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emotion

  (ĭ-mō'shən) pronunciation
n.
  1. A mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
  2. A state of mental agitation or disturbance: spoke unsteadily in a voice that betrayed his emotion. See synonyms at feeling.
  3. The part of the consciousness that involves feeling; sensibility: “The very essence of literature is the war between emotion and intellect” (Isaac Bashevis Singer).

[French émotion, from Old French, from esmovoir, to excite, from Vulgar Latin *exmovēre : Latin ex-, ex- + Latin movēre, to move.]


 
 

An umbrella concept in the common language, typically defined by instantiation by reference to a variety of mental and behavioral states. These range from lust to a sense of liking, from joy to hostile aggression, and from esthetic appreciation to disgust. Emotions are usually considered to be accompanied by some degree of internal, frequently visceral, excitement, as well as strong evaluative components. Emotions are also often described as irrational, that is, not subject to deliberative cogitation, and as interfering with normal thought processes.

These latter qualities are often exacerbated in the emotional behavior and expression seen in clinical cases. The expression of strong emotions is typically considered to be symptomatic of some underlying conflict, and even the positive emotions are used as indices of unusually strong attachments and atypical earlier experiences. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of repression to describe a defense mechanism against the occurrence of strong emotional experiences. From the psychoanalytic point of view, what is repressed is not the emotion itself, since the very concept of emotion implies conscious experience, but rather the memory of an event which, if it became conscious, would lead to strong conflicts and emotional consequences. Many other defense mechanisms, such as rationalization and compulsive or obsessive neurotic symptoms, are also seen as serving the purpose of avoiding conscious conflict and emotional sequelae. See also Psychoanalysis.


 

Emotion has usually, in the European- American tradition, been seen as the opposite of reason; the definitions provided in the Oxford English Dictionary emphasize emotion as agitation, perturbation, and ‘feeling’ or ‘affection’ — as distinguished from cognitive or volitional states of consciousness. Philosophically this split became entrenched through the thought of Rene Descartes, with his famous ‘I think, therefore I am’. Emotion has thus come to be associated with the body the way reason has been associated with the mind.

The European-American tradition often values reason over emotion, except in specifically defined events such as funerals, weddings, or births. Some cultures, notably that of Japan, are even more reserved, wanting to avoid negative emotional expression altogether. Other cultures, especially those of South and Latin America, and some south-east Asian cultures, see emotional expression as essential to living life, and value a wide range of emotional experience.

Emotion's connection to the body is frequently reinforced through our metaphoric description of emotion; it is frequently described as a visceral event. Disappointment means a sinking heart; nervousness, butterflies in the stomach; depression, weight in the chest area; joy, lightness and freedom of movement; excitement, racing heart and blood and tingling nerves. Emotions are conveyed to others through bodily configurations, including facial expressions, posture, muscle tension, voice tone, and gestures.

While emotions and their physical expression are culturally specific (especially gestures), studies have suggested that facial expressions are remarkably similar across cultures, with the biggest differences or confusions occurring for anger or surprise. We learn to identify and reproduce facial expressions as infants, where we study the expressions on adult faces and learn to associate them with emotions. Western cultures have long attributed special emotional intelligence and capability to women, who have traditionally borne the largest burden of emotional work in the culture.

Emotion frequently plays an important role in religious ritual. Many Christian sects revere emotional ecstasy as a direct encounter with the Holy Spirit and an expression of our oneness with God. Buddhism, on the other hand, rejects both self-denial and self-indulgence in a quest to extinguish the craving for physical or material pleasures. Religious emotion is often balanced through paired rituals; Catholic cultures often have a festival period preceding the asceticism of Lent.

— Julie Vedder

 
Thesaurus: emotion

noun

    A complex and usually strong subjective response, such as love or hate: affection, affectivity, feeling, sentiment. See feelings.

 
Antonyms: emotion

n

Definition: mental state
Antonyms: physicality


 

n

A complex feeling or state (affect) accompanied by characteristic motor and glandular activities; feelings; mood.

 

Affective aspect of consciousness. The emotions are generally understood as representing a synthesis of subjective experience, expressive behaviour, and neurochemical activity. Most researchers hold that they are part of the human evolutionary legacy and serve adaptive ends by adding to general awareness and the facilitation of social communication. Some nonhuman animals are also considered to possess emotions, as first described by Charles Darwin in 1872. An influential early theory of emotion was that proposed independently by William James and Carl Georg Lange (1834 – 1900), who held that emotion was a perception of internal physiological reactions to external stimuli. Walter B. Cannon questioned this view and directed attention to the thalamus as a possible source of emotional content. Later researchers have focused on the brain-stem structure known as the reticular formation, which serves to integrate brain activity and may infuse perceptions or actions with emotional valence. Cognitive psychologists have emphasized the role of comparison, matching, appraisal, memory, and attribution in the forming of emotions. All modern theorists agree that emotions influence what people perceive, learn, and remember, and that they play an important part in personality development. Cross-cultural studies have shown that, whereas many emotions are universal, their specific content and manner of expression vary considerably.

