Chapters 11 & 13

  There are different definitions of emotion, but many include a cognitive aspect, a behavioral/physiological aspect, and feeling.

Emotions can arouse both the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the nervous system, and most situations arouse parts of both. But are these physical symptoms the result of an emotion, or is an emotion what we label a set of physical responses? The James-Lange theory suggests the latter. According to the theory, an event triggers an appraisal of the situation, followed by an appropriate action, including changes to physiology like increased heart rate. Then comes the emotional feeling. The principal idea of the James-Lange theory is that of cognition, behavior, and feeling, the feeling aspect is not first, but last of these three.

Cognitions, behaviors, and feelings don’t always “stick” together. For example, you can have a cognition about a danger and take action without feeling much fear (getting a flu shot). And sometimes feelings are hard to connect to cognitions. Also, many emotions trigger similar activation of parts of the nervous system. Fear and anger are quite similar.

In studies, researchers have been able to identify neurons in the amygdala that correspond to perceiving an emotion in someone else, but not for experiencing an emotion oneself. Scans for these feelings highlight many different areas, and there is no way so far to distinguish between emotions.

All of this leads researchers to ask whether emotion is biological fact or a social construct.

The best evidence for emotion is facial expressions, some of which are recognizable across cultures. Happiness is one of them. Anger, however, may look different in different cultures. If there are these kinds of universal, basic emotions, though, it's clear they don't each correspond to a particular part of the amygdala or some other part of the brain. Instead, they may have signature pattern of activity that is unique to the emotion.

    Like the feeling part of emotion, cognition is similarly difficult to pin down. What do we know we are aware of, and what does our brain process without our "knowing" it? What researchers do know is that we have limited attention, and a more engaging stimulus can cause us to be unaware of other stimuluses, even though our brain does register them.

    Our upcoming material concerns temperature regulation, which is something our body partially does for us, by doing things like activating our sweat glands. But sometimes we become aware that we are too hot or too cold and need to grab a jacket or step into the shade. It will be interesting to see how much scientists know about how our brain decides when to "alert" us to the problem.