Exploring the Strength of Association between the Components of Emotion Syndromes: The Case of Surprise

Abstract

A new experimental paradigm involving a computerised quiz was used to examine, on an intra-individual level, the strength of association between four components of the surprise syndrome: cognitive (degree of prospectively estimated unexpectedness), experiential (the feeling of surprise), behavioural (degree of response delay on a parallel task), and expressive (the facial expression of surprise). It is argued that this paradigm, together with associated methods of data analysis, effectively controls for most method factors that could in previous studies have lowered the correlations among the components of emotion syndromes. It was found that (a) the components of the surprise syndrome were all positively correlated; (b) strong association existed only between the cognitive and the experiential component of surprise; (c) the coherence between syndrome components did not increase with increasing intensity of surprise; and (d) there was also only moderate coherence between the components of the facial expression of surprise (eyebrow raising, eye widening, mouth opening), although in this case, coherence tended to increase with intensity. Taken together, the findings support only a weakly probabilistic version of a behavioural syndrome view of surprise. However, the component correlations seem strong enough to support the existence of strong associations among a subset of the mental or central neurophysiological processes engaged in surprise. 1 Considering the popularity of the syndrome view of emotions, it is surprising to learn that its empirical support is far from solid: Experimental 1 Apart from ``syndrome view' ' (e.g. Averill, 1980; Lazarus et al., 1970) the theory of the nature of emotions under discussion also goes by names such as the ``componential' ' , ``multicomponent ' ' , or ``component process' ' view of emotions (e.g. Frijda et al., 1992; Scherer, 1984), the view that emotions are ``organised response patterns' ' , and probably still others. I prefer the term ``syndrome view' ' because it points to, but does not enforce, a probabilistic perspective, and because it is neutral with respect to the nature of the syndrome components (they can be mental, behavioural, or both). studies of the degree of association among the components and subcomponents of presumed emotion syndromes (e.g. fear, happiness, anger, or surprise), particularly studies in which multiple syndrome components were measured, are comparatively rare; they exist only for few emotions; and they provide for the greater part at best limited support for the syndrome view. That is, these studies often found (a) non-significant or very weak, and occasionally even negative associations between syndrome components, as well as (b) context-(and participant-) dependence of these associations (for recent, partial reviews of the literature, see e.g. Meyer, Schützwohl, & Reisenzein, 1997a; Schmidt-Atzert, 1993). Although most of the more recent versions of syndrome theories of emotion are formulated probabilistically and do not even necessarily predi...

Why some surprises are more surprising than others: Surprise as a metacognitive sense of explanatory difficulty

“…In this paper, we have focused on the cognitive aspects of surprise. This is not to deny that there is an important affective aspect to surprise that been explored in many studies (e.g., Meyer et al, 1997;Reisenzein, 2000;Silvia, 2009). Clearly, when people encounter surprising events in the world they often immediately experience the "shock of the surprise" and a certain level of arousal; a shock that sets in train the explanatory processes described here.…”

Individual differences in patterns of appraisal and anger experience

“…For instance, Kuppens, Van Mechelen, Smits, and De Boeck (2003) showed that the anger appraisals of frustration, other accountability, and unfairness do not necessarily accompany the experience of anger and vice versa. Also, findings from other studies suggest that emotions are not always characterised by the same pattern of appraisals (Parkinson, 1999;Reisenzein, 2000).…”

Describing the emotional states that are expressed in speech

“…Recent research has highlighted an alternative perspective, which is primarily concerned with correlation (and decorrelation) among various emotion-related variables. In particular, Reisenzein (2000) has highlighted the ''decoupling'' of physiological with self-report, expressive, and behavioural measures of emotion; that is, the measures from these different systems tend not to correlate very highly with one another. From that perspective, the natural strategy is to explore patterns of correlation and decorrelation among vocal and physiological indicators, without assuming that either will relate simply to categorical descriptions.…”

“…More recently, Reisenzein (2000) used a computerized science quiz to examine the relationships among the various expressive and experiential components of surprise. A related, older methodology involves exposing participants to various ''threats'' such as a painful injection (Schachter, 1959), a difficult intelligence test (Braunstein-Bercovitz et al, 2001), electric shock (Cornelius and Averill, 1980), or speaking in public (Davidson et al, 2000b).…”