Psychology- a Complete Introduction
Page 10
Spotlight: Boredom and creativity
Did you know that boredom can increase creativity? I carried out some groundbreaking research into this myself with my student Rebekah Cadman, at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.
Our research examined the relationship between boredom and creativity on a range of tasks and found that engaging in ‘boring activities’ such as tedious writing exercises before undertaking creative tasks results in more productive thinking. We believe that the reason for this was that boredom allows daydreaming, which is a key to creativity (since it provides the ability to re-evaluate information and mull over possible solutions).
To measure whether creativity was indeed a result of daydreaming, a subsequent study was conducted based on similar activities but instead focused on reading (which allows daydreaming more easily) instead of writing.
The first study involved participants copying telephone numbers from a phone directory for 15 minutes so that we could explore the impact on subsequent levels of creativity shown in a divergent thinking task (which included coming up with as many uses for a pair of polystyrene cups as possible). Participants provided varied examples such as pencil pots, earrings, drums and plant pots.
We found that the number of creative answers were higher for participants who completed a boredom task followed by the creative task than participants who completed the creative task in isolation. However, in the next study we had people read the phone numbers and found that levels of creativity then to be even higher. This suggests that passive activities, like reading or attending meetings, can lead to more creativity whereas writing, which inherently reduces the scope for daydreaming, lessens the chance to be creative.
Dig deeper
Article on language acquisition:
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/pinker.langacq.html
Noam Chomsky website:
http://www.chomsky.info/
An excellent TED Talk on creativity by Gerard J. Puccio, chair and professor of the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State University:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltPAsp71rmI&list=PLfJZEI22FEjTrR8HbqGjc9gMK5GvBZSLs
Fact-check
1 Which of the following statements about language acquisition is true?
a Speech perception always precedes speech production
b Speech production always precedes speech perception
c Speech production and perception occur round about the same time.
d There are no hard-and-fast rules about the order in which speech production and perception occur
2 What is a phoneme?
a A measure of vocabulary
b A rule about grammar
c A non-verbal communicator
d The smallest unit of sound in a language
3 What is a language acquisition device (LAD)?
a A device used to learn a second language
b An app for phones to help people learn a second language
c An innate mechanism or process that allows children to develop language skills
d A means by which language and thought are interlinked
4 The linguistic relativity hypothesis:
a Explains how languages relate to each other
b Is a theory that opposes the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis
c Claimed that language determines the way people think
d Claimed that the way people think determines language
5 Which of the following is not a primary function of non-verbal communication?
a To express emotions
b To perform rituals
c To express one’s personality
d To help people with hearing difficulties
6 Functional fixedness is when
a Only one solution is available to solve a problem
b An individual is unable to see all the options available to solve a problem
c An individual cannot see what function an object has
d An individual is fixated on the function of an object
7 Which of the following is not one of the ‘Four Ps of Creativity’?
a Process
b Place
c Person
d Perfect
8 Which of the following components is not used to score Guilford’s Test of Divergent Creativity?
a Originality
b Fluency
c Elaboration
d Depth
9 The incubation stage of the creative process is when:
a The thinker deliberately thinks about the problem
b No effort is put into thinking about the problem at all
c The thinker tests ideas about solutions to the problem
d Resources are gathered to solve a problem
10 Boredom increases creativity because it:
a Facilitates daydreaming
b Inhibits daydreaming
c Stops you thinking
d Distracts you
7
Emotion
What exactly is an emotion and how does it occur? And why do we have emotions? Psychologists over the years have been concerned with defining and classifying emotions, as well as trying to work out how (and why) they happen.
‘An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response.’
D. H. Hockenbury and S. E. Hockenbury, Discovering Psychology (New York: Worth Publishers, 2007)
Most researchers believe that emotions consist of five distinct components and some believe that to truly experience an emotion, at least four out of five components must exist (there is some doubt about the fifth). These are:
1 Our feelings: we label the way we feel as being angry, sad and so on. These feelings are very subjective and also quite personal in that other people cannot always tell how we feel just by looking at us.
2 Our physiological reactions: our bodies change when we are emotional (e.g. we might sweat, experience raised heartbeat, clench our fists). This category includes the bodily changes that we cannot see or notice such as chemicals secreted from various glands. Many of the physical reactions experienced during an emotion are controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, a branch of the autonomic nervous system (see Chapter 17). The brain also has a role in these responses; the amygdala, for example, which is part of the limbic system, plays an important role in emotion (especially in fear) – there is more on this in Chapter 17.
