Module 41 Theories and Physiology of Emotion

LEARNING TARGETS
41-1 Describe how arousal, expressive behavior, and cognition
interact in emotion.
41-2 Explain whether we can experience emotions without
consciously interpreting and labeling them.
41-3 Describe the basic emotions, and the link between emotional
arousal and the autonomic nervous system.
41-4 Discuss whether different emotions activate different
physiological and brain-pattern responses.
41-5 Discuss the effectiveness of polygraphs in using body states to
detect lies.

Motivated behavior often is driven by powerful emotions that color our

lives. In times of stress, emotions can disrupt your life, or save it. Fear,
anger, sadness, joy, and love are psychological states that also entail
physical reactions. Nervous about an important encounter, we feel stomach
butterflies. Anxious over public speaking, we frequent the bathroom.
Smoldering over a family conflict, we get a splitting headache.
You can surely recall a time when emotion overwhelmed you. I [DM]
retain a flashbulb memory of the day I went to a huge store and brought
along Peter, my toddler first-born child. As I set Peter down on his feet for
a moment to do some paperwork, a passerby warned, “You’d better be

1155
careful or you’ll lose that boy!” Not more than a few breaths later, I turned
and found no Peter beside me.
With mild anxiety, I peered around one end of the customer service
counter. No Peter in sight. With more anxiety, I peered around the other
end. No Peter there, either. Now, with my heart accelerating, I circled the
neighboring counters. Still no Peter anywhere. As anxiety turned to panic,
I began racing up and down the store aisles. He was nowhere to be found.
The alerted store manager used the public-address system to ask customers
to assist in looking for a missing child. Soon after, I passed the customer
who had warned me. “I told you that you were going to lose him!” he now
scolded. With visions of kidnapping (strangers routinely adored that
beautiful child), I braced for the unthinkable possibility that my negligence
had caused me to lose what I loved above all else, and that I might have to
return home and face my wife without our only child.
But then, as I passed the counter yet again, there he was, having been
found and returned by some obliging customer. In an instant, the arousal of
terror spilled into ecstasy. Clutching my son, with tears suddenly flowing,
I found myself unable to speak my thanks and stumbled out of the store
awash in grateful joy.
Emotions are subjective. But they are real, says researcher Lisa
Feldman Barrett (2012, 2013): “My experience of anger is not an illusion.
When I’m angry, I feel angry. That’s real.” Where do our emotions come
from? Why do we have them? What are they made of?
Emotions are our body’s adaptive response. They support our survival.
When we face challenges, emotions focus our attention and energize our
actions (Cyders & Smith, 2008). Our heart races. Our pace quickens. All
our senses go on high alert. Receiving unexpected good news, we may find
our eyes tearing up. We raise our hands triumphantly. We feel exuberance
and a newfound confidence. Yet negative and prolonged emotions can
harm our health.

1156
1157
Emotion: Arousal, Behavior, and Cognition
41-1 How do arousal, expressive behavior, and cognition interact
in emotion?

As my panicked search for Peter illustrates, emotions are a mix of

bodily arousal (heart pounding),
expressive behaviors (quickened pace), and
conscious experience (“Is this a kidnapping?”) and feelings (panic, fear,
joy).

emotion
a response of the whole organism, involving (1) physiological arousal, (2)
expressive behaviors, and (3) conscious experience.

The puzzle for psychologists is figuring out how these three pieces fit
together. To do that, the first researchers of emotion considered two big
questions:

1. A chicken-and-egg debate: Does your bodily arousal come before or

after your emotional feelings? (Did I first notice my racing heart and
faster step, and then feel terror about losing Peter? Or did my sense of
fear come first, stirring my heart and legs to respond?)
2. How do thinking (cognition) and feeling interact? Does cognition
always come before emotion? (Did I think about a kidnapping threat
before I reacted emotionally?)
Historical emotion theories, as well as current research, have sought to
answer these questions.