For more information on emotion, visit Britannica.com.

 

The typical human emotions include love, grief, fear, anger, joy. Each indicates a state of some kind of arousal, a state that can prompt some activities and interfere with others. These states are associated with characteristic feelings, and they have characteristic bodily expressions. Unlike moods they have objects: one grieves over some particular thing, or is angry at something. Different philosophical theories have tended to highlight one or other of these aspects of emotion. Pure arousal theory imagines a visceral reaction triggered by some event, which stands ready to be converted into one emotion or another by contextual factors. Theories based on the feel or qualia of an emotion were put forward by writers such as Hume and Kant, but the approach meets difficulty when we consider that an emotion is not a raw feel, but is identified by its motivational powers, and their function in prompting action. The characteristic expression of emotion was studied extensively by Darwin, resulting in the classic The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In 1884 James published what became known as the James-Lange theory of emotion whose main contention is that we feel as we do in virtue of the bodily expressions and behaviour that we are prompted towards, rather than the other way round: ‘our feeling of the changes as they occur is the emotion’. Again it is not clear how such a theory would accommodate the directed, cognitive side of emotions that have a specific object, rather than being simply the experience of bodily change. Directly opposing this some philosophers have put forward a purely cognitive theory of the emotions, derived from Stoicism, seeing them simply as judgments: fear of the dog is no more than the judgement that it is dangerous or a threat to one's well-being. The Stoics thought that as judgements the emotions were typically false, but modern cognitive theories tend to be more generous to them, often influenced by the idea that our capacity for emotions is often an admirable moral adaptation. Other questions concern the cultural variability of emotion, and the dependence of some emotions, but not all, on the existence of linguistically adequate modes of expression and self-interpretation.

 

A complex state of arousal that occurs as a reaction to a perceived situation. In its most obvious manifestation, an emotion is an acute condition characterized by disruption of routine experience and activities; as such, emotions may provoke subjective feelings of pleasure or displeasure, physiological responses (such as changes in heart rate), and behavioural responses. There is much disagreement as to the exact nature of emotions and how they differ from motives and distractions, but there is no doubt that emotions may have an organizing or disorganizing effect on performance in sport.

 
term commonly and loosely used to denote individual, subjective feelings which dictate moods. In psychology, emotion is considered a response to stimuli that involves characteristic physiological changes—such as increase in pulse rate, rise in body temperature, greater or less activity of certain glands, change in rate of breathing—and tends in itself to motivate the individual toward further activity. Early psychological studies of emotion tried to determine whether a certain emotion arose before the action, simultaneously with it, or as a response to automatic physiological processes. In the 1960s, the Schachter-Singer theory pointed out that cognitive processes, not just physiological reactions, played a significant role in determining emotions. Robert Plutchik developed (1980) a theory showing eight primary human emotions: joy, acceptance, fear, submission, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation, and argued that all human emotions can be derived from these. Psychologists Sylvan Tomkins (1963) and Paul Ekman (1982) have contended that “basic” emotions can be quantified because all humans employ the same facial muscles when expressing a particular emotion. Studies done by Ekman suggest that muscular feedback from a facial expression characteristic of a certain emotion results in the experience of that emotion. Since emotions are abstract and subjective, however, they remain difficult to quantify: some theories point out that non-Western cultural groups experience emotions quite distinct from those generally seen as “basic” in the West.


 
Psychoanalysis: Emotion

The word emotion is derived from the Latin emovere, "to set in motion." It initially referred to the idea of physical movement and then assumed a figurative meaning associated with mental movement.

The term is infrequently used in psychoanalysis, where the term affect, derived from German Affekt, is preferred. Sigmund Freud, however, in a text written in French in 1895, used the expression "étatémotif" ("emotive state") to designate what was translated in the German editions as Affekt. It is with the theoretical developments associated with Kleinian psychoanalysis that the term emotion reappeared. The reasons for the change are significant.

Freudian metapsychology is centered on the study of the mental apparatus, which is considered, if not as an isolated entity, at least as one that can be isolate. In the Freudian model the mental apparatus is charged with drives, whose effects—affect and representation—are observable. Affect corresponds to the quantitative aspects, and mental representations correspond to the qualitative aspects of the drives. Positive affects accompany the satisfaction of drives, negative affects accompany the state of tension within the mental apparatus (pleasure/unpleasure principle). The object of satisfaction, that is, the object that triggers the discharge of the impulse, is contingent, vicarious. For Daniel Widlöcher, the affect refers to internal regulatory functions of the mental apparatus: a discharge of impulses and signals intended to provide information to the mental apparatus, as Freud suggested in his second theory of anxiety, and that emotion adds a third reference, that of communication with the external object, "a modality of expression intended to inform others of a particular situation, laden with value for the subject."