3 Our behaviour: for example, certain emotions might lead us to run away, hit someone/something, hug someone and so forth.
4 Our cognitions: this is what we think – our interpretation of the events that produce the emotion. For example, thinking about a sad event such as a bereavement will make us feel sad.
5 Expression: this component doesn’t have to be present in that you can feel an emotion without any outward expression, but, often, emotions are accompanied by a distinct change in facial and/or vocal expression (e.g. we blush when we are embarrassed and smile when we are happy). Such expression can also be used to deliberately convey an emotion (that is either felt or not felt) – there is more on this later in this chapter.
Thus, to experience the phenomenon of an emotion that we are all so familiar with, the emotional trigger or stimulus must penetrate our consciousness (i.e. we must notice the trigger), there must be some kind of reaction in our body (even if we are not aware of it), we produce some kind of behavioural change and we label the whole thing as an ‘emotion’ (and this emotion may be communicated by our outward expressions).
How many emotions?
According to classic work by Paul Ekman in 1972, there are only six distinct emotions. These are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise (although in 1999 he expanded this list to include a number of other basic emotions including embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction and amusement). Later on, in 2002, another well-known emotions expe
rt, Robert Plutchik, agreed that there were a finite number of distinct emotions but suggested that there are eight basic emotions, rather than six, and that these could be grouped into four pairs of opposites:
Joy – Sadness
Trust – Disgust
Anger – Fear
Surprise – Anticipation
He further suggested that these primary emotions could be ‘blended’ (a bit like primary colours) into more complex emotions. For example, disgust and anger could blend together to form contempt. In Plutchik’s view, all emotions are a combination of these basic emotions and many of the emotions that we identify are, in reality, just forms of the above eight. Thus, for example, we might claim that we are elated, thrilled, happy, delighted or even exhilarated, but all these are variations of the basic emotion of ‘joy’. Similarly, rage and annoyance are forms of anger.
There are generally two kinds of emotion: those that do not require anyone else to be involved and those that do. The former such as happiness and sadness do not rely on an audience or on anyone else’s participation. These emotions tend to be basic and universal emotions; this means that we tend not to need to learn how to feel these emotions – although we might need to learn to be aware of them, or to be able to label them. Babies, for example, do not need to learn to be happy, sad, disgusted, fearful, surprised or angry – and they will feel these whether or not anyone else is involved.
Spotlight: One by one
The basic emotions appear in the first six months of life, but not all at the same time. Joy, sadness and disgust generally appear first, followed by anger then surprise, while fear is a later response.
In contrast, there are other emotions that require a more social environment to be fully experienced. These so-called ‘social emotions’ include embarrassment, shame, jealousy and pride. In order to feel these, we need to understand the mental states of ourselves and of other people – a skill that doesn’t fully develop until early adolescence.
Theories of emotion
But what is the mechanism for experiencing these emotions?
The American psychologist William James first outlined his theory of emotion in Mind in 1884. Actually, he only just pipped his fellow physiologist, the Dutchman Carle Lange, to the post as they both postulated the same processes as being involved. Consequently, the resulting theory is referred to as the James–Lange Theory of Emotion to acknowledge the input of both parties.
Their theory stated that emotion occurs as a direct result of the physiological changes produced by the autonomic nervous system in our bodies. To experience an emotion, they said, you need to see something (or hear/feel it) and this causes physical changes to occur in your body. You then interpret those changes as an emotion. For example, imagine it’s late at night and a stranger approaches you in a dark alleyway. This external stimulus causes your heartbeat to increase and your legs to tremble. You notice these changes in your body and decide that you must be feeling frightened (‘I am trembling therefore I am frightened’).
This theory turned on its head what was seen as the obvious sequence of events at the time. As James himself said, ‘Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike’ (James 1890). This, he claimed, was not the correct order of events and actually, he said, we feel sorry because we cry, we are angry because we hit and we are afraid because we tremble. Without these physical reactions in our bodies, we might still run away from the bear because it is the sensible, rational thing to do – but this would be an unemotional, cognitive decision, devoid of any emotion; we would not actually feel frightened unless we experience the physical changes first.
In the 1920s Walter Cannon (who was later joined by Phillip Bard) disagreed with the James–Lange Theory and put forward four main arguments to discredit it:
1 People can, in fact, experience physiological arousal without experiencing emotion, such as when they have been engaged in exercise. In this case, the physiological symptoms, such as increased heart rate, are not indicative of emotions (e.g. fear) but of physiological arousal.