Historical Emotion Theories

Flip It Video: Theories of Emotion

1158
The psychological study of emotion began with the first question: How do
bodily responses relate to emotions? Two famous theories offered different
answers.

James-Lange Theory: Arousal Comes Before Emotion

Common sense tells most of us that we cry because we are sad, lash out
because we are angry, tremble because we are afraid. First comes
conscious awareness, then the feeling. But to pioneering psychologist
William James, this commonsense view of emotion had things backward.
Rather, “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid
because we tremble” (1890, p. 1066). To James, emotions result from
attention to our bodily activity. James’ idea was also proposed by Danish
physiologist Carl Lange, and so is called the James-Lange theory. James
and Lange would have guessed that I noticed my racing heart and then,
shaking with fright, felt the whoosh of emotion—that my feeling of fear
followed my body’s response.

James-Lange theory
the theory that our experience of emotion is our awareness of our physiological
responses to an emotion-arousing stimulus: stimulus → arousal → emotion.

FYI
Not only emotion, but most psychological phenomena (vision, sleep, memory, sex,
and so forth) can be approached these three ways—physiologically, behaviorally,
and cognitively.

Cannon-Bard Theory: Arousal and Emotion Occur Simultaneously

Physiologist Walter Cannon (1871–1945) disagreed with the James-Lange
theory. Does a racing heart signal fear or anger or love? The body’s
responses—heart rate, perspiration, and body temperature—are too
similar, and they change too slowly, to cause the different emotions, said
Cannon. He, and later another physiologist, Philip Bard, concluded that

1159
our bodily responses and experienced emotions occur separately but
simultaneously. So, according to the Cannon-Bard theory, my heart
began pounding as I experienced fear. The emotion-triggering stimulus
traveled to my sympathetic nervous system, causing my body’s arousal. At
the same time, it traveled to my brain’s cortex, causing my awareness of
my emotion. My pounding heart did not cause my feeling of fear, nor did
my feeling of fear cause my pounding heart.

Cannon-Bard theory
the theory that an emotion-arousing stimulus simultaneously triggers (1)
physiological responses and (2) the subjective experience of emotion.

But are they really independent from each other? The Cannon-Bard
theory has been challenged by studies of people with severed spinal cords,
including a survey of 25 World War II soldiers (Hohmann, 1966). Those
with lower-spine injuries, who had lost sensation only in their legs,
reported little change in their emotions’ intensity. Those with high spinal
cord injury, who could feel nothing below the neck, did report changes.
Some reactions were much less intense than before the injuries. Anger, one
high spinal cord-injured man confessed, “just doesn’t have the heat to it
that it used to. It’s a mental kind of anger.” Other emotions, those
expressed mostly in body areas above the neck, were felt more intensely.
These men reported increases in weeping, lumps in the throat, and getting
choked up when saying good-bye, worshiping, or watching a touching
movie. Such evidence has led some researchers to view feelings as “mostly
shadows” of our bodily responses and behaviors (Damasio, 2003). Brain
activity underlies our emotions and our emotion-fed actions (Davidson &
Begley, 2012).

1160
 Joy expressed According to the James-Lange theory, we don’t just smile
because we share our teammates’ joy. We also share the joy because we are
smiling with them.

But our emotions also involve cognition (Averill, 1993; Barrett, 2006).
Here we arrive at psychology’s second big emotion question: How do
thinking and feeling interact? Whether we fear the man behind us on the
dark street depends entirely on whether or not we interpret his actions as
threatening.

AP® EXAM TIP

Be prepared for at least a multiple-choice question that tests your ability to

compare and contrast the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, and Schachter-Singer
Two-Factor theories of emotion.

Schachter-Singer Two-Factor Theory: Arousal + Label =

Emotion

41-2 To experience emotions, must we consciously interpret and

label them?

Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer (1962) demonstrated that how we

appraise (interpret) our experiences also matters. Our physical reactions
and our thoughts (perceptions, memories, and interpretations) together

1161
create emotion. In their two-factor theory, emotions have two ingredients:
physical arousal and cognitive appraisal. An emotional experience, they
argued, requires a conscious interpretation of arousal.

two-factor theory
the Schachter-Singer theory that to experience emotion one must (1) be
physically aroused and (2) cognitively label the arousal.

Consider how arousal spills over from one event to the next. Imagine
arriving home after an invigorating run and finding a message that you got
a longed-for college acceptance letter. With arousal lingering from the run,
would you feel more elated than if you heard this news after staying awake
all night studying?
To explore this spillover effect, Schachter and Singer injected college
men with the hormone epinephrine, which the trickster researchers told the
men would help test their eyesight. In reality, the drug triggers feelings of
arousal. Picture yourself as a participant: After receiving the injection, you
go to a waiting room, where you find yourself with another person
(actually an accomplice of the experimenters) who is acting either
euphoric or irritated. As you observe this person, you begin to feel your
heart race, your body flush, and your breathing become more rapid. If you
had been told to expect these effects from the injection, what would you
feel? The actual volunteers felt little emotion—because they attributed
their arousal to the drug. But if you had been told the injection would
produce no arousal, what would you feel? Perhaps you would react as
another group of participants did. They “caught” the apparent emotion of
the other person in the waiting room. They became happy if the
accomplice was acting euphoric, and testy if the accomplice was acting
irritated.

1162
 The spillover effect Arousal from a soccer match can fuel anger, which can
descend into rioting or other violent confrontations.

This discovery—that a stirred-up state can be experienced as one

emotion or another, depending on how we interpret and label it—has been
replicated in dozens of experiments and continues to influence modern
emotion research (MacCormack & Lindquist, 2016; Reisenzein, 1983;
Sinclair et al., 1994).
The point to remember: Arousal fuels emotion; cognition channels it.

Zajonc, LeDoux, and Lazarus: Does Cognition Always Precede

Emotion?
But is the heart always subject to the mind? Must we always interpret our
arousal before we can experience an emotion? Robert Zajonc [ZI-yence]
(1923–2008) didn’t think so. He contended that we actually have many
emotional reactions apart from, or even before, our conscious
interpretation of a situation (1980, 1984a). Perhaps you can recall liking
something or someone immediately, without knowing why.
Even when people repeatedly view stimuli flashed too briefly for them
to interpret, they come to prefer those stimuli (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc,
1980). Unaware of having previously seen them, they nevertheless like
them. We also have an acutely sensitive automatic radar for emotionally
significant information, such that even a subliminally flashed stimulus can
prime us to feel better or worse about a follow-up stimulus (Murphy et al.,
1995; Zeelenberg et al., 2006).

1163
 Neuroscientists are charting the neural pathways of emotions (Ochsner
et al., 2009). Our emotional responses can follow two different brain
pathways. Some emotions (especially more complex feelings like hatred
and love) travel a “high road.” A stimulus following this path would travel
(by way of the thalamus) to the brain’s cortex (Figure 41.1a). There, it
would be analyzed and labeled before the response command is sent out,
via the amygdala (an emotion-control center).

Figure 41.1 The brain’s pathways for emotions

In the two-track brain, sensory input may be routed (a) to the cortex
(via the thalamus) for analysis and then transmission to the
amygdala, or (b) directly to the amygdala (via the thalamus) for an
instant emotional reaction.

