The+Evolution+of+Emotion


 * Notes from Class**

The Evolution of Emotion
 * cuteness - big heads, stubby limbs, big cheeks, tiny noses

Basic Principles of Evolution
 * Natural selection - adaptive characteristics stay, get rid of bad characteristics
 * Mutation - change in the gene
 * Adaptation - positive mutations, give us an advantage for dealing with our environment
 * functional
 * Characteristics increases probability that you will survive long enough to reproduce
 * Characteristic increases probability you will have more offspring that will reproduce
 * Characteristic increases probability that your relatives will survive and have more offspring
 * Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness - gene in the environment can be adaptive over time, environment changes and it is not that adaptive, but it stays
 * Don't talk about survival of the fittest with Darwin

Natural selection - mutations are random, take advatnage of good mutations Survival of the fittest - always trying to strive for perfection

Emotions as Adaptations
 * Some basis in genes
 * Genes started out as random mutations
 * Individuals with emotions have more offspring than those without emotions and/or took better care of their offspring
 * Through natural selection, genes supporting emotions spread through future generations

Cosmides & Tooby (2000)
 * Evolved
 * Reliably developing
 * Species - typical
 * Computational architecture of the human mind
 * Information processing programs -- face detection, risk evaluation, figuring out what others are thinking
 * Emotions are superordinate neural programs - activate subroutines that resolve the situation and inhibit ones that would interfere
 * Heuristic function - short cuts related to emotions, respond to something quickly
 * People are very good at picking out an angry face in a crowd because that person poses the most threat
 * Evolutionary recurrent situation or condition
 * Adaptive problem
 * Cues that signal the presence of the situation
 * Situation detecting algorithms
 * Algorithms that assign priorities
 * Internal communication system
 * Each program and physiological mechanism entrained by an emotion program must have associated algorithms that regulate how it responds to each emotional signal
 * Programs that mobilize emotions -- goals, motivational priorities, information-gathering motivations, perceptual mechanisms, memory, attention, physiology, communication and emotional expression, and behavior

Functions of Emotions
 * Intrapersonal -- provide information to the individual
 * Social function -- adapt to the committed, interdependent and complex relationships among people

Universality of Emotions
 * Facial expressions
 * Appraisal -- Scherer - certain appraisal patterns associated with emotion across cultures
 * Physiological Aspects of Emotions -- cross culturally similar physiological responses to emotions
 * Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust and surprise are universal


 * Chapter 2: The Evolution of Emotion**

An Evolutionary Perspective on Emotion
 * Darwin knew there must be some way that traits were passed down from parents to their offspring, but he did not know about genes
 * The subsequent research on DNA allowed for Darwin’s and Mendel’s theories to be combined into modern evolutionary theory
 * Sometimes gene copying can go awry, this is called a mutation
 * Natural selection – the process by which random genetic mutations that happen to be problematic are removed from the population (because they cause the individuals with them to die or under-reproduce), whereas mutations that happen to be beneficial spread through the population (because they cause the individuals with them to have more offspring or to take better care of their relatives, who share their genes)
 * Adaptations – beneficial characteristics that spread as a result of natural selection
 * A gene-based characteristic is functional if it meets one or more of the following criteria: (1) increases the probability that you will survive long enough to reproduce, (2) increases the probability that you will have more offspring than the next guy and these offspring can survive and reproduce, (3) increases the probability that your relatives will survive and have more offspring
 * Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA) – the time and place in the past when that characteristic spread throughout the population due to natural selection
 * Emotions are adaptations, thus: (1) emotions have some basis in our genes, (2) the genes needed for us to experience emotions started out as random mutations long ago, (3) individuals with emotions had more offspring than individuals without emotions, and/or took better care of their genetic relatives, (4) natural selection caused genes supporting emotions to spread through future generations and become typical of the whole population
 * By-product – a genetically-based characteristic that is neutral, but is due to a mutation that also causes some beneficial trait, and becomes species-typical as that mutation spreads through the population
 * Superordinate neural programs – a hypothesized neural “program” that coordinates the activities of many smaller programs, activating those that will be useful for the function of the program and inhibiting those that will interfere