It should come as no surprise therefore that the theories assigning greater importance to object relations have given a central place to the concept of emotion. Compared to affect, it contains levels of additional complexity, because it is a means of communicative exchange between self and other, through its behavioral (especially facial) expressions, which have been extensively studied by specialists in development and cognitive function, and because it refers to nuanced qualitative aspects rather than simply quantitative aspects combined with a positive or negative valence.

Melanie Klein insisted on the extreme nature of the baby's emotions at the start of its extra-uterine existence, associated with love and hate relations directed at the (partial) object in what she called the "paranoid-schizoid position." Later, when the infant achieves the "depressive position," emotions become more nuanced, hate is tinged with guilt, love with ambivalence. Wilfred Bion gave the concept of emotion an essential role in his description of the intrapsychic world as a world of relations between internal or interiorized objects. For Bion the links between internal objects are emotional links, just as the links between the subject and its external objects are emotional in nature. He chose three types of emotional links: these correspond to love relations (L link = love), hate relations (H link = hatred), and knowledge relations (K link = knowledge). The first two, L and H, are emotional links; these are unstable and associated with splitting. The K link is the psychoanalytic link par excellence and has the advantage of stability. It does indeed involve an emotional link, in the sense that it corresponds to an emotion associated with uncertainty and the tension experienced in the face of the unknown in anticipation of meaning. Psychoanalytic therapy develops K links.

Bibliography

Bion, Wilfred. R. (1962). A theory of thinking. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, XLIII, 4-5; in Second Thoughts, London: Heinemann, 1967.

Freud, Sigmund. (1895c [1894]). Obsessions and phobias: their psychical mechanism and their aetiology. SE, 3: 69-82.

Klein, Melanie. (1952). Quelques conclusions théoriques au sujet de la vieémotionnelle des bébés. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs, and J. Riviere (Eds.), Developments in psychoanalysis (pp. 187-253). London: Hogarth Press.

Widlöcher, Daniel. (1992). De l'émotion primaireà l'affect différencié. In P. Mazet and S. Lebovici (Eds.)Émotions et Affects chez le bébé et ses partenaires (pp. 45-55). Paris: Eshel.

—DIDIER HOUZEL

 

Aroused state involving intense feeling, autonomic activation and related behavior. Animals have emotions insofar as they are motivated to behave by what they perceive and much of the reaction is learned rather than intuitive. The reactions are based on rewarding and adversive properties of stimuli from the external environment. The center for the control of emotional behavior is the limbic system of the brain.

 
A cynical view of the world by Ambrose Bierce


n.

A prostrating disease caused by a determination of the heart to the head. It is sometimes accompanied by a copious discharge of hydrated chloride of sodium from the eyes.


 
Word Tutor: emotion
pronunciation

IN BRIEF: Strong feeling. Also: A physical or mental reaction to a strong feeling.

pronunciation People think love is an emotion. Love is good sense. — Ken Kesey.

 
Quotes About: Emotions

Quotes:

"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray." - Oscar Wilde

"Emotions have taught mankind to reason." - Marquis De Vauvenargues

"The heart is forever inexperienced." - Henry David Thoreau

"Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits." - Bishop Fulton J. Sheen

"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end." - George Santayana

"The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool." - George Santayana

See more famous quotes about Emotions

 
Wikipedia: emotion


Emotions

Acceptance
Affection
Aggression
Ambivalence
Anger
Apathy
Anxiety
Compassion
Depression
Disgust
Doubt
Ecstasy
Empathy
Envy
Embarrassment
Euphoria
Fear
Forgiveness
Frustration
Guilt
Gratitude
Grief
Happiness
Hatred
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Homesickness
Hysteria
Loneliness
Love
Paranoia
Pity
Pleasure
Pride
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Sadness
Shame
Suffering
Surprise
Sympathy

An emotion is a "complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral, and physiological elements, by which the individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter of event."[1] It arises without conscious effort and is either positive or negative in its valence.

Other closely related terms are:

  • affect, a synonym for emotion
  • affect display, external display of emotion
  • disposition, referring to a durable differentiating characteristic of a person, a tendency to react to situations with a certain emotion
  • feeling, which usually refers to the subjective, phenomenological aspect of emotion
  • mood, which refers to an emotional state of duration intermediate between an emotion and a disposition

Etymology

Emotion is derived from French émotion, from émouvoir, 'excite' based on Latin emovere, from e- (variant of ex-) 'out' and movere 'move'. "Motivation" is also derived from movere.

Definitions of emotion

Emotion is very complex, and the term has no single universally accepted definition.[2] The study of emotions is part of psychology, neuroscience, and ethics.

According to Sloman,[3] emotions are cognitive processes. Some authors emphasize the difference between human emotions and the affective behavior of animals.