But sometimes our emotions (especially simple likes, dislikes, and

fears) take what Joseph LeDoux (2002, 2015) has called the more direct
“low road,” a neural shortcut that bypasses the cortex. Following the low
road, a fear-provoking stimulus would travel from the eye or ear (again via
the thalamus) directly to the amygdala (Figure 41.1b). This shortcut
enables our greased-lightning emotional response before our intellect
intervenes. Like speedy reflexes (that also operate separately from the

1164
brain’s thinking cortex), the amygdala reactions are so fast that we may be
unaware of what’s transpired (Dimberg et al., 2000). A conscious feeling
of fear then occurs as we become aware that our brain has detected danger.
The amygdala sends more neural projections up to the cortex than it
receives back, which makes it easier for our feelings to hijack our thinking
than for our thinking to rule our feelings (LeDoux & Armony, 1999).
Thus, in the forest, we can jump at the sound of rustling bushes nearby,
leaving it to our cortex to decide later whether the sound was made by a
snake or by the wind. Such experiences support Zajonc’s and LeDoux’s
belief that some of our emotional reactions involve no deliberate thinking.
Emotion researcher Richard Lazarus (1991, 1998) conceded that our
brain processes vast amounts of information without our conscious
awareness, and that some emotional responses do not require conscious
thinking. Much of our emotional life operates via the automatic, speedy
low road. But he wondered: How would we know what we are reacting to
if we did not in some way appraise the situation? The appraisal may be
effortless and we may not be conscious of it, but it is still a mental
function. To know whether a stimulus is good or bad, the brain must have
some idea of what it is (Storbeck et al., 2006). Thus, said Lazarus,
emotions arise when we appraise an event as harmless or dangerous. We
appraise the sound of the rustling bushes as the presence of a threat. Later,
we realize that it was “just the wind.”
So, let’s sum up (see also Table 41.1). As Zajonc and LeDoux have
demonstrated, some emotional responses—especially simple likes,
dislikes, and fears—involve no conscious thinking (Figure 41.2). When I
[ND] see a big spider trapped behind glass, I experience fear, even though
I know the spider can’t hurt me. Such responses are difficult to alter by
changing our thinking. Within a fraction of a second, we may perceive one
person as more likable or trustworthy than another (Willis & Todorov,
2006). This instant appeal can even influence our political decisions if we
vote (as many people do) for a candidate we like over the candidate who
expresses positions closer to our own (Westen, 2007).

TABLE 41.1 Summary of Emotion Theories

1165
Theory Explanation of Emotions Example

James- Emotions arise from our awareness of We observe our heart

Lange our bodily responses to emotion- racing after a threat and
arousing stimuli: stimuli → arousal then feel afraid.
→ emotion.

Cannon- Emotion-arousing stimuli trigger our Our heart races at the

Bard bodily responses and simultaneous same time that we feel
subjective experience. afraid.

Schachter- Our experience of emotion depends We may interpret our

Singer on two factors: general arousal and a arousal as fear or
conscious cognitive label. excitement, depending on
the context.

Zajonc; Some embodied responses happen We automatically feel

LeDoux instantly, without conscious appraisal. startled by a sound in the
forest before labeling it as
a threat.

Lazarus Cognitive appraisal (“Is it dangerous The sound is “just the

or not?”)—sometimes without our wind.”
awareness—defines emotion.

Figure 41.2 Two pathways for emotions

Zajonc and LeDoux emphasized that some emotional responses are
immediate, before any conscious appraisal. Lazarus, Schachter, and
Singer emphasized that our appraisal and labeling of events also
determine our emotional responses.

1166
 AP® EXAM TIP

Table 41.1 summarizes the theories of emotion. They are presented in their
order of appearance historically. Notice that cognition, an important factor in
the modern theories, is not mentioned in the first two theories.

But other emotions—including depressive moods and complex

feelings such as hatred and love—are greatly affected by our conscious
and unconscious information processing: our memories, expectations, and
interpretations. For these emotions, we have more conscious control.
When we feel emotionally overwhelmed, we can change our
interpretations (Gross, 2013). Such reappraisal often reduces distress and
the corresponding amygdala response (Buhle et al., 2014; Denny et al.,
2015). Reappraisal not only reduces stress, it also helps students achieve
higher test scores (Jamieson et al., 2016). Don’t stress about your stress.
Embrace it, and approach your next test with the mindset, “Stress evolved
to help maintain my focus and solve problems.” Although the emotional
low road functions automatically, the thinking high road allows us to
retake some control over our emotional life. The bottom line: Together,
automatic emotion and conscious thinking weave the fabric of our
emotional lives.

