My favorite week from this course was week 4 on emotions.

I find it really fascinating how

much emotions can control what you think and how you act in scenarios. I think that a proper
understanding of them can me in my every day life, to give me a little bit more control over my
emotions, instead of vice versa.

One of the most fascinating things that I found about the week 4 lecture was that we can
determine the emotions of someone often times by solely examining their eyes. This weird
power ties in with how the hundreds of facial muscles can discreetly give away your emotion. It
was interesting to learn about how and why exactly it is extremely difficult to fake ones
emotional stance. I never thought about how often times, people exaggerate emotions when
they are not being sincere. This can easily be used as a pseudo- lie detector test. Although a
person can often use the most blatant facial muscles to fake an emotion, the slightly less
noticeable muscles can give away your true emotions. I actually ended up watching the
beginning of the first episode to lie to me, and I thought it was really amazing how facial
expressions are so difficult to conceal, especially when you are trying really hard to not give
away any information.

Another topic that I thought was very interesting is the relationship between our physiological
responses to stimuli and their corresponding emotional responses. This is the basis for
Schachter Singers Two-Factor Theory which proposes that our cognitive interpretation of our
physiological responses determines our emotional experience. The general idea is that an event
can occur which causes some emotion, say fear. The fear causes your body to exhibit certain
physiological factors like trembling and a faster heart rate. These physical factors cause your
brain to cognitively label them as linked to fear, which leads to the actual emotional experience
of being frightened. This theory also allows for experiments to try to confound the brain and
have it mislabel a physiological factor to the wrong emotion. Specifically, the example that I
found amusing is where a high heart rate caused by fear can actually be misinterpreted by the
body as attraction. When a man is walking along a high up, wavering bridge it causes fear which
leads to the body trembling and having a faster heart rate. However, these physiological factors
can also imply physical attraction. Thus, when a female is present on the bridge, the body can
mislabel these symptoms as due to attraction to the female instead of fear of heights.