Friday, October 7, 2011
Physiological Influences on Emotion
The physiological perception of emotions made the most sense to me. This section described emotions as "reflexes", or a response to an external stimuli. In these situations the stimuli would be events that occur and make you feel those emotions. An example would be receiving bad news about the health of a family member and feeling knots in your stomach. Receiving the bad news would be the stimuli, and feeling knots in your stomach would be the response. Our bodies experience actual physical changes in response to events that happen. I've had this happen on several different occasions recently. Last week, I noticed a suspicious man fleeing from my house when I got home from work late at night. As a result, knots formed in my stomach and I felt a rush of adrenaline through my body. If I had not experienced that stimuli, the rush of adrenaline would have never occured. I believe physiological influences are the easiest to understand because we've all had those types of experiences.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
You hit the nail right on, there's always some kind of external stimuli that makes someone feel some kind of emotion or a reflex. There are times where we do some kind of emotion without an external stimuli, but somethings also the external stimuli would be a thought that crosses in your mind that makes you think of a time when something happened that makes you feel an emotion. I really like your example of your personal example of the man running from your house and I'm glad nothing happened to you. Whenever I'm out in a not too great neighborhood and see people, my body turns onto high alert. Physiological influences are truly the easiest to understand because we have so many external factors that plays a role on our emotions and reflexes. We go through it every day whether we're at home, or out.
ReplyDeleteHi domsmcdee,
ReplyDeleteI found the physiological perception of emotions made a lot of sense too. After reading this chapter, I reevaluate certain reactions and was surprised to notice things I had not before. When our heart rate increases or we get that “dropping” feeling in our stomach, they are all reactions to stimuli that then translate to emotions. Our bodies are reacting physiological before reflecting it to us as how we feel. I think a lot of times we may overlook physiological influences because our emotions overwhelm us. We feel emotions of sadness or happiness and just focus on that, but forget to notice our bodies reacted to the events at first. Thank you for sharing!