Emotion KAREN

“a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioural, and physiological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a significant matter or event” - APA dictionary of psychology

• Experiential component • Behavioural component • Physiological component

what the mind has conscious access to. E.g. I feel sacred

What physical actions we perform with our body – the tendency the emotions produce

Prepares body for future actions

A disposition to person emotionally in a practical way that may last for hours, days, or even weeks, perhaps at a low level without the person knowing what prompted that state

Express emotion as points in continuous space This location is specified by a series of numbers, with one corresponding to each dimension

2 dimensions • Arousal - links to energy levels • Valence - positive valence responds to good and negative feelings - used to encourage the individual to take decisions that are good for the organism’s security

• Pleasure - like valence • Arousal - links to energy levels • Dominance - distinguishes further - e.g. Fear and anger produce same pint on the circumflex model but a re very different when considering dominance

He believes we should focus on core emotions • Distinctive universal signals – there function to communicate emotional state with conspecifics (should occur cross-culturally) • Distinctive physiological signature – e.g., heart rate • Have an automatic appraisal mechanism – emotion must be a spontaneous reaction to a situation • Must have universal antecedent events – same events should elicit same emotions cross culturally

Efficient summary of relationships between emotions The dimensions of the models can have underlying biological significance

Limited in expressivity – struggle to provide a complete account of human emotion

Capture subtle differences between emotions

By being able to create many categories you end up with a long list with no clear structure Are emotions continuous or categorical?

Broad set of terms as to what an emotion is Conducted through a series of self-reported questionnaires based on how people experience emotions in musical contexts Model is hierarchical Top level being sublimity, vitality, and unease – each level is thus broken into more specific terms There is a positivity bias in this model – as positive emotions were more widely reported

• Aesthetic versions of ‘ordinary’ emotions 2. Appreciation of aesthetic virtues

• Aesthetic emotions are deeply linked with pleasure and displeasure • Pleasure is largely determined by the intensity of the aesthetic emotion • An intense experience can be pleasant – listening to something that evokes strong feelings of sadness can correspond to a pleasant aesthetic experience

• Self report • Physiological • Neuroimaging

a) Heart rate b) Respiration c) Goosebump recorder d) Skin conductance response e) Skin temperature f) Facial electromyography g) Pupillometry

Avoids mediation through vocabulary, they are necessary to understand full response pattern

Produces noisy data streams Meaning more participants or longer testing sessions to reach sufficient reliability Difficult to distinguish emotions in fine detail methods can be invasive Potentially changing the listening experience

Gain insight into brain processing underlying a particular emotional response

Functional Magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) i. FMRI assess the blood oxygen levels of different regions of the brain, through this neural activity you can hypothesise what brain areas are involved in particular cognitive processes • Amygdala – implicated in pleasant and unpleasant emotions, thought to be used to codify music’s affective positivity or negativity • Nucleus accumbens – is implicated in motivation, aversion and reward; particularly involved in pleasure • Hippocampus – linked to positive tender emotions

Well suited to accessing the deeper brain regions that are associated with emotion processing Provides precise spatial localisation of activity within the brain, helping differentiate the precise process happening