Check Your Understanding

Ask Yourself
Can you remember a time when you began to feel upset or uneasy and only
later labeled those feelings?

Test Yourself
According to the Cannon-Bard theory, (a) our physiological response to a
stimulus (for example, a pounding heart) and (b) the emotion we experience
(for example, fear) occur ______________ (simultaneously/sequentially).

1167
 According to the James-Lange theory, (a) and (b) occur ______________
(simultaneously/sequentially).
According to Schachter and Singer, two factors lead to our experience of an
emotion: (1) physiological arousal and (2) ______________ appraisal.
Emotion researchers have disagreed about whether emotional responses
occur in the absence of cognitive processing. How would you characterize
the approach of each of the following researchers: Zajonc, LeDoux, Lazarus,
Schachter, and Singer?

Answers to the Test Yourself questions can be found in Appendix E at the end of the book.

1168
Embodied Emotion
Whether you are falling in love or grieving a death, you need little
convincing that emotions involve the body. Feeling without a body is like
breathing without lungs. Some physical responses are easy to notice. Other
emotional responses we experience without awareness.

The Basic Emotions

41-3 What are the basic emotions, and what is the link between
emotional arousal and the autonomic nervous system?

How many distinct emotions are there? When surveyed, most emotion
scientists agreed that anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and happiness are basic
human emotions (Ekman, 2016). Carroll Izard (1977) isolated 10 basic
emotions (joy, interest-excitement, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust,
contempt, fear, shame, and guilt), most present in infancy (Figure 41.3).
Others believe that pride and love are also basic emotions (Shaver et al.,
1996; Tracy & Robins, 2004). But Izard has argued that other emotions are
combinations of these 10, with love, for example, being a mixture of joy
and interest-excitement.

1169
 Figure 41.3 Some naturally occurring infant emotions
To identify the emotions generally present in infancy, Carroll Izard
analyzed the facial expressions of infants.

Emotions and the Autonomic Nervous System

As we saw in Module 10, in a crisis the sympathetic division of your
autonomic nervous system (ANS) mobilizes your body for action (Figure
41.4). It directs your adrenal glands to release the stress hormones
epinephrine (adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline). To provide
energy, your liver pours extra sugar into your bloodstream. To help burn
the sugar, your respiration increases to supply needed oxygen. Your heart
rate and blood pressure increase. Your digestion slows, diverting blood
from your internal organs to your muscles. With blood sugar driven into
the large muscles, running becomes easier. Your pupils dilate, letting in
more light. To cool your stirred-up body, you perspire. If wounded, your
blood would clot more quickly.

1170
 Figure 41.4 Emotional arousal
Like a crisis control center, the autonomic nervous system arouses
the body in a crisis and calms it when danger passes.

When the crisis passes, the parasympathetic division of your ANS

gradually calms your body, as stress hormones slowly leave your
bloodstream. After your next crisis, think of this: Without any conscious
effort, your body’s response to danger is wonderfully coordinated and
adaptive—preparing you to fight or flee. So, do the different emotions
have distinct arousal fingerprints?

The Physiology of Emotions

41-4 Do different emotions activate different physiological and

brain-pattern responses?

Imagine conducting an experiment measuring the physiological responses

of emotion. In each of four rooms, you have someone watch a movie: In
the first, the person views a horror film; in the second, an anger-provoking
film; in the third, a sexually arousing film; in the fourth, a boring film.
From the control center, you monitor each person’s perspiration, pupil
size, breathing, and heart rate. Could you tell who is frightened? Who is
angry? Who is sexually aroused? Who is bored?

