Chapter-2: Cognitive and emotional consequences of anthropomorphic product appearance
3. Causes of human emotions
Emotions can be distinguished by their causes; different emotions are caused by different things. It is very useful to categorize the causes of emotion as the origins are different: cognitive and non-cognitive.
3.1. Cognitive causes:
Prinz (2012) highlighted that cognitive events can be understood in terms of a pre-theoretical umbrella term “Thoughts”. Thoughts can be defined as mental episodes that require concepts which human beings can build through their experience. Thoughts may be an automatic mental episode that may not be the copy of stimuli that affect our senses. They may go beyond ordinary sensation and present the world being a certain way. “Thoughts can occur through the process of deliberation and can be affected by many causes, at least by reasoning”. In this section, cognitive causes of emotion refer to how a thought causes emotion.
Cognitive scientists have widely accepted that thoughts can cause emotions but it depends on what kind of thought it is. Many thoughts such as rose is red, ice is cold etc. may have little impact on most people. Thoughts which are evoking emotion, likely to be evaluative thoughts: thoughts that assess things in way that reflects our attitudes towards them. For example, one may not have any emotional response to the thought that kitchen knife is sharp, but emotion will likely follow the thought that kitchen knife is dangerous. The concept of more dangerous or less dangerous is directly related to the degree of well-beings. Many emotion researchers use the term appraisal to denote evaluation of well-being-ness (Arnold, 1960; Desmet, 2002). An appraisal refers to a thought representing an organism-environment relationship that bears on well-being (Lazarus, 1991). It is well documented fact that appraisal may affect emotions. In 1964, Lazarus and Alfert conducted a study in which they used same film clip with different narratives. Their study reveals that different narratives generate different appraisals. In another study, Smith and Lazarus (1993) gave vignettes with different contents to manipulate appraisals and got different emotional responses e.g. if participants invited to construe an event as a loss, they might feel sad.
According to their view, there are several appraisal dimensions trigger every emotion. That means if we ask these questions about a situation: is it goal- congruent or incongruent? Who deserves blame or credits? What copping strategies are available to me? In such situations every answer to these questions corresponds to every emotion. For example, happiness is goal-congruent, anger involves placing blame on others and fear involves coping strategies. This theory is known a dimensional appraisal theory. This theory is not universally accepted as some researchers think that emotions are elicited by thoughts such as „I am in danger‟, „I have been wronged‟ etc.
Researches on molecular appraisals were designed to show how changing thoughts in fine grain scale can influence our emotions (e.g. a shift from other blame to self-blame can make a shift from anger to guilt). It may be due to the fact that these cognitive changes influence emotions only by affecting our course gained appraisals. That means molecular appraisals may affect our emotions but
not an essential aspect of emotion elicitation. Some dimensional appraisal theorists may agree, treating the molecular appraisals as a part of semantic analysis of emotion terms rather than as components of an emotion process model (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988).
Most of the cognitive theories regarding emotion and design explained about appraisal process. Details about these theories are discussed in the subsequent sections of this chapter.
3.2. Non-cognitive causes
Most of the non-cognitive elicitors of emotions are perceptual states. For example, a fuel smell can cause disgust, a sudden loss of support can cause fear and seeing someone cry can cause sadness. It can be assumed that perceptual states may evoke/induce emotions by affecting our appraisal process. Perception generally requires interpretation before emotion arises. Perceptual states may or may not require interpretation to elicit an emotion. For example, when there is a sudden sound, it rapidly generates an emotion. Such stimuli would seem gratuitous to postulate an intervening thought. More direct evidence for emotion induction without cognition comes from studies in the field of neuroscience.
Amygdala is an almond-shaped structure of brain composed of collection of nuclei. This brain structure is closely related with emotional responses. Laberge et al. (2006) stated that amygdala is an ancient brain structure- a part of limbic system- with homologues in reptiles. This structure of brain is itself too primitive to harbor cognitive states. Cognitive states can cause emotions via amygdala, because it is connected with frontal cortex which is evolutionary advanced in human. It is evident that amygdala responses can by triggered by non-cognitive structures of brain, including both cortical and subcortical perception pathways (LeDoux, 1996). Subcortical pathways make emotional changes most dramatically. The thalamus is connected to the amygdala via superior colliculus and it receives sensory information from sensory transducers. For example, visual information that not yet reached to neocortex (where visual object recognition is taking place) via the optic nerves can be sent to amygdala. This may be what
happens when we have sudden fear response to coiled rope, mistaking it as a snake. In such situations, fear may already be experienced before our realization that we are not in danger. Thus, there is a good reason to think that emotion can be generated by non-cognitive causes. Role of amygdala and other related brain structures in control of emotion/ affect is illustrated in Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1 Role of amygdala and other brain structure in emotion regulation (This figure is adapted from Helander & Khalid, 2012)
Even emotions can be generated from what we perceived, what we feel.
Emotions can be affected by music (Blood et al., 1999), by weather (Palinkas &
Houseal, 2000), and exercise (Roth, 1989). Emotions may be affected by changing chemistry of the brain. For example certain drug administration, alcohol uptake may alter human emotional states. Facial feedback may as a way of calibrating emotions in groups: If any one automatically mimics other‟s expressions and thereby feels the expressed emotion. In this way, automatic, non- cognitive process can generate contextually appropriate emotions even when we lack of cognitive insights into the reasons for having those emotions. Some cognitive theorists rejected this thought by highlighting the unconscious cognitive
appraisal rather than non-cognitive causes. According to them evolutionary pressure promotes the emergence of emotional responses that arises immediately upon perceiving stimuli that have great relevance for survival. Cognitive mediators may slowdown vital reactions such as freezing after sudden noise (Prinz, 2012). Cross-talk between cognitive and affective system is presented in Figure 2.2. It seems that the sensory information about the stimulus goes to both affective and cognitive systems. Human affective system is more intuitive and experiential in nature and it generates emotional responses very quickly. On the contrary, cognitive system is little slow; and, it is analytical and rational in nature.
Human cognitive system generally helps to understand meanings and to gain knowledge.
Figure 2.2 Cross-talk between cognitive and affective system (Adapted from: Helander &
Khalid, 2012).