We often talk about brains as information-processing systems, but any account of the brain that lacks an account of emotions, motivations, fears, and hopes is incomplete.[citation needed] Emotions are measurable physical responses to salient stimuli: the increased heartbeat and perspiration that accompany fear, the freezing response of a rat in the presence of a cat, or the extra muscle tension that accompanies anger. Feelings, on the other hand, are the subjective experiences that sometimes accompany these processes: the sensations of happiness, envy, sadness, and so on.[citation needed] Emotions seem to employ largely unconscious machinery—for example, brain areas involved in emotion will respond to angry faces that are briefly presented and then rapidly masked, even when subjects are unaware of having seen the face. Across cultures the expression of basic emotions is remarkably similar, and as Darwin observed, it is also similar across all mammals. There are even strong similarities in physiological responses among humans, reptiles, and birds when showing fear, anger, or parental love.[citation needed]

Modern views propose that emotions are brain states that quickly assign value or valence to outcomes and provide a simple plan of action. Thus, emotion can be viewed as a type of computation, a rapid, automatic summary that initiates appropriate actions.[citation needed] When a bear is galloping toward you, the rising fear directs your brain to do the right things (determining an escape route) instead of all the other things it could be doing (rounding out your grocery list). When it comes to perception, you can spot an object more quickly if it is, say, a spider rather than a roll of tape. In the realm of memory, emotional events are laid down differently by a parallel memory system involving a brain area called the amygdala.

One goal of emotional neuroscience is to understand the nature of the many disorders of emotion, depression being the most common and costly. Impulsive aggression and violence are also thought to be consequences of faulty emotion regulation.[citation needed]

The function of emotion (relations among emotion, meta-emotion, and reason)

Emotion is generally regarded by Western civilization as the antithesis of reason. This distinction stems from Western philosophy specifically Cartesian dualism and modern interpretations of Stoicism, and is reflected in common phrases like appeal to emotion or your emotions have taken over.[citation needed]

In Paul D. MacLean's triune brain model, emotions are defined as the responses of the mammalian cortex. Emotion competes with even more instinctive responses from the Reptilian cortex and the more logical, reasoning neocortex.[citation needed] However, current research on the neural circuitry of emotion suggests that emotion is an essential part of human decision-making and planning, and that the distinction made in Western culture between reason and emotion is not as clear as it seems.[4]

Emotions can be undesired either to the individual experiencing them, but also can be undesired to the other persons, groups of persons, organizations, sub-cultures, and civilizations such as Western civilization, which can be viewed as the emotion being subjected to the individual's or someone else's discouraging meta-emotion about the undesired emotion or can be even repressed by the meta-emotions. Thus one of the most distinctive, and perhaps challenging, facts about human beings is this potential for entanglement, or possibly opposition, between emotion, meta-emotion, will, and reason.[citation needed]

Some state that there is no empirical support for any generalization suggesting the antithesis between reason and emotion: indeed, anger or fear can often be thought of as a systematic response to observed facts. In any case, it is clear that the relation between logic and argument and emotion is one which merits careful study. [citation needed]

Emotion as the subject of scientific research has multiple dimensions: behavioral, physiological, subjective, and cognitive. Sloman argues that many emotions are side-effects of the operations of complex mechanisms (e.g. 'alarm' mechanisms) required in animals or machines with multiple motives and limited capacities and resources for coping with a changing and unpredictable world, just as 'thrashing' can sometimes occur as a side-effect of scheduling and memory management mechanisms required in a computer operating system for purposes other than producing thrashing. Such side effects are sometimes useful, but sometimes they are dysfunctional.[citation needed] Other theorists, often influenced by writings of Antonio Damasio argue that emotions themselves are necessary for any intelligent system (natural or artificial).[citation needed]

Psychiatrist William Glasser's theory of the human control system states that behavior is composed of four simultaneous components: deeds, ideas, emotions, and physiological states. He asserts that we choose the idea and deed and that the associated emotions and physiological states also occur but cannot be chosen independently. He calls his construct a total behavior to distinguish it from the common concept of behavior. He uses the verbs to describe what is commonly seen as emotion. For example, he uses 'to depress' to describe the total behavior commonly known as depression which, to him, includes depressing ideas, actions, emotions, and physiological states. Dr. Glasser also further asserts that internal choices (conscious or unconscious) cause emotions instead of external stimuli.[citation needed]

According to Damasio, feeling can be viewed as the subjective experience of an emotion that arises physiologically in the brain.[5]

Many psychologists adopt the ABC model, which defines emotions in terms of three fundamental attributes: A. physiological arousal, B. behavioral expression (e.g. facial expressions), and C. conscious experience, the subjective feeling of an emotion.[citation needed] All three attributes are necessary for a full fledged emotional event, though the intensity of each may vary greatly.[citation needed]

Robert Masters makes the following distinctions between affect, feeling and emotion: "As I define them, affect is an innately structured, non-cognitive evaluative sensation that may or may not register in consciousness; feeling is affect made conscious, possessing an evaluative capacity that is not only physiologically based, but that is often also psychologically (and sometimes relationally) oriented; and emotion is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling."[6]

