Emotion Definition

What is emotion?

The word emotion includes a wide range of observable behaviors, expressed feelings, and changes in the body state. This diversity in intended meanings of the word emotion make it hard to study. For many of us emotions are very personal states, difficult to define or to identify except in the most obvious instances. Moreover, many aspects of emotion seem unconscious to us. