Valence (psychology)

Last updated

Valence, also known as hedonic tone, is a characteristic of emotions that determines their emotional affect (intrinsic appeal or repulsion).

Contents

Positive valence corresponds to the "goodness" or attractiveness of an object, event, or situation, making it appealing or desirable. Conversely, negative valence relates to "badness" or averseness, rendering something unappealing or undesirable.

This concept is not only used to describe the intrinsic qualities of objects and events but also categorizes emotions based on their inherent attractiveness or averseness. [1] [2]

History

The use of the term in psychology entered English with the translation from German ("Valenz") in 1935 of works of Kurt Lewin. The original German word suggests "binding", and is commonly used in a grammatical context to describe the ability of one word to semantically and syntactically link another, especially the ability of a verb to require a number of additional terms (e.g. subject and object) to form a complete sentence.

The term chemical valence has been used in physics and chemistry to describe the mechanism by which atoms bind to one another since the nineteenth century.

Phenomenology

Valence is an inferred criterion from instinctively generated emotions; it is the property specifying whether feelings/affects are positive, negative or neutral. [2] The existence of at least temporarily unspecified valence is an issue for psychological researchers who reject the existence of neutral emotions (e.g. surprise, sublimation). [2] However, other psychological researchers assume that neutral emotions exist. [3] Two contrasting views in the phenomenology of valence are that of a constrained valence psychology, where the most intense experiences are generally no more than 10 times more intense than the mildest, and the Heavy-Tailed Valence hypothesis, which states that the range of possible degrees of valence is far more extreme. [4]

Measurement

Valence could be assigned a number and treated as if it were measured, but the validity of a measurement based on a subjective report is questionable. Measurement based on observations of facial expressions, using the Facial Action Coding System and microexpressions (see Paul Ekman) or muscle activity detected through facial electromyography, or on modern functional brain imaging may overcome this objection. The perceived emotional valence of a facial expression is represented in the right posterior superior temporal sulcus and medial prefrontal cortex. [5]

Examples

"Negative" emotions like anger and fear have a negative valence. [6] But positive emotions like joy have a positive valence. Positively valenced emotions are evoked by positively valenced events, objects, or situations. [7] The term is also used to describe the hedonic tone of feelings, certain behaviors (for example, approach and avoidance), goal attainment or non-attainment, and conformity with or violation of norms. Ambivalence can be viewed as conflict between positive and negative valence-carriers.

Theorists taking a valence-based approach to study affect, judgment, and choice posit that emotions with the same valence (e.g., anger and fear or pride and surprise) produce a similar influence on judgments and choices. Suffering is negative valence and the opposite of this is pleasure or happiness.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion</span> Conscious subjective experience of humans

Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

Pleasure is experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something. It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad. It is closely related to value, desire and action: humans and other conscious animals find pleasure enjoyable, positive or worthy of seeking. A great variety of activities may be experienced as pleasurable, like eating, having sex, listening to music or playing games. Pleasure is part of various other mental states such as ecstasy, euphoria and flow. Happiness and well-being are closely related to pleasure but not identical with it. There is no general agreement as to whether pleasure should be understood as a sensation, a quality of experiences, an attitude to experiences or otherwise. Pleasure plays a central role in the family of philosophical theories known as hedonism.

A facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles beneath the skin of the face. These movements convey the emotional state of an individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information between humans, but they also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species.

Motivational salience is a cognitive process and a form of attention that motivates or propels an individual's behavior towards or away from a particular object, perceived event or outcome. Motivational salience regulates the intensity of behaviors that facilitate the attainment of a particular goal, the amount of time and energy that an individual is willing to expend to attain a particular goal, and the amount of risk that an individual is willing to accept while working to attain a particular goal.

Robert Bolesław Zajonc was a Polish-born American social psychologist who is known for his decades of work on a wide range of social and cognitive processes. One of his most important contributions to social psychology is the mere-exposure effect. Zajonc also conducted research in the areas of social facilitation, and theories of emotion, such as the affective neuroscience hypothesis.

Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate within the field of affective neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affect (psychology)</span> Experience of feeling or emotion

Affect, in psychology, is the underlying experience of feeling, emotion, attachment, or mood. It encompasses a wide range of emotional states and can be positive or negative. Affect is a fundamental aspect of human experience and plays a central role in many psychological theories and studies. It can be understood as a combination of three components: emotion, mood, and affectivity. In psychology, the term affect is often used interchangeably with several related terms and concepts, though each term may have slightly different nuances. These terms encompass: emotion, feeling, mood, emotional state, sentiment, affective state, emotional response, affective reactivity, disposition. Researchers and psychologists may employ specific terms based on their focus and the context of their work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reward system</span> Group of neural structures responsible for motivation and desire

The reward system is a group of neural structures responsible for incentive salience, associative learning, and positively-valenced emotions, particularly ones involving pleasure as a core component. Reward is the attractive and motivational property of a stimulus that induces appetitive behavior, also known as approach behavior, and consummatory behavior. A rewarding stimulus has been described as "any stimulus, object, event, activity, or situation that has the potential to make us approach and consume it is by definition a reward". In operant conditioning, rewarding stimuli function as positive reinforcers; however, the converse statement also holds true: positive reinforcers are rewarding.The reward system motivates animals to approach stimuli or engage in behaviour that increases fitness. Survival for most animal species depends upon maximizing contact with beneficial stimuli and minimizing contact with harmful stimuli. Reward cognition serves to increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction by causing associative learning, eliciting approach and consummatory behavior, and triggering positively-valenced emotions. Thus, reward is a mechanism that evolved to help increase the adaptive fitness of animals. In drug addiction, certain substances over-activate the reward circuit, leading to compulsive substance-seeking behavior resulting from synaptic plasticity in the circuit.

The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when positive or neutral things of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frisson</span> Psychophysiological response to rewarding auditory or visual stimuli

Frisson, also known as aesthetic chills or psychogenic shivers, is a psychophysiological response to rewarding stimuli that often induces a pleasurable or otherwise positively-valenced affective state and transient paresthesia, sometimes along with piloerection and mydriasis . The sensation commonly occurs as a mildly to moderately pleasurable emotional response to music with skin tingling; piloerection and pupil dilation not necessarily occurring in all cases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Determination</span> Positive emotional feeling

Determination is a positive emotional feeling that promotes persevering towards a difficult goal in spite of obstacles. Determination occurs prior to goal attainment and serves to motivate behavior that will help achieve one's goal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emotion classification</span> Contrast of one emotion from another

Emotion classification, the means by which one may distinguish or contrast one emotion from another, is a contested issue in emotion research and in affective science. Researchers have approached the classification of emotions from one of two fundamental viewpoints:

  1. that emotions are discrete and fundamentally different constructs
  2. that emotions can be characterized on a dimensional basis in groupings

The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.

Emotional responsivity is the ability to acknowledge an affective stimuli by exhibiting emotion. It is a sharp change of emotion according to a person's emotional state. Increased emotional responsivity refers to demonstrating more response to a stimulus. Reduced emotional responsivity refers to demonstrating less response to a stimulus. Any response exhibited after exposure to the stimulus, whether it is appropriate or not, would be considered as an emotional response. Although emotional responsivity applies to nonclinical populations, it is more typically associated with individuals with schizophrenia and autism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Desire</span> Emotion of longing for a person, object or outcome

Desires are states of mind that are expressed by terms like "wanting", "wishing", "longing" or "craving". A great variety of features is commonly associated with desires. They are seen as propositional attitudes towards conceivable states of affairs. They aim to change the world by representing how the world should be, unlike beliefs, which aim to represent how the world actually is. Desires are closely related to agency: they motivate the agent to realize them. For this to be possible, a desire has to be combined with a belief about which action would realize it. Desires present their objects in a favorable light, as something that appears to be good. Their fulfillment is normally experienced as pleasurable in contrast to the negative experience of failing to do so. Conscious desires are usually accompanied by some form of emotional response. While many researchers roughly agree on these general features, there is significant disagreement about how to define desires, i.e. which of these features are essential and which ones are merely accidental. Action-based theories define desires as structures that incline us toward actions. Pleasure-based theories focus on the tendency of desires to cause pleasure when fulfilled. Value-based theories identify desires with attitudes toward values, like judging or having an appearance that something is good.

Emotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than neutral events.

In psychology, a first impression is the event when one person first encounters another person and forms a mental image of that person. Impression accuracy varies depending on the observer and the target being observed. First impressions are based on a wide range of characteristics: age, race, culture, language, gender, physical appearance, accent, posture, voice, number of people present, economic status, and time allowed to process. The first impressions individuals give to others could greatly influence how they are treated and viewed in many contexts of everyday life.

Risk aversion is a preference for a sure outcome over a gamble with higher or equal expected value. Conversely, rejection of a sure thing in favor of a gamble of lower or equal expected value is known as risk-seeking behavior.

Motivational intensity is defined as the strength of the tendency to either approach a positive situation or event or to move away from a negative situation or event.

In cognitive psychology, the affect-as-information hypothesis, or 'approach', is a model of evaluative processing, postulating that affective feelings provide a source of information about objects, tasks, and decision alternatives. A goal of this approach is to understand the extent of influence that affect has on cognitive functioning. It has been proposed that affect has two major dimensions, namely affective valence and affective arousal, and in this way is an embodied source of information. Affect is thought to impact three main cognitive functions: judgement, thought processing and memory. In a variety of scenarios, the influence of affect on these processes is thought to be mediated by its effects on attention. The approach is thought to account for a wide variety of behavioural phenomena in psychology.

References

  1. Nico H. Frijda, The Emotions. Cambridge(UK): Cambridge University Press, 1986. p. 207
  2. 1 2 3 Vazard J (2022). "Feeling the unknown: emotions of uncertainty and their valence". Erkenntnis. 89 (4): 1275–1294. doi: 10.1007/s10670-022-00583-1 . S2CID   250417356.
  3. Hu, C, Wang Q, Han T, Weare E, Fu G (2017). "Differential emotion attribution to neutral faces of own and other races". Cognition and Emotion. 31 (2): 360–368. doi:10.1080/02699931.2015.1092419. PMID   26465265. S2CID   24973774.
  4. Gómez-Emilsson, Andrés; Percy, Chris (16 November 2023). "The heavy-tailed valence hypothesis: the human capacity for vast variation in pleasure/pain and how to test it". Frontiers in Psychology. 14. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1127221 . PMC   10687198 . PMID   38034319.
  5. Kliemann, Dorit; Jacoby, Nir; Anzellotti, Stefano; Saxe, Rebecca R. (2016-11-16). "Decoding task and stimulus representations in face-responsive cortex". Cognitive Neuropsychology. 33 (7–8): 362–377. doi:10.1080/02643294.2016.1256873. ISSN   0264-3294. PMC   5673491 . PMID   27978778.
  6. "Negative Valence Systems". National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Retrieved 2023-07-25.
  7. "Positive Valence Systems". National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Retrieved 2023-07-25.