In pop culture there are sub-cultures which cultivate the expressions of anger and rebelliousness even when they are not really angry, its members encouraging each other to express the anger by internalizing meta-gladness about it. Encouragement (i.e. meta-gladness) and discouragement (i.e. psychological repression) of selected emotions - instead of mere awareness and equal interest in all emotions - can be considered as additional source of organizational climate, family dynamics, psychodynamics, personality traits, and of mental disorders, including depression among others.[citation needed]

Emotions in the philosophy of mind

In opposition to the traditional philosophy of mind that has considered emotions only as non-essential addition, at best giving a flavour to rational intellectual thought, the authors of naturalistic philosophy of mind inspired by prospects of building robots and other autonomous agents are starting to give emotions a central role as an indispensable constituent for adaptive agency (see DeLancey 2002/2004).[citation needed]

Emotions in Decision Making

There is increasing support for treating people's emotions as an information source in their decision making process.[citation needed]

Theoretical Traditions in Psychological Emotion Research

Several theoretical traditions in emotion research have been offered. These traditions are not mutually exclusive and many researchers incorporate multiple perspectives in their work.

Somatic theories

William James in the late 19th century believed that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. These changes might be visceral, postural, or facially expressive. The most basic of these somatic theories is the James-Lange theory. This theory and its derivates state that a changed situation leads to a changed bodily state. It is this bodily state which in turn gives rise to an emotion. Hence the emotion fear upon encountering a bear in the woods would follow from:

Spot a bear
-> Heart begins beating faster; adrenalin is being produced
-> The emotion fear arises

This approach underlies experiment where through manipulating the bodily state, a desired emotion is induced (e.g. in laughter therapy).[citation needed]

The Cannon-Bard theory

Walter Cannon provided empirical evidence against the dominance of the James-Lange theory of the physiological aspects emotions in the second edition of Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage. Cannon and Bard came up with a different account of the relations between emotions and behavior; where a certain situation leads to an emotion; which in turn activates a typical behavior. Here the emotion fear upon encountering a bear in the woods would result in:

Spot a bear
-> The emotion fear arises
-> Run away

Cognitive theories

Research in social psychology interprets emotions as a combination of two elements; physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation. The earliest account of such a theory is the Singer-Schachter theory that is based on experiments that varied arousal introducing chemical (adrenaline) and put the participants in different situations. The combination of the appraisal of the situation (cognitive) and whether participants received adrenaline or a placebo together determined the response. In the example of the bear this would lead to:

Spot a bear
-> Adrenalin is released, hearts starts beating faster
-> The sight of a bear is interpreted as being dangerous for the health (note this needs not necessarily be a conscious appraisal)
-> The emotion fear arises.

Several other theories have a similar ideas, for example, the framework proposed by Nico Frijda where such appraisal leads to action tendencies is related to this idea.

In all these theories, the different emotions causes a detectable physical response in the body. These responses are often perceived as sensation in the body; for example:

  • Fear is felt as a heightened heartbeat, increased “flinch” response, and increased muscle tension.
  • Anger, based on sensation, seems indistinguishable from fear.
  • Happiness is often felt as an expansive or swelling feeling in the chest and the sensation of lightness or buoyancy, as if standing underwater.
  • Sadness is often experienced as a feeling of tightness in the throat and eyes, and relaxation in the arms and legs.
  • Shame can be felt as heat in the upper chest and face.
  • Desire can be accompanied by a dry throat, heavy breathing, and increased heart rate.

The evolutionary perspective

A fourth theoretical tradition has been gaining influence once more (see: Cornelius, 1996). This fourth, evolutionary tradition, started in the late 19th century with Charles Darwin's publication of a book on the expression of emotions in man and animals.[7] Darwin's original thesis was that emotions evolved via natural selection for reasons of warning other creatures about your intentions (e.g. a cat with a high back is angry and will strike you unless you back off). Darwin argued that for mankind emotions were no longer functional but are epiphenomena of functional associated habits. Such an evolutionary origin would predict emotions to be cross-culturally universal. Confirmation of this biological origin was provided by Paul Ekman's seminal research on facial expressions in humans. Other research in this area focuses on physical displays of emotion including body language of animals and facial expressions in humans. (See Affect display.) The increased potential in neuroimaging has allowed investigation of this idea focusing on the working brain itself. Important neurological advances where made from this perspectives in the 1990s by, for example, Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damasio.

Primary and secondary emotion

Primary emotions (i.e., innate emotions, such as fear) "depend on limbic system circuitry," with the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus being "key players".

  • Smell carries directly to limbic areas of the mammalian brain via nerves running from the olfactory bulbs to the septum, amygdala, and hippocampus. In the acquatic brain, olfaction was critical for detecting food, foes, and mates from a distance in murky waters.
  • An emotional feeling, like an aroma, has a volatile or "thin-skinned" quality because sensory cells lie on the exposed exterior of the olfactory epithelium (i.e., on the bodily surface itself).
  • A sudden scent, like a whiff of smelling salts, may jolt the mind. The force of a mood is reminiscent of a smell's intensity (e.g., soft and gentle, pungent, or overpowering), and similarly permeates and fades as well. The design of emotion cues, in tandem with the forebrain's olfactory prehistory, suggests that the sense of smell is the neurological model for our emotions.

