Emotion

In psychology , and in ordinary language, emotion is used todescribe a state of a person. Examples of emotions are fear , anger , joy , hate ; see list of emotions . Emotional state isrelated to mood , sometimes even identified with it, although emotions are generallyconsidered to be more transient than moods.

Emotional state is sometimes thought of as being internal and unobservable. However, this is not an assertion which issupported by empirical evidence, since externally-visible changes almost always accompany emotional changes. Emotion is alsosometimes regarded as the antithesis of reason; as is suggested by phrases such as appeal to emotion or don't letyour emotions take over. Again, there is no empirical support for any generalization of this kind: indeed, anger or fear canoften be thought of as a systematic response to observed facts. In any case, it should be clear that the relation between logic and argument on the one hand andemotion on the other, is one which merits careful study.

Culture and emotion

It is not even clear whether emotion is a purely human phenomenon, since animals seem to exhibit conditions whichresemble emotional responses such as anger, fear or sadness.

Much of what can be said about emotions, as well as the history of what has been said about them, is conditioned by culture and even politics . That is to sayspecific emotional responses may be influenced by cultural norms of propriety. This methodological relativity is entirely different from the question of whether emotions are universal or are culturallydetermined.

Mental health and emotion

Emotions are generally regarded as an indicator of mental health . Forexample a wide class of psychiatric disorders relating tomood are classified as affective disorders . Depression forinstance, is an affective disorder with a range of symptoms such as the prolonged and painful experience of sadness. On the otherhand individuals that are incapable of experiencing emotions such as sadness or anger are referred to as suffering fromemotional poverty reflective of many personalitydisorders .

Common views on emotions

Following are some propositions concerning the nature of emotions. Some of these assertions may be mutually contradictory.Nonetheless, they are an indicator of the wide range of beliefs on this subject:

• An emotion is a mental state or process . This process can be conscious or subconscious, but in any case itattempts to balance and integrate various and often conflicting, facts, experiences and concepts.

• It is a subjective, psychological experience , associated with a group of physiological reactions arising in response to some event. This experience is often held to be involuntary, although there appears to be noagreement on the extent to which one can learn to intentionally influence emotions.

• Emotional experiences consist of thoughts, feelings, affective responses (e.g., sadness , anger , joy , determination), physiological responses (changes in internal bodily functioning),cognitive responses (e.g., a conceptual representation of an event), and behavioural responses (an outward expression such asflight or resistance).

Theories of emotions

Questions concerning the mystery of human emotion were the territory of a number of disciplines until the development ofmodern psychology . Over the last century, psychologically-based theories haveprovided influential, if incomplete explanations of how emotional experience is produced.

• The James-Lange theory proposes that conscious conclusions about what we are "feeling" form in reaction tophysiological changes occurring in the body. This was proposed by WilliamJames and Carl Lange independently in the 1880s .
• The Cannon-Bard Approach proposes that the lower brain initially receives emotion-producing information and thenrelays it simultaneously to the higher cortex for interpretation and to the nervous system to trigger physiologicalresponses.
• The Schacher-Singer Approach gives highest importance to the cognitive skills that create an interpretation of thesituation and so provide a framework for the individual's behavioral response.
• The Opponent-Process Approach views emotions as sets of pairs, one positive and one negative. When anemotion-producing stimulus is present, one of the pair is suppressed so that the more situationally appropriate emotion is feltintensely.

The feeling component of emotion encompasses a vast spectrum of possible responses. Psychologists have attempted to offergeneral classifications of these responses, and as with the colour spectrum, systematically distinguishing between them largelydepends on the level of precision desired. One of the most influential classification approaches is Robert Plutchik's eightprimary emotions - anger, fear , sadness, disgust, surprise, curiosity, acceptance and joy.Plutchik argues for the primacy of these emotions by showing each to be the trigger of behaviour with high survival value (i.e. fear : fight or flight).

Principally involved in the physiological component of emotion are: the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the limbicsystem , and the hypothalamus . Fear , in particular learned fear, is thought to depend on the amygdala .

There is considerable debate as to whether emotions and emotional experiences are universal or culturally determined. One ofthe first modern attempts to classify emotions was Adam Smith 's study, TheTheory of Moral Sentiments. This book is based largely on data from Western Europe. Some anthropologists have explored the relationship between emotionaldisposition or expression and culture, most notably Ruth Benedict in herethnological study, Patterns of Culture; Jean Briggs in her ethnography Never in Anger, Michelle Rosaldo in herethnography Knowledge and Passion; Lila Abu-Lughod in her ethnography Veiled Sentiments; and Katherin Lutz inher ethnography Unnatural Emotions. Paul Ekman has found that some facial expressions of emotion appear to be culturallyindependent, as described in his book Emotions Revealed.

