Paul Ekman | Psychologist known for his research on microexpressions |
| catharsis | emotional release; the catharsis hypothesis maintains that "releasing" aggressive energy (through action or fantasy) relieves aggressive urges (NOTE: research has NOT uniformly supported this hypothesis) |
| feel-good, do-good phenomenon | people's tendency to be helpful when already in a good mood |
| subjective well-being | Self-perceived happiness or satisfaction with life. Used along with measures of objective well-being (for example, physical and economic indicators) to evaluate people's quality of life. |
| adaptation-level phenomenon | Our tendency to form judgments (of sounds, of lights, of income) relative to a neutral level defined by our prior experience. For example, a $500 bonus would be exciting if you never got one before, but unappealing if you usually get a $1000 bonus for the same task. |
| relative deprivation | the perception that one is worse off relative to those with whom one compares oneself; also works in reverse (happiness increases if you realize you are better off than some comparison group) |
| Neal Miller | psychologist who studied biofeedback |