Secondary emotions (i.e., feelings attached to objects [e.g., to dental drills], events, and situations through learning) require additional input, based largely on memory, from the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices. The stimulus may still be processed directly via the amygdala but is now also analyzed in the thought process. Thoughts and emotions are interwoven: every thought, however bland, almost always carries with it some emotional undertone, however subtle.

Neurobiological theories of emotion

Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain.

Defined as such, these emotional states are specific manifestations of non-verbally expressed feelings of agreement, amusement, anger, certainty, control, disagreement, disgust, disliking, embarrassment, fear, guilt, happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and uncertainty. If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures. In mammals, primates, and human beings, feelings are displayed as emotion cues.

For example, the human emotion of love is proposed to have evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulated gyrus) designed for the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring. Paleocircuits are neural platforms for bodily expression configured millions of years before the advent of cortical circuits for speech. They consist of pre-configured pathways or networks of nerve cells in the forebrain, brain stem and spinal cord. They evolved prior to the earliest mammalian ancestors, as far back as the jawless fishes, to control motor function.

Presumably, before the mammalian brain, life in the non-verbal world was automatic, preconscious, and predictable. The motor centers of reptiles react to sensory cues of vision, sound, touch, chemical, gravity, and motion with pre-set body movements and programmed postures. With the arrival of night-active mammals, circa 180 million years ago, smell replaced vision as the dominant sense, and a different way of responding arose from the olfactory sense, which is proposed to have developed into mammalian emotion and emotional memory. In the Jurassic Period, the mammalian brain invested heavily in olfaction to succeed at night as reptiles slept — one explanation for why olfactory lobes in mammalian brains are proportionally larger than in the reptiles. These odor pathways gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.

Brain areas related to emotion

Emotions are thought to be related to activity in brain areas that direct our attention, motivate our behavior, and determine the significance of what is going on around us. Pioneering work by Broca (1878), Papez (1937), and MacLean (1952) suggested that emotion is related to a group of structures in the center of the brain called the limbic system, which includes the hypothalamus, cingulate cortex, hippocampi, and other structures. More recent research has shown that some of these limbic structures are not as directly related to emotion as others are, while some non-limbic structures have been found to be of greater emotional relevance. The following brain structures are currently thought to be most involved in emotion:

  • Amygdala — The amygdalae are two small, round structures located anterior to the hippocampi near the temporal poles. The amygdalae are involved in detecting and learning what parts of our surroundings are important and have emotional significance. They are critical for the production of emotion, and may be particularly so for negative emotions, especially fear.
  • Prefrontal cortex — The term prefrontal cortex refers to the very front of the brain, behind the forehead and above the eyes. It appears to play a critical role in the regulation of emotion and behavior by anticipating the consequences of our actions. The prefrontal cortex may play an important role in delayed gratification by maintaining emotions over time and organizing behavior toward specific goals.
  • Anterior cingulate — The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is located in the middle of the brain, just behind the prefrontal cortex. The ACC is thought to play a central role in attention, and may be particularly important with regard to conscious, subjective emotional awareness. This region of the brain may also play an important role in the initiation of motivated behavior.
  • Ventral striatum — The ventral striatum is a group of subcortical structures thought to play an important role in emotion and behavior. One part of the ventral striatum called the nucleus accumbens is thought to be involved in the experience of goal-directed positive emotion. Individuals with addictions experience increased activity in this area when they encounter the object of their addiction.
  • Insula — The insular cortex is thought to play a critical role in the bodily experience of emotion, as it is connected to other brain structures that regulate the body’s autonomic functions (heart rate, breathing, digestion, etc.). This region also processes taste information and is thought to play an important role in experiencing the emotion of disgust.

Positive and negative perception

Like aromas, emotions are experienced as either positive or negative, pleasant or unpleasant; emotions do not seem to be neutral. Like odors, feelings come and go, but are logical, and clearly show upon our face in mood signs. It is likely that many emotions evolved from aroma paleocircuits a. in subcortical nuclei (e.g., the paleocortex of the amygdala), and b. in layers of nerve cells within the forebrain's outer covering of neocortex. The latter's stratified architecture resembles that of the olfactory bulb, which is organized in layers as well.

Sociology of Emotions

Systematic observations of group interaction found that a substantial portion of group activity is devoted to the socio-emotional issues of expressing affect and dealing with tension.[8] Simultaneously, field studies of social attraction in groups revealed that feelings of individuals about each other collate into social networks,[9] a discovery that still is being explored in the field of social network analysis.

Ethnomethodology revealed emotional commitments to everyday norms through purposeful breaching of the norms. For example, students acting as boarders in their own homes reported others' astonishment, bewilderment, shock, anxiety, embarrassment, and anger; family members accused the students of being mean, inconsiderate, selfish, nasty, or impolite. Actors who breach a norm themselves feel waves of emotion, including apprehension, panic, and despair.[10] However, habitual rule breaking leads to declining stress, and may eventually end in enjoyment.