In his book Descartes' Error, the neurologist AntonioDamasio has developed a universal model for human emotions. This model is based on a rejection of the Cartesian body-minddualism that he believes has crippled scientific attempts to understand human behaviour, and draws on psychologicalcase-histories and his own neuropsychological experiments. He began with the assumption that human knowledge consists ofdispositional representations stored in the brain. He thus defines thought as the process by which these representations aremanipulated and ordered.

One of these representations, however, is of the body as a whole, based on information from the endocrine and peripheralnervous systems. Damasio thus defines "emotion" as: the combination of a mental evaluative process, simple or complex,with dispositional responses to that process, mostly toward the body proper, resulting in an emotional bodystate, but also toward the brain itself (neurotransmitter nuclei in the brain stem), resulting from additional mentalchanges.

Damasio distinguishes emotions from feelings, which he takes to be a more inclusive category. He argues that the brain iscontinually monitoring changes in the body, and that one "feels" an emotion when one experiences "such changes injuxtaposition to the mental images that initiated the cycle".

Damasio thus further distinguishes between "primary emotions", which he takes to be innate, and "secondary emotions," in whichfeelings allow people to form "systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, andprimary emotions, on the other."

Damasio has suggested that the neurological mechanisms of emotion and feeling evolved in humans because they create strongbiases to situationally appropriate behaviours that do not require conscious thought. He argued that the time-consuming processof rational thought often decreases one's chances of survival in situations that require instant decisions.

Daniel Goleman and other investigators have researched what isentailed in the abilities to manage one's own and other people's emotions. See Emotional intelligence .

Apart from the common western views as described above, also traditional systems such as Buddhist psychology survived forthousands of years with treasuries of experiential knowledge, but are often disregarded because of their subjective approach.However, exactly the aspect of introspection is extremely valuable for psychology - as long as we have no machines which canactually show us thoughts and thought processes, a certain level of subjectiveness is unavoidable.

Nussbaum on emotion

Philosophers have considered the problem of emotions from a number of different angles, and in recent years haveattempted to integrate, or at least relate, accounts of emotion found in literature, psychoanalysis , behavioural psychology , neurobiology and inthe philosophical literature itself. Martha Nussbaum , to take oneexample, has issued a recent challenge to theorists of emotion who understand emotions to be irrational states grafted onto arational, emotionless thought process. This understanding of emotions may be considered the epiphenomenal account; emotions may bethe end-product of cognitive processes -- such as a feeling of anger uponrealizing that one's been cheated -- but they can never take their place among other mental states, such as believing, as equals.In this account, one may, for example, reason perfectly well about an ethical quandary without experiencing emotion.

In Nussbaum's account, emotions are essentially cognitive states of a subject; what distinguishes emotions from other thoughtsis that they refer to events or states in the world that directly relate to what she terms the individual's ownself-flourishing. Here, self-flourishing refers to a constellation of concepts taken from the Aristotelian notion of Eudaimonia .

Nussbaum's primary goal in her recent work on emotion is to support this cognitive account of emotions against theepiphenomenal account by showing how emotions both have a logic -- can be considered to follow coherently or not upon one another-- and are directly responsive to external facts. For Nussbaum, the fact that the emotion of jealousy can coexist with that oflove, but not with that of, say, friendly-feeling, is a consequence of their cognitive properties. Accounts of psychoanalysis andof the sequence of emotions experienced when listening to music are also, in Nussbaum's view, supportive of the cognitivistaccount.

See also Emotion theory , List of emotions , Empathy

Further reading

• Task Force on DSM-IV ,Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders : DSM-IV, American PsychiatricAssociation
• Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge University Press , November, 2001, hardcover, 751 pages, ISBN 0521462029 ; trade paperback, April, 2003, ISBN 0521531829
• Martha C. Nussbaum, Therapy of Desire, Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, February, 2003, hardcover, 320pages, ISBN 0151005575 ; tradepaperback, December, 2003, 368 pages, ISBN0156028719
• A Buddhist View on Emotions and Delusions

External link

• Initial Control of Emotions