Emotional Episode Timeline. Design by Eve Ekman & Joe Flumerfelt
1.
Automatic Appraisal
: the constant and subjective appraisal of the environment seen through
the lens of our individual mind.
2.
Environment
: the physical context including places, people and other sensual input as well
as thoughts or memories.
3.
Emotion Alert Database:
where universal/hardwired responses and acquired memories
create the scripts behind all of our triggers. For example, from the environment we get a smell
and in the emotion alert database is the stored memory of the shampoo our mother used in
our childhood and we are triggered to experience an emotion of warm nostalgia of a happy
childhood.
4.
Triggers:
the initiator of the physiological emotion response. Can be universal (sudden loss of
ground under the feet creating fear) or learned (the smell of a certain shampoo). They are
created from the combination of the automatic appraisal of the environment matching to some
universal/hardwired or acquired script in the emotion alert database. When the trigger
resembles something in the emotion alert database, it may be a highly accurate or distorted
perception of the triggering event.
5
. Activation of relevant affect program
: each emotion has a separate program. This occurs
also in milliseconds. The affect program contains instructions for facial, vocal and postural
signals, preset changes in physiology to support preset actions, learned changes in
physiology to support learned actions – physical actions, words, memories, images. The
instructions in an affect program generate impulses in milliseconds.
6.
Learned display rules
(to regulate the signals) and
learned feeling rules
(to modify, amplify
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