T. David Kemper[11] proposed that people in social interaction have positions on two relational dimensions: status and power. Emotions emerge as interpersonal events change or maintain individuals' status and power. For example, affirming someone else's exalted status produces love-related emotions. Increases or decreases in one's own and other's status or power generate specific emotions whose quality depends on the patterns of change.

Sociologist Randall Collins has stated that emotional energy is the main motivating force in social life, for love and hatred, investing, working or consuming, rendering cult or waging war.[12] Emotional energy ranges from the highest heights of enthusiasm, self-confidence and initiative to the deepest depths of apathy, depression and retreat. Emotional energy comes from variously successful or failed chains of interaction rituals, that is, patterned social encounters –from conversation or sexual flirtation through Christmas family dinners or office work to mass demonstrations, organizations or revolutions. In the latter, the coupling of participants' behavior synchronizes their nervous systems to the point of generating a collective effervescence, one observable in their mutual focus and emotional entraining, as well as in their loading of emotional and symbolic meaning to entities which subsequently become emblems of the ritual and of the membership group endorsing, preserving, promoting and defending them. Thus social life would be most importantly about generating and distributing emotional energy.

Thomas J. Scheff[13] established that many cases of social conflict are based on a destructive and often escalating, but stoppable and reversible shame-rage cycle: when someone results or feels shamed by another, their social bond comes under stress. This can be cooperatively acknowledged, talked about and – most effectively when possible - laughed at so their social bond may be restored. Yet, when shame is not acknowledged, but instead negated and repressed, it becomes rage, and rage may drive to aggressive and shaming actions that feed-back negatively on this self-destructive situation. The social management of emotions might be the fundamental dynamics of social cooperation and conflict around resources, complexity, conflict and moral life. It is well-established sociological fact that expression and feeling of the emotion of anger, for example, is strongly discouraged (repressed) in girls and women in many cultures, while fear is discouraged in boys and men. Some cultures and sub-cultures encourage or discourage happiness, sadness, jealousy, excitedness, and many other emotions. The free expression of the emotion of disgust is considered socially unacceptable in many countries.

Arlie Hochschild[14] proposed that individuals apply cultural and ideological standards to judge the suitability of emotions occurring during a social interaction, and then manage their feelings to produce acceptable displays. Hochschild showed that jobs often require such emotional labor. Her classic study of emotional labor among flight attendants found that an industry speed-up, reducing contact between flight attendants and passengers, made it impossible for flight attendants to deliver authentic emotional labor, so they ended up surface-acting superficial smiles. Peggy Thoits[15] divided emotion management techniques into implementation of new events and reinterpretation of past events. Thoits noted that emotions also can be managed with drugs, by performing faux gestures and facial expressions, or by cognitive reclassifications of one's feelings.

Affect Control Theory which was originated by David R. Heise proposes that social actions are designed by their agents to create impressions that befit sentiments reigning in a situation. Emotions are transient personal states depending on the current impression of the emoting person, and on the comparison of that impression with the sentiment attached to the person's identity.

Classification of emotions

There has been considerable debate whether emotions should be classified as a position in a continuum (e.g. the circumplex model by Russell, or many of the valence approaches in social psychology) or whether emotions are best identified as distinct (basic) states.

Classification by basic emotions

One of the most influential classification approaches in the study of emotion is Robert Plutchik’s classification into eight primary emotions. The emotions that Plutchik lists as primary are:[citation needed]

Similar to the way primary colors combine, primary emotions are believed to blend together to form the full spectrum of human emotional experience. Plutchik reasons that these eight are primary on evolutionary grounds, by relating each to behavior with survival value. For example: fear motivates flight from danger, anger motivates fighting for survival. They are considered to be part of our biological heritage and built into human nature.[citation needed]Paul Ekman devised a similar list of basic emotions from cross-cultural research on the Fore tribesmen of Papua New Guinea. He found that even members of an isolated, stone age culture could reliably identify the expressions of emotion in photographs of people from cultures which the Fore were not yet familiar, and concluded that the facial expression of some basic emotions is innate. The following is Ekman’s list of basic emotions:[citation needed]

Ekman holds that this lends further support to the view that at least some emotions are primary, innate, and universal in all human beings.[16]

Lazarus (1991) similarly offers a taxonomy of 'Core Relational Themes' for various emotions; these help define both function and eliciting conditions. They include a demeaning offense against me and mine for anger; facing an immediate, concrete, and overwhelming physical danger for fear; having experienced an irrevocable loss for sadness; taking in or being too close to an indigestible object or idea (metaphorically speaking) for disgust; making reasonable progress toward the realization of a goal for happiness.