2 Physiological reactions do not occur very rapidly so are unlikely to be the cause of the experiences of emotion since we often experience emotions quickly. For example, if you are alone at night in your house and hear a sudden suspicious noise, you are likely to feel afraid rather quickly, while the physical ‘symptoms’ of fear generally take longer to materialize.
3 People can experience very different emotions even when they have the same pattern of physiological arousal. For example, a person may have an increased heart rate and feel breathless both when they are angry and when they are excited.
4 Emotion can still be experienced even when the physical changes occurring in the body are prevented from being communicated back to the brain. Cannon conducted experiments on cats in which he disconnected the nerves giving feedback to the brains and these cats still demonstrated ‘rage’ when provoked (this was called ‘sham rage’ since, according to Lange, without feedback to the brain, they shouldn’t experience real rage at all).
The Cannon–Bard Theory of Emotion, as it became known, postulated, then, that, rather than the physical reactions coming first and then producing the emotion, the two processes happen simultaneously (Cannon 1927). Some external stimulus (the sight of that hoody in the dark alleyway) will trigger the thalamus in the brain to send information to both other areas of the brain (specifically the cerebral cortex) and the autonomic nervous system (including the skeletal muscles) at the same time, so that both the awareness of emotion (in the brain) and the physical reaction (e.g. in the muscles) occur at once.
More recent explanations (first put forward by Schachter and Singer in 1962) to account for the emotional experience focus on the role played by our brains in interpreting physical sensations as emotions. It is not enough to just experience the physical reactions in our body; we must also interpret and label these changes as a particular emotion. The actual physical changes we experience may not differ; it is our interpretation of the environment and so on that leads us to label these sensations as a particular emotion. Singer and Schachter’s theory became known as the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion. From this theory came two main propositions:
1 If a person experiences a state of arousal for which they do not have any immediate explanation, they will look for an explanation of that arousal that may involve attributing it to an emotion.
2 If a person experiences a state of arousal for which they do have an appropriate explanation, then they will be unlikely to look for an alternative means to account for it, and thus be less likely to label it as an emotion.
These propositions were tested with the now-famous Adrenalin Study described in the following case study.
Case study: The Adrenalin Study
In 1962 Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer performed a study that tested how people use clues in their environment to explain physiological changes. At Minnesota University 184 male psychology students were recruited. Each participant was taken to a room by the experimenter and told that the aim of the experiment was to look at the effects of vitamin injections (given the made-up name of Suproxin) on visual skills.
They were given an injection (by a doctor) of either adrenalin (this is called epinephrine when it is manufactured in a lab) or a placebo (a saline solution), both of which the participants believed to be the Suproxin. The effects of adrenalin are an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, blood sugar level and respiration rate, and these are often experienced as palpitations, tremors, flushing and faster breathing. The effects begin after three minutes and last from ten minutes to an hour.
The participants were then put in one of four experimental conditions:
1 Ignorant: participants here were given the adrenalin injection (instead of the vitamin they were expecting) and were not told anything about how the injection would make them feel.
2 Informed: participants here w
ere given the adrenalin injection but this time they were accurately warned of the side effects of the drug (although they still assumed the drug was Suproxin).
3 Misinformed: in this condition, participants were given an adrenalin injection but were told to expect side effects that were completely different from the ones that adrenalin gives (e.g. headache).
4 Control group: participants were given a placebo injection that would have no effect and were given no instructions about what to expect.
Participants were then allocated to emotional conditions – either a euphoria condition or an anger condition. In the euphoria situation, a stooge in a waiting room carried out a number of silly tasks designed to entertain and amuse the participant. In the anger situation, a stooge in a waiting room carried out tasks and made comments designed to annoy the participant.
In the euphoria condition, the misinformed participants reported feeling happier than all the others. The second happiest group was the ignorant group. This was because these participants had no plausible explanation of why their bodies felt as they did (due to the effects of the adrenalin injection) – so they looked around and decided it must be because they felt happy. The informed group felt the least happy because they had a perfectly reasonable explanation to account for the physical changes in their bodies.
In the anger condition, the ignorant group felt the angriest. The second angriest group was the placebo group. The least angry group was those who were informed. Again, this shows that participants were more susceptible to picking up on the emotions of the stooge when they had no other readily available explanation of why their body felt as it did.
So, our emotional experiences rely on us noticing physical changes in our bodies and giving them an appropriate emotional label. In other words, appraisal is a key feature and it is this appraisal that explains how different people can experience the same event but feel different emotions. This led to the well-known Wobbly Bridge Study described in the following case study – and explains why you should take your date to a scary film or a white-knuckle roller coaster if you want them to fall in love with you.