Emotion in Relationships

Definition

Emotion is a product of a core, “hardwired” system that evaluates the environment for situations that are relevant to personal motives and goals and that may potentially affect the well-being and survival of the person. This coordinated response system calls the mind and body into action. Changes include shifts in perception and attention; physiological functioning, both autonomic (e.g., heart rate, skin conductance) and endocrine (e.g., hormone production); gross motor behaviors (e.g., muscle tone, posture); and expressive behaviors (e.g., facial and vocal displays, gestures), many of which occur without awareness. However, many conscious processes are also associated with emotion, including awareness of feelings as well as motivated, intentional actions (e.g., disclosing emotions, seeking physical closeness to another). Notably, the emotion system also has an elaborate structure dedicated to emotion regulation, affecting the way social information is appraised as well as how responses to feelings are managed.

Although the emotion system itself is located within the person, emotion by its nature is a process about the social environment. That is, the emotion system is stimulated by changes in environmental circumstances (which is almost invariably about how people are relating to others) and signals the valence (positive or negative) of the experienced relational changes. Further, one's internal states are communicated to others through facial expressions, vocalizations, and gestures, thereby signaling whether one is likely to draw closer to or create greater distance from others. Emotion thereby may dictate personal behavior as well as socially regulate others. Thus, although the architecture of the emotion system may be personal, the function is tethered to the social world, including relationships.

Elicitation and Measurement

To study the experience and expression of emotions, scientists have used many different methods. Some methods involve tasks that are typically performed by the person alone, such as guided imagery, memory recall, or stimulus exposure, whereas other techniques engage participants in actual interactions with others to evoke an emotional response or understand how an emotional response is received by another.

When scientists show stimuli to evoke particular emotions or affective states, these usually take the form of film clips or slides. Film clips typically show social interactions (e.g., a comedian telling jokes to audience) or graphic scenes (e.g., an amputation procedure) and slide sets show pictures of positive and negative objects or scenes (e.g., flowers, a snake eating a frog). Emotions are also elicited unconsciously using a technique called backward masking, which consists of a brief presentation of a target stimulus (e.g., pictures of [Page 501]spiders, puppies) immediately followed by a masking stimulus (same pictures only cut and reorganized to form new stimuli). This technique allows both stimuli to be perceived yet only the masked one to be consciously recognized, thus allowing researchers to measure the extent to which people show different thresholds for recognition and reactivity to emotionally evocative stimuli.

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