Emotion Paper - Admission/Application Essay Example

Research Techniques on Emotions Affiliation. Research Techniques on Emotions. Emotion is a person’s natural of mind or instinct about a circumstance, mood and how they relate with other people, normally subjective. It’s so amazing how everything about me can change from one moment to another, depending on what I am conscious about. When I operate from a different state of consciousness, I will have a different set of thoughts and feelings flowing through me. As a person, my emotion is most often influenced by my mood or temperament, though through more reading I get to understand that disposition and personality also influences emotion.

Motivation, be it negative or positive is habitually driven by emotion. Emotion also results from neurotransmitters and hormonal activations due to physical or psychological changes. From my past experiences, I have discovered that emotions if not handled properly can ruin our lives very much. Emotions have caused me to have health problems, feels of uneasiness and feeling of insecurity.Psychology has a wide range of research techniques applicable to examining different subjects. The techniques must meet criteria for assessing physiological patterns connected to specific emotional feelings.

To understand this topic on emotion, I took to go through Bradley’s Emotion and Motivation I: Defensive and Appetitive Reactions in Picture Processes (2001). I got that there is a wide agreement that emotion is mediated in subcortical structures. As it further suggests, I would take on exploring neural substrates of both autonomic and somatic responses of subcortical structures and work on them backwards. Impact on different structures of the cortical region effects neurotransmissions which in turn activates response.

Emotion is a product of neurotransmissions which in turn activates sympathetic and parasympathetic reactions. As a person, I can always decide on which image to pay attention to or pictures to focus on. This information is then transferred to the visual cortex of the cerebellum for processing. This then activates responses such as that of blinking, fear or escape.Amygdala is a limbic structure that I would also put focus on while trying to understand the concept of emotion. According to Bradley (2001), this structure has a role in mediating association involving motivationally relevant events both positive and negative.

From the literature, lesion and simulative have indicated that specific nuclei in amygdala mediate specific emotional phenomena, both appetitive and defensive. From this I get to understand that my rage, defense or attack reactions are as a result of the stimulation of the amygdala. Amygdala includes multiple afferent and efferent connections to cortical, subcortical and brainstem structures which allows it to receive input from and control outputs to many parts of the brain responsible for mediating somatic and autonomic behavior responsible for emotional behaviors.

I note that in order to mediate appetitive and defensive reaction stimuli, a neural system implementing motivation will need to receive extensive perceptual and memorial information.The appraisal theory explains the interview scenario. In the theory, stored information is a critical variable determining emotionality of an experience. Different reports of emotion can be produced by the same stimuli while different situations produce the same reports of an emotion. This can be achieved by allowing appraisal to control emotional experience.

In the event of movies, coding of multiple types of information is involved based on perceptual and sensory features. Through response units, coding associated actions and reactions to the event of movies, emotions are initiated on the basis of conditioned and unconditioned associations. Through all this, I get to understand that the quality, nature, type and amount of information are important for associative activation and physiological output.ReferenceBradley, M. M., Codispoti, M., Cuthbert, B. N., & Lang, P. J. (2001, August 1).

Emotion and Motivation I: Defensive and Appetititve Reactions in Picture Processes. American Psychological Association, 1(3), 276-298.