Classifying Emotions, Their Neural Foundations, and Theories of Stress

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Classifying Emotions, Their Neural Foundations, and Theories of Stress

Abnormal Psychology · Chapter 13: Stress-Related Disorders and Emotional ResilienceSection 13.2 · lesson 48 of 9719 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Three live positions, four classical theories, and the one that reached the clinic.

  • Compare the basic-emotion, dimensional and constructionist approaches
  • Describe neural contributions without over-attributing them
  • Compare the classical theories of emotion
  • Explain why appraisal is the practical intervention point

Transcript

Everything said in the video, section by section (2,517 words). Read along, or search it.

Stress-Related Disorders and Emotional Resilience

Classifying Emotions, Their Neural Foundations, and Theories of Stress

Ask two people to describe the same feeling and you may get two incompatible answers. Not because one of them is wrong, but because emotions can be carved up in more than one way. This section is about those competing schemes, and about why the choice has consequences. We look at three approaches to classifying emotion, and the debate between them is live. Then the neural systems involved, described carefully, because popular accounts get this badly wrong. Then the classical theories, which disagree about order rather than about substance. And finally appraisal theory, which is the one that reached clinical practice. Along with three ways of thinking about stress itself.

Why It Matters

A Scheme Decides What Gets Studied

How emotions are carved up is not a bookkeeping question. A classification scheme determines what counts as a research finding. What an instrument measures. And what a clinician looks for. Suppose emotions are a small set of discrete kinds. Then the research question is what distinguishes fear from anger. The instrument asks which emotion a person is experiencing. And the clinical target is a particular emotion in excess. Now suppose instead that emotions are positions on continuous dimensions. The research question concerns valence and arousal. The instrument asks how pleasant, and how activated, the person feels. And the clinical target is a region of that space. So these are not merely different vocabularies for the same findings. They generate different studies. One note before we start. Two debates here are presented as live, because they are live. Neither is presented as the correct view, and this course does not settle them. One more note. This material is educational, and is not a basis for diagnosing anyone.

Basic Emotion

A Small Set of Discrete Kinds

The basic-emotion approach holds that there is a small set of discrete emotions. Each with a distinct evolutionary function. A characteristic physiological and expressive signature. And cross-cultural recognizability. Lists vary, and commonly include fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise. The best-known support comes from studies of facial expression. People from widely separated cultures were asked to match photographed expressions to described situations. Including populations with minimal exposure to outside media. And they did so at rates well above chance. The approach also has an evolutionary rationale that makes sense. An emotion that solves a recurrent problem should be organized as a package. Now the criticisms, which are substantial. Much of the recognition research used forced-choice formats. The participant selects from a short list of provided labels. Performance drops considerably when people are asked to name the emotion freely. The photographs used were frequently posed and exaggerated rather than spontaneous. Recognition rates vary considerably by culture and by emotion. They are far from the near-perfect matching sometimes implied. And attempts to find distinct physiological signatures for each basic emotion have been inconsistent. The autonomic profiles overlap far more than the theory predicts.

Dimensional

Positions, Not Categories

The dimensional approach describes emotional states as positions rather than categories. Two dimensions account for most of the variance in how people rate emotional terms. Valence, running from unpleasant to pleasant. And arousal, running from deactivated to activated. A third dimension, usually described as dominance or control, is sometimes added. The circumplex is the arrangement that results. Emotion terms distribute around a circle in that space, rather than clustering into separate islands. Now look at where angry and afraid sit relative to each other. They are close neighbors on both dimensions. And that captures something real. The two share unpleasantness and high arousal. Which is why they are confusable in self-report, and why they produce overlapping physiological profiles. But notice equally what the arrangement loses. Whatever distinguishes fear from anger is not represented anywhere in this space. And the basic-emotion approach regards that difference as the important part. What the dimensional approach captures that categories miss is worth stating. Emotional states blend and shade into one another rather than switching between kinds. Many everyday states have no clean category label, and are easy to place on two dimensions. And the arrangement predicts which states people confuse, which categorical accounts do not.

Constructionist

Built in the Moment, From General Ingredients

The constructionist approach makes a different move entirely. Emotions are not triggered as pre-set programs. They are constructed in the moment, from more general ingredients. A basic affective state of valence and arousal, together with conceptual knowledge, language, and context. On this account fear is not a package that fires. It is what the brain makes of a particular bodily state, in a particular situation. Using the emotion concepts the person has learned. The evidence offered runs like this. The failure to find consistent distinct physiological signatures is treated as a positive finding. Not as a null result. Emotion vocabularies differ substantially across languages. Terms in some languages have no clean equivalent in others. And experimental work indicates that manipulating context changes how the same bodily state is labeled. The objections raised are serious too. That the approach struggles to explain why the same emotions recur so consistently across cultures. That cross-cultural recognition, even at reduced rates, still requires explanation. That infants and non-human animals show organized emotional behavior before concepts could be acquired. And that the theory can be difficult to test. A sufficiently flexible construction account can accommodate most findings after the event. Now read the evidence and objection columns of that table together. In every case, the strongest evidence for one approach is close to the main objection against another. That symmetry is why the debate has not resolved. The positions are not competing on the same evidence. They emphasize different parts of it.