1171
 AP® EXAM TIP

Figure 41.4 compares and contrasts the sympathetic and parasympathetic

nervous systems. On the AP® exam you may need to be able to identify which
physiological effects occur with each division.

With training, you could probably pick out the bored viewer. But
discerning physiological differences among fear, anger, and sexual arousal
is much more difficult (Barrett, 2006). Different emotions can share
common biological signatures.
A single brain region can also serve as the seat of seemingly different
emotions. Consider the broad emotional portfolio of the insula, a neural
center deep inside the brain. The insula is activated when we experience
various negative social emotions, such as lust, pride, and disgust. In brain
scans, it becomes active when people bite into some disgusting food, smell
disgusting food, think about biting into a disgusting cockroach, or feel
moral disgust over a sleazy business exploiting a saintly widow (Sapolsky,
2010). Similar multitasking regions are found in other brain areas.

“ No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I am not afraid, but the
sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same

restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. ”

C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 1961

Yet our varying emotions feel different to us, and they often look
different to others. We may appear “paralyzed with fear” or “ready to
explode.” Fear and joy prompt a similar increased heart rate, but they
stimulate different facial muscles. During fear, your brow muscles tense.
During joy, muscles in your cheeks and under your eyes pull into a smile
(Witvliet & Vrana, 1995).
Some of our emotions also have distinct brain circuits (Panksepp,
2007). Observers watching fearful faces showed more amygdala activity

1172
than did other observers who watched angry faces (Whalen et al., 2001).
Brain scans and EEG recordings show that emotions also activate different
areas of the brain’s cortex. When you experience negative emotions such
as disgust, your right prefrontal cortex tends to be more active than the
left. Depression-prone people, and those with generally negative
perspectives, have also shown more right frontal lobe activity (Harmon-
Jones et al., 2002).

Scary thrills Elated excitement and panicky fear involve similar physiological
arousal. That allows us to flip rapidly between the two emotions.

Positive moods tend to trigger more left frontal lobe activity. People
with positive personalities—exuberant infants and alert, energized, and
persistently goal-directed adults—have also shown more activity in the left
frontal lobe than in the right (Davidson, 2000; Urry et al., 2004). Indeed,
the more a person’s baseline frontal lobe activity tilts left—or is made to
tilt left by perceptual activity—the more upbeat the person typically is
(Drake & Myers, 2006).
To sum up, we can’t easily see differences in emotions from tracking
heart rate, breathing, and perspiration. But facial expressions and brain
activity can vary with the emotion. So, do we, like Pinocchio, give off
telltale signs when we lie? For more on that question, see Thinking
Critically About: Lie Detection.

1173
polygraph
a machine used in attempts to detect lies that measures several of the
physiological responses (such as perspiration, heart rate, and breathing changes)
accompanying emotion.

Check Your Understanding

Ask Yourself
Can you think of a recent time when you noticed your body’s reactions to an
emotionally charged situation, such as a difficult social setting, or perhaps a
test or game you had been worrying about in advance? How would you
describe your sympathetic nervous system’s responses?

Test Yourself
How do the two divisions of the autonomic nervous system affect our
emotional responses?

1174
Answers to the Test Yourself questions can be found in Appendix E at the end of the book.

1175
Module 41 REVIEW
41-1 How do arousal, expressive behavior, and cognition interact
in emotion?

Emotions are psychological responses of the whole organism involving

an interplay among physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and
conscious experience.
Theories of emotion generally address two major questions: (1) Does
physiological arousal come before or after emotional feelings, and (2)
how do cognition and feeling interact?
The James-Lange theory maintains that emotional feelings follow our
body’s response to emotion-inducing stimuli. (We observe our heart
pounding and feel fear.)
The Cannon-Bard theory proposes that our body responds to emotion at
the same time that we experience the emotion (one does not cause the
other).

41-2 To experience emotions, must we consciously interpret and

label them?