Emotions and Psychotherapy

Depending on the particular school's general emphasis either on cognitive component of emotion, physical energy discharging, or on symbolic movement and facial expression components of emotion, different schools of psychotherapy approach human emotions differently. While, for example, the school of Re-evaluation Counseling propose that distressing emotions are to be relieved by “discharging” them - hence crying, laughing, sweating, shaking, and trembling.[17] other more cognitively oriented schools approach them via their cognitive components, or via symbolic movement and facial expression components (like in contemporary Gestalt therapy[18]).

Meta-emotions


Main article: Meta-emotion

Meta-emotion refers in accordance with the general definition of the prefix "meta-" to second-order emotions about first-order emotions. Meta-emotions can be short-lived or long-lived. The latter can be a source of discouragement or even psychological repression, or encouragement of specific emotions, having implications for personality traits, psychodynamics, organizational climate, emotional disorders, but also emotional awareness, and emotional intelligence.

Emotions and computer models, artificial intelligence and computing

Main article: Affective computing

A flurry of recent work in computer science, engineering, psychology and neuroscience is aimed at developing devices that recognize human affect display and modelling emotions generally (Fellous, Armony & LeDoux, 2002).

Emotion in animals

Main article: Emotion in animals

Animals have physiological responses that are analogous to human emotional responses, as has been recognized at least since Darwin published The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872.

Notes

  1. ^ vandenBos, Gary B. (2006). APA Dictionary of Psychology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association
  2. ^ Emotional Competency discussion of emotion
  3. ^ Sloman, Aaron (1981) Why Robots Will Have Emotions. In proc.[1]. University of Sussex, UK
  4. ^ Damasio, Antonio (1994) Descartes Error Penguin Putnam, New York, New York
  5. ^ Damasio, Antonio (1994) Descartes Error Penguin Putnam, New York, New York
  6. ^ Masters, Robert (2000), Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger
  7. ^ Darwin, Charles (1872). The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Note: This book was originally published in 1872, but has been reprinted many times thereafter by different publishers
  8. ^ Hare, A. P. (1976). Handbook of small group research (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press, Chapter 3
  9. ^ Hare, A. P. (1976). Handbook of small group research (2nd ed.). New York: Free Press, Chapter 7
  10. ^ Milgram, S. (1974, ). An interview with Carol Tavris. Psychology Today, pp. 70-73
  11. ^ Kemper, T. D. (1978). A social interactional theory of emotion. New York: Wiley
  12. ^ Collins, Randall. (2004) Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton University Press
  13. ^ Scheff, Thomas J, and Retzinger, Suzanne. (1991) Emotions and violence : shame and rage in destructive conflicts. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books
  14. ^ Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: The commercialization of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press
  15. ^ Thoits, P. A. (1990). Emotional deviance: research agendas. T. D. Kemper (Ed.), Research agendas in the sociology of emotions (pp. 180–203). Albany: State University of New York Press
  16. ^ Ekman, P. & Friesen, W. V (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and encoding. Semiotica, 1, 49–98.
  17. ^ Counseling recovery processes - RC website
  18. ^ On Emotion - an article from Manchester Gestalt Centre website

References

  1. Arbib, M. and Fellous, J-M (editors). (2005) Who Needs Emotions?: The Brain Meets the Robot. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
  2. Cornelius, R. (1996). The science of emotion. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
  3. DeLancey, C. (2002/2004). "Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about Mind and Artificial Intelligence", Oxford University Press.
  4. Ekman P. (1999). "Basic Emotions". In: T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Sussex, UK:.
  5. Ekman P. (1999). "Facial Expressions" in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Dalgleish T & Power M, Eds. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. New York, New York.
  6. Fellous, J.M., Armony, J.L., & LeDoux, J.E. (2002). "Emotional Circuits and Computational Neuroscience" in 'The handbook of brain theory and neural networks' Second Edition. M.A. Arbib (editor), The MIT Press. [2]
  7. Frijda, Nico H. (1986). The Emotions. Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Cambridge University Press. [3]
  8. Jaeger, C., & Bartsch, A. (2006), "Meta-emotions". Grazer Philosophische Studien, 73, 179–204.
  9. Lazarus, R. (1991). "Emotion and adaptation". New York: Oxford University Press.
  10. LeDoux, J.E. (1986). The neurobiology of emotion. Chap. 15 in J E. LeDoux & W. Hirst (Eds.) Mind and Brain: dialogues in cognitive neuroscience. New York: Cambridge.
  11. Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion (pp. 3–33). New York: Academic.
  12. Moore, S. C. & Oaksford, M. (2002) Emotional Cognition: From Brain to Behaviour. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s Publishing Company.
  13. Loewenstein, G. F., Weber, E. U., Hsee, C.K., & Welch, E. 2001. Risk as feelings. Psychological Bulletin, 127: 267–286
  14. Mellers, B., &McGraw, A. P. (2001). Anticipated emotions as guides to choice. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 10(6), 210–214.
  15. Isen, A. M. (2001). An influence of positive affect on decision making in complex situations: Theoretical issues with practical implications. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 11(2), 75–85

Emotion researchers

See also