Alexithymia

When the Emotion Is Not Available to Report

Alexithymia is marked difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotional states. Together with a tendency toward externally oriented thinking, and limited imaginative activity. It is a dimension along which people vary, rather than a diagnosis. Its clinical relevance is broad. Elevated levels are found across several presentations. Including somatic presentations, eating-related and substance-related conditions, and following trauma. Two practical consequences follow. A person high in alexithymia may report bodily sensations where another would report an emotion. Which contributes directly to somatic presentation. And treatments that require identifying and reporting emotional states are harder to deliver. Which is why the emotional vocabulary is sometimes built before anything else is attempted. In an assessment, this changes what you ask. I do not know is frequently an accurate answer. A person who cannot say how they feel may genuinely not have access to that information. Rather than be withholding it. So ask about the body and the situation instead. What was happening, what changed physically, and what they wanted to do at that moment. And expect somatic presentation, which is a reason not to read it as evasion.

Neural Systems

Circuits, Not Centers

Before any of the anatomy, one correction, because it is the default in popular accounts. There is no fear center. No emotion center. No happiness center. The framing in which a structure is an emotion misrepresents how the brain is organized. Structures participate in circuits, and circuits do many things. Any given structure contributes to several functions. And any given function draws on several structures. A region being more active during an emotional task does not make it the seat of that emotion. The amygdala contributes rapid appraisal of significance, particularly potential threat. It assigns salience and initiates responses. But it responds to significance generally, including positive and novel stimuli. Prefrontal regions contribute appraisal, regulation, and modulation of responses initiated elsewhere. They are not a rational controller suppressing an emotional brain. The interaction is bidirectional and continuous. The insula contributes interoception, the representation of internal bodily states. Its role is not specific to emotion. Interoception serves many functions. Reward circuitry contributes motivation, anticipation, and approach toward valued outcomes. Note that anticipation and enjoyment are dissociable. The phrase, the pleasure center, collapses two distinct processes. And the hippocampus and connected regions contribute contextual memory. Which determines whether a situation is the kind in which a response is warranted. That contributes context, rather than emotion itself.

Two Contested Claims

One Overstated, One Simply False

Two claims in this area need their status stated carefully. The first is a widely cited proposal about how threat information travels. It holds that such information reaches the amygdala by two routes. A rapid subcortical route carrying coarse information quickly. And a slower cortical route carrying detailed information after processing. The proposal has intuitive appeal. It would explain how a response can begin before conscious identification. And it is frequently presented as established fact. Its current standing is more contested than that presentation suggests. The evidence for the rapid route in humans is indirect, and has been challenged. Including on grounds of timing, and of what the anatomical pathways can actually carry. So describe it as an influential proposal with continuing debate. And note that the observation it was invented to explain is well supported independently. Emotional responses can begin before conscious recognition. That part is not in doubt. The second claim is simply false, and should be discarded. That one hemisphere is emotional and the other rational. What the evidence supports is narrower, and less memorable. There are asymmetries in emotional processing. Including patterns associated with approach-related and withdrawal-related states. Those are differences in relative contribution, rather than in location. Both hemispheres participate in emotion, and no emotion lives in one of them.

Classical Theories

They Disagree About Order, Not Existence

Three classical theories are standardly taught, and the framing matters. Each is historically important and partially supported, rather than simply superseded. Each identified something real. And the disagreement between them concerns the order of events, not their existence. James-Lange proposes that bodily change comes first. The emotion is the perception of that change. The classic formulation is that we do not tremble because we are afraid. We are afraid because we tremble. Supporting evidence. Bodily feedback does influence emotional experience. Manipulating posture, facial muscles, or arousal alters reported emotion to a measurable degree. The difficulty. Bodily responses were argued to be too slow and too undifferentiated. And people with substantially reduced bodily feedback still report emotions. Cannon-Bard proposes that the bodily change and the experience are produced simultaneously. By a common signal, rather than one causing the other. Supporting evidence. Central processing does initiate both in parallel. The difficulty. It treats bodily feedback as irrelevant to experience, which is too strong a claim. Schachter-Singer two-factor theory proposes that emotion requires two things together. Physiological arousal, and a cognitive label drawn from the context. So the same arousal becomes different emotions depending on how it is interpreted. Supporting evidence. Misattribution of arousal to the wrong source has been demonstrated. The difficulty. The original experimental work has proved difficult to replicate cleanly.

