PowerPoint Presentation

							        PSYC18 2009 – Psychology of Emotion
Professor: Gerald Cupchik              TA: Michelle Hilscher
Office: S634                           Office: S142C
Email: cupchik@utsc.utoronto.ca        Email: hilscher@utsc.utoronto.ca
Office Hours: Thursdays 10-11; 2-3     Office Hours: Thursdays 10-11 am
Phone: 416-287-7467


                          Course website:
                          www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~cupchik/psyc18.htm

                          Textbook:
                          Oatley, Keltner & Jenkins (2006, 2nd Ed.)
                          Understanding Emotions.
  Grasping the Phenomenon



Overview

There are three parts to today’s lecture:

1. Account of process and theory.
2. Everyday and classroom application.
3. Background of these ideas.
                    Process and Theory

a. We need a way to approach everyday life:

        - Descriptive natural history
        - Theoretical account of process

b. Narrative accounts of life experiences in episodes and situations.

c.   Two fundamental themes in life episodes:

        - Action – survival and adaptation; planning for the future

        - Meaning – attempting to understand particular events;
        understanding the past
d. What makes a lived episode coherent for the person within the
   episode and others outside of it?

     - What makes an episode memorable?

e. The role of feelings and emotions as a binding glue in an episode.

     - The episode is about something important and has emotion at its
     core.

f.   An episode becomes meaningful when it can be placed in a
     context.

     - Of course there are many viewpoints and contexts within which
     to interpret it.

g. What is the role of psychology in addressing life episodes?

     - There is unity in the experience of meaningful life episodes.
     - Meaning of the event lies in our history with prior events like it…
- Psychology is about conditions that shape the emergence of
meaning.
- Psychology takes experiences and places them in a context. It
focuses on the situation.

Psychology looks beneath the surface of an event. It goes from the
manifest to the latent.

    Psychology is about layers:
    Mind and body
    Perception, cognition, affection, emotion, action

    Mind and body are linked.
    Thought is associated with feeling or emotion.
    Feelings in action episodes.
    Emotion in reaction episodes.
                           Application

- We need to begin with rich accounts of life experiences.

- What is implicated in these experiences?

- Picking a topic.

- Diversity of topics.

- Personal relevance of topics.

- Acts of noticing: Lived-world and the Plane of Observation
- Collecting life episodes.

- Interpreting life episodes.

- Similarities and differences across life episodes.

- What to avoid: Francis Bacon: biases, dogma, pet hypotheses.

- Deductive (we have anticipations, having picked the topic and
therefore noticed or focused on it in everyday life)

- Inductive (open to the unexpected)

- Evaluation of this teaching method.
                           Background

- Relation of theory to phenomena

- Gestalt psychology and “the situation”

- Gestalt and figure/ground relations in terms of topic and the search
    for a relevant context.

- Tradition of Natural History… observation and collection of richly
     described instances.

- Naturwissenschaft and Geistwissenschaft
Goethe
                 Dilthey

                              Husserl




                           Cassirer


         Lewin