Okay. So emotions can be shaped and influenced by appraisals. And appraisals are essentially our evaluations and interpretations of a stimulus or event. So this is a cognitive process. It's essentially how you are thinking about and understanding the stimulus.
And that is going to, of course, shape the emotional response that you end up having. So our appraisals are based off of our experiences, our knowledge, our expectations. All of those things can kind of shape how we are understanding and interpreting a stimulus. So appraisals can explain how we can have different emotional responses to the same stimulus. So obviously, we can see that across different people.
Right? You can have 2 people who have completely different emotional reactions to the exact same event that happens all the time. But appraisals can also show us how, you know, how we might have different emotional responses to the same thing with any single person. So for example, imagine you are having an amazing day. It's just like the best day ever.
You're on cloud 9 and you come home and there is a surprise birthday party waiting for you. Right? Full of, you know, people who want to talk to you and celebrate you. And based on your current mood, you might find this super exciting. Right?
It makes you really happy. But now imagine you are having the worst day ever. All you want to do is go home and curl up under the covers and never come out. And you open the door and there's a big loud noisy surprise party full of people who want to talk to you for hours on end. Right?
Maybe because of the day you're having, you might appraise that as kind of a negative thing and it might evoke some more negative or unpleasant emotions. Right? So, because of your experiences, your expectations, you're going to appraise this situation in 2 very different ways. Now appraisals can be either conscious or unconscious. Sometimes appraisals happen immediately and without any conscious thought.
Sometimes you have to really kind of take a moment and consciously think about how you are feeling and understanding an event. So they can be conscious or unconscious. So those are appraisals. They play a really big role in shaping our emotions. Now some emotions produce what we call action tendencies.
And action tendencies are specific and automatic behavioral responses. So they are behaviors that you do not have to think about. If you feel the emotion, this behavior kind of automatically follows it. And these seem to have a very strong evolutionary basis and that will kind of make sense as I go through and talk about these. Now I do want to be clear that not all emotions produce action tendencies.
The 3 that we are going to talk about here are the 3 that are most associated with action tendencies. So our first one is fear and fear is very commonly associated with a freeze response. Okay. So the other day I was out feeding my chickens and a black bear just came walking right towards me through the woods. And the first thing I did was freeze.
I did not have to think about freezing. It happened immediately and automatically. It was a beautiful example of an action tendency. And that has a really clear evolutionary advantage. Right?
If you freeze, you don't draw attention to yourself, you don't make any noise, and it kind of gives you a moment to gather your thoughts and figure out what to do next while you're not drawing any attention to yourself. So, fear is associated with freezing. Now the emotion of disgust is associated with avoidance. So, if you see something that you find disgusting or repulsive, you might, like, physically recoil from it. Right?
Either hold it further away or physically move your body back. And again, very clear evolutionary basis here. If something is disgusting to you, there's a very good chance it could be dirty, it could have bacteria or mold or things that could make you sick and so you would want to physically get away from that thing as much as possible. So disgust and avoidance go together. And then finally, we have anger which is often associated with an approach action tendency.
And this also makes sense because quite often when we feel anger it's because we feel that something is unfair or something is hurting us either physically or emotionally. And so being able to approach that thing, confront it, and change it is really important potentially. Now anger is a little bit different than the other two because we do see some cultural differences here. In certain cultures, this approach behavior is just not as acceptable as in some other cultures, and so you do see less of it. However, regardless of the effect of culture and socialization, we do still think of all three of these as having a really strong evolutionary basis across all humans.
Alright. So those are appraisals and action tendencies, and I will see you guys in our next one. Bye bye.