One Episode

Four Accounts of the Same Two Minutes

Take one episode and run all four accounts over it. A composite, constructed for instruction. Naomi is thirty-one, and is giving a presentation to about forty people. Two minutes in, the projector fails. She notices her heart beating hard, her hands unsteady, and heat in her face. She experiences this as anxiety, and feels an impulse to leave the room. Instead she continues without the slides. Afterwards a colleague, who had the same failure in her own session the previous week. That colleague says she found the experience almost funny. James-Lange. The failure produced the bodily changes, and her perception of them is the anxiety. It explains the strong bodily character of what she describes. It explains poorly why her colleague's body, presumably doing something similar, produced amusement. Cannon-Bard. The perception of the failure triggered both simultaneously. It explains the immediacy. She did not notice her heart and then conclude she was anxious. Two-factor. Undifferentiated arousal, labeled from the context available to her. A high-stakes public situation, an audience, a visible failure. Arriving at anxiety. It explains the colleague well. Her context included having survived the same thing. Appraisal. Naomi appraised the failure as threatening her competence in front of colleagues. And appraised her resources as inadequate to the situation. Her colleague made the same primary appraisal and a different secondary one. She had done this before, and knew she could. Now notice what just happened. All four accounts fit the episode. They are distinguished by what they predict about the colleague. That is the correct way to compare theories here. Not by which sounds most plausible for one case. But by which generates a prediction that could fail.

Appraisal

The Element That Can Actually Be Examined

Appraisal theory holds that emotions follow from evaluations of a situation's significance. And that the specific emotion is determined by the pattern of that evaluation. Lazarus's version distinguishes two evaluations, occurring together rather than in strict sequence. Primary appraisal asks whether the situation is relevant to the person's wellbeing. And if so, in what way. As harm already done. As threat of harm to come. Or as challenge, which is demand appraised as an opportunity to be met. Secondary appraisal asks what can be done about it. What resources, options, and control the person has. And reappraisal is the continuous revision of both. As the situation and the person's resources change. Now, why this is the most clinically useful framework in the section. Of the three elements in the sequence, only one is reliably available to work on. The situation is often not modifiable. A diagnosis, a bereavement, or circumstances outside a person's control. The emotion cannot be changed by decision. Instructing a person not to feel something is ineffective. And treating the feeling as the target invites exactly that error. But the appraisal can be examined. What the person takes the situation to mean, and what they take their resources to be. Both are open to investigation. One qualification. Where an appraisal is accurate, there is nothing to correct. And the work moves to the situation.

Stress Theories

Each Captures What the Last One Missed

Three approaches to stress, and each captures what the last one missed. The response-based approach treats stress as the organism's physiological reaction to demand. That is Selye's position. It measures physiological indices of activation. What it misses is why the same demand produces different responses in different people. It also treats the response as non-specific, which thirteen point one showed it is not. The stimulus-based approach treats stress as a property of events. Some events are stressful, and can be ranked by how much. It measures counts and weightings of life events experienced in a period. What it misses is individual differences, entirely. The same event is not equivalent across people. And anticipatory stress has no stimulus at all to count. The transactional approach treats stress as a relationship, continuously reappraised. Between demand and perceived capacity. It measures appraisal, perceived control, and perceived resources alongside the demand. What it misses is measurement precision. It depends heavily on self-report. So note the shape of that. The transactional model's weakness is methodological, not conceptual. It explains more and measures less easily, which is a trade-off rather than a refutation. One last pattern worth carrying out of this section. Difficulties in generating, identifying, and regulating emotion recur across many conditions. Reduced capacity for pleasure is a generation difficulty. So is excessive threat-related generation. Alexithymia is an identification difficulty. And difficulty modulating states once they arise is a regulation difficulty. If the same processing difficulty appears across conditions defined by different content. Then the process may be a more useful treatment target than the category.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Classifying Emotions, Their Neural Foundations, and Theories of Stress

What is the difference between the basic-emotion, dimensional and constructionist views of emotion?
The basic-emotion view holds that there is a small set of discrete emotions, such as fear, anger and sadness, each with its own function and signature. The dimensional view places emotional states on continuous dimensions, chiefly valence and arousal. The constructionist view says emotions are built in the moment from a basic affective state plus concepts, language and context. The debate between them remains unresolved because each emphasizes different evidence.
How do the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard and Schachter-Singer theories of emotion differ?
The three theories disagree mainly about the order of events. James-Lange says bodily change comes first and the emotion is our perception of it. Cannon-Bard says bodily change and emotional experience are triggered at the same time by a common signal. Schachter-Singer two-factor theory says emotion requires physiological arousal plus a cognitive label drawn from the context. Each is partially supported rather than simply wrong.
What is alexithymia?
Alexithymia is marked difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotional states, together with a tendency toward externally oriented thinking and limited imaginative activity. It is a dimension on which people vary rather than a diagnosis, and elevated levels appear in somatic, eating-related and substance-related conditions and after trauma. A person high in alexithymia may report bodily sensations instead of emotions, so asking about the body and the situation often works better than asking how they feel.
What are primary and secondary appraisal in Lazarus's appraisal theory?
In Lazarus's appraisal theory, primary appraisal asks whether a situation matters to a person's wellbeing and how, as harm, threat or challenge. Secondary appraisal asks what can be done about it, judging available resources, options and control. Reappraisal continually revises both. The theory is clinically useful because a situation often cannot be changed and an emotion cannot be switched off by decision, but the appraisal can be examined.

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