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Look up Emotion in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Emotions
Basic

Anger
Fear
Sadness
Happiness
Disgust
Interest

Others

Acceptance
Affection
Aggression
Ambivalence
Annoyance
Apathy
Anxiety
Boredom
Compassion
Compersion
Confusion
Contempt
Curiosity
Depression
Disappointment
Doubt
Ecstasy
Empathy
Envy
Embarrassment
Euphoria
Forgiveness
Frustration
Gratitude
Grief
Guilt
Hatred
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Homesickness
Hunger
Hysteria
Jealousy
Loneliness
Paranoia
Pity
Pleasure
Pride
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Revenge
Shame
Suffering
Surprise
Sympathy
Vanity

v  d  e

Emotions are evolutionary adaptations, as they enhance an organism\'s ability to experience, reproduce and evaluate its environment and thus increase its likelihood to survive and reproduce, by providing the simplest plans for evolutionary most common actions needed, such as approaching or avoiding (in)digestible objects, fighting for it with other organisms or running away if the other organism is too powerful (anger vs. fear), and forming or loosing cooperative ties based on reciprocal altruism (gladness vs. sadness) with other organisms. In addition, emotions serve important functions in animal communication (between or within species).[citation needed]

Despite that in many cultures emotions (passion) are contrasted with cognition (reason) as a source of motivation and decision making, modern psychological science recognizes that, in healthy animals and humans, an individual\'s emotion, cognition, and behavior have a certain degree of integration and also can influence reciprocally each other.[citation needed]

Contents

Closely related terms

Other closely related terms are:

  • Affect, a synonym for emotion; in psychology and psychiatry, the term "affect" is used when the emotional experience has been qualified (e.g., intense, labile, or appropriate affect) or quantified (e.g., a high score on a scale that measures positive emotion).
  • Affect display, external display of emotion (e.g., facial expression, body posture, voice quality).
  • Disposition, referring to a durable differentiating characteristic of a person, a tendency to react to certain classes of situations with a certain emotion;
  • Feeling, which usually refers to the subjective, phenomenological aspect of emotion (e.g., the internal experience of anxiety, sadness, love, pride, and so forth);
  • Mood, which refers to an emotional state of duration intermediate between an emotion and a disposition (e.g., depressed, euphoric, neutral, or irritable mood).
  • Meta-emotion is emotion about emotion.

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.Though Emotion can defined as an affective state involving a high level of activation, visceral changes and strong feelings. Emotion is derived from the Latin verb "emoverse" meaning "to stir-up" or "to move." It conotes a stirred-up bodily state.Emotional Competency discussion of emotion

Emotions as simple plans and preparations for action

Modern views propose that emotions are brain states that quickly assign value or valence to outcomes, provide a simple plan for action, and prepare the body physiologically for appropriate action. Other examples of such preparation include, for example:

  • the increased heartbeat and perspiration as preparation for flight action (fear),
  • the freezing response of a rat in the presence of a cat (a simple plan to act dead and avoid being eaten), or
  • the extra muscle tension as preparation for fight action (anger).

When a bear is galloping toward you, the function of the fear is to prepare the body for the appropriate action (flight) 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.

Emotion as unconscious process

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.

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.

Emotions about emotions

Main article: Meta-emotion

Emotions about 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. Jaeger, C., & Bartsch, A. (2006), "Meta-emotions". Grazer Philosophische Studien, 73, 179–204.

Classification by basic emotions

Robert Plutchik

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

Blending of primary emotions

Similar to the way primary colors combine, primary emotions are believed to blend together to form the full spectrum of human emotional experience.[citation needed]

Emotions and survival

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

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 with which the Fore were not yet familiar. He 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.Ekman, P. & Friesen, W. V (1969). The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: Categories, origins, usage, and encoding. Semiotica, 1, 49–98.

Lazarus

Lazarus (1991) similarly offers a taxonomy of Core Relational Themes for various emotions. These themes 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.

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

The evolutionary perspective

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.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

Darwin\'s original thesis was that emotions evolved via natural selection and therefore have cross-culturally universal counterparts. 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 were made from this perspectives in the 1990s by, for example, Joseph LeDoux and Antonio Damasio.

American evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, argues that moral emotions are based on the principal of reciprocal altruism:

  • Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest
  • Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by making him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship
  • Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past
  • Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future

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. 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.

Cognitive theories

Research in social cognitive psychology interprets emotions as a combination of two elements; physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation. A leading exponent of the cognitive theory of emotions is Robert Solomon in his book The Passions, Emotions and the Meaning of Life, 1993. Solomon also considers a third crucial element -- the emotion\'s purpose or plan for action. The earliest account of social cognitive theory is the Singer-Schachter theory 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, heart 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 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 cause detectable physical responses 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.

Sociology of Emotions

Main article: Sociology of Emotions

We try to regulate our emotions to fit in with the norms of the situation, based on many - sometimes conflicting - demands upon us which originate from various entities studied by sociology on a micro level -- such as social roles and \'feeling rules\' the everyday social interactions and situations are shaped by -- and, on a macro level, by social institutions, discourses, ideologies etc. For example, (post-)modern marriage is, on one hand, based on the emotion of love and on the other hand the very emotion is to be worked on and regulated by it.

Emotion and Attitude Change

Main article: Attitude change

Emotional appeals are commonly found in advertising, health campaigns and political messages. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaign advertising emphasizing the fear of terrorism.

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.Counseling recovery processes - RC website Other more cognitively oriented schools approach them via their cognitive components, such as Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Yet other approach emotions via symbolic movement and facial expression components (like in contemporary Gestalt therapyOn Emotion - an article from Manchester Gestalt Centre website).


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.

Developing An Emotionally Healthy Body

This is a list of such rules as noted down by psychologist is herein compiled;

  • Excercise restraint and temperamence and moderation in the expression of your emotion.
  • Cultivate a sense of humor.
  • Learn to accept the inevitable things in life.
  • Develop an atittude of consideration and respect for the rights of other people.
  • Pursue a hobby that will open new avenues of interest, engage your attention and divert it from the routine, humdrumwork of daily life.
  • Be humble to accept your own mistakes when you commit them.
  • Avoid the occasions that will cause or trigger violent emotions.
  • Redirect the expression of certain emotions through substitution of more diserable ones- this is sublimation.
  • Learn to accept yourself for what you are.
  • Cultivate Friendship.

Glywiki (talk) 07:54, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

Notes

References

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