The Schachter-Singer two-factor theory holds that our emotions have

two ingredients, physical arousal and a cognitive label, and the cognitive
labels we put on our states of arousal are an essential ingredient of
emotion.
Lazarus agreed that many important emotions arise from our inferences.
Zajonc and LeDoux, however, have contended that some simple
emotional responses occur instantly, not only outside our conscious
awareness but before any cognitive processing occurs. This interplay
between emotion and cognition illustrates our two-track mind.

41-3 What are the basic emotions, and what is the link between

1176
 emotional arousal and the autonomic nervous system?

Caroll Izard’s 10 basic emotions are joy, interest/excitement, surprise,

sadness, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, and guilt.
The arousal component of emotion is regulated by the autonomic
nervous system’s sympathetic (arousing) and parasympathetic (calming)
divisions.
In a crisis, the fight-or-flight response automatically mobilizes your
body for action.

41-4 Do different emotions activate different physiological and

brain-pattern responses?

The large-scale body changes that accompany fear, and anger, and
sexual arousal are very similar (increased perspiration, breathing, and
heart rate), though they feel different. Emotions may be similarly
arousing, but some subtle physiological responses, such as facial muscle
movements, distinguish them.
More meaningful differences have been found in activity in some brain
pathways and cortical areas.

41-5 How effective are polygraphs in using body states to detect

lies?

Polygraphs, which measure several physiological indicators of emotion,

are not accurate enough to justify widespread use in business and law
enforcement. The use of the Concealed Information Test and new forms
of technology may produce better indications of lying.

Multiple-Choice Questions
1. One night Samar became frightened when she was startled by a noise
while walking down the street alone. Which theory of emotion would
say that her fear resulted from the startle response alone?

1177
 a. James-Lange
b. Cannon-Bard
c. Two-factor
d. Lazarus’
e. Schachter-Singer’s
2. The Cannon-Bard theory of emotion states that
a. emotional response occurs before cognition.
b. physiological response occurs before emotional response.
c. emotional response occurs before physiological response.
d. cognition occurs before emotional response.
e. physiological response and emotion occur independently and
simultaneously.
3. Which of the following is an example of cognitive appraisal?
a. Randall is happy all day because he is savoring the wonderful events
of yesterday.
b. Charles is frightened in a dark alley because he remembers stories of
others being attacked in dark alleys.
c. Sherika labels the arousal she is feeling as attraction because she is
in the presence of a good-looking man.
d. Dora is angry because she cannot figure out how to convince her
husband to take her to Hawaii.
e. Ann is frustrated because traffic has made her late for an important
meeting.
4. Which of the following characterizes the “low road” neural pathway to
emotions?
a. Information travels directly from the thalamus to the amygdala.
b. The emotional response happens more slowly than it would via the
“high road.”
c. It is an example of top-down processing.
d. It is more likely to be utilized for complex feelings.
e. It passes through the brain’s cortex.

1178
Practice FRQs

1. Roger is about to ride a roller coaster. He is afraid of heights and is

nervous about the ride. How would each of the following theories
explain Roger’s experience of fear on the roller coaster?
James-Lange
Cannon-Bard
Schachter-Singer

Answer
1 point: The James-Lange theory would explain Roger’s fear as
happening after he notices that his heart is pounding (or any other
physiological response to the stress of riding a roller coaster.) Page
433
1 point: The Cannon-Bard theory would describe Roger’s fear as
occurring at the same time that he feels his heart pound (or any other
physiological response to the stress of riding a roller coaster.) Page
433
1 point: The Schachter-Singer theory would explain Roger’s fear as a
result of a cognitive appraisal of his pounding heart (or any other
physiological response to the stress of riding a roller coaster) that he
would then label as fear. Page 434

2. Lynn’s boyfriend has not replied to her last three texts. Lynn is
experiencing anger, increased blood pressure, and rapid breathing.
Analyze this situation using the James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, and
Lazarus theories of emotion.
(3 points)

1179