Intrapersonal Functions of Emotion
 * Intrapersonal functions of emotion – ways in which emotions directly benefit the reproductive fitness of the individual experiencing the emotion
 * When the function of an emotion is intrapersonal, then the situation eliciting the emotion poses a problem for the individual’s fitness, and the effects of the emotion within that individual increase the chance that she will behave in a way that solves the problem
 * Between detecting the problem and resolving it lie dozens of more specific processes, including perceptual shifts, activation of relevant memories, biases in cognitive processing, and physiological changes, all of which facilitate an appropriate behavioral response
 * The idea is that the behavioral response facilitated by the emotion directly resolves the problem

Social Functions of Emotion
 * Humans are ultrasocial (conducting almost all of the business of life in highly cooperative groups)
 * Social functions of emotion – ways in which emotions support committed, interdependent, and complex relationships among people that in turn help us to survive and pass on our genes
 * Emotions often help establish and stabilize relationships with other people in your community

Are some aspects of emotion universal?
 * One kind of evidence to support evolutionary models illustrates that some aspect of emotion is universal
 * Darwin noted that some of the most common human expressions of emotion occur in monkeys and apes as well
 * Darwin recognized that if facial expressions were inherited from primate ancestors, they should be the same in all human cultures
 * Findings from a study on identifying from a picture what emotion the person was feeling, found that most people throughout the world give similar interpretations to certain facial expressions of emotion
 * We are better at determining a person’s emotion if we can see their body and hear their tone of voice. Sometimes we infer people’s emotions from their smell.
 * Measuring people’s accuracy at identifying facial expressions is complicated
 * It is clear that several facial expressions convey roughly the same meaning from culture to culture which gives evidence that humans have a few innate, universal templates for producing and interpreting certain facial expressions. This supports the idea that emotions are a product of our evolution, not just of our culture.
 * People in different regions offered very similar appraisal ratings, on average, for situations in which they had felt that emotion. This study suggests that certain appraisal patterns are associated with the same emotions throughout the world.
 * Perceptions of what is moral and what is not vary a great deal from culture to culture
 * Studies have found that there are some similarities in physiological responding across cultures

**Of snakes and faces: An evolutionary perspective on the psychology of fear** By: ARNE OHMAN

Background: The Preparedness Premise • On one end are instincts which provide responses to specific stimuli without any previous environmental input • On the other end are biologically highly prepared learning of associations between stimuli (Ex: taste aversion learning)
 * Continuum of more or less biologically prepared learning defined in terms of amount of input (learning) needed to produce evidence of behavioral change attributable to the learning

 Enter snakes: Testing the preparedness concept with animal stimuli • Applying the preparedness hypothesis to phobias, proposing that the fears of individuals diagnosed with phobias reflect evolution • Test: putting slides depicting common phobic objects and neutral control stimuli (houses) • Only one pairing was needed for strong conditioning to snakes, whereas, not even 5 pairings of the CS-US was sufficient for conditioning to houses

Enter faces: Preparedness in a social context • Invoked the preparedness theory to predict that an angry face should be more easily conditioned to an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US) than should a happy face • This prediction was confirmed • The amygdala tunes visual brain areas for effective perception of fear-related stimuli • Human ability to communicate by the face is better developed than that of our primate relatives

Animal fears vs. Social fears <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Animal fears are essentially escape and avoidance packages for keeping a safe distance between the potential victim and the threatening beast. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Social fears within an established group are complicated by the conflict between escaping an aggressive group member and remaining within the protective realm of the group. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Rather than actual flight, using the prefrontal brake on the amygdala to promote submissiveness in social conflicts provides means of handling fear within the realms of the group. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Social fears have a more cognitive, strategic character than animal fears.

<span style="color: #000000; display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">Conclusions <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Snakes and faces as evolutionary fear relevant stimuli systematically differ from fear-irrelevant stimuli. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• First, they are more strongly and persistently conditioned to an aversive US than are neutral stimuli. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Second, fear-related responses can be elicited from pictorial representations of both snakes and faces. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Third, snakes and threatening faces both appear to have attentional priority in visual search tasks. <span style="display: block; font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 130%; text-align: left;">• Snakes and faces have in common that they both are likely candidate stimuli for having been selected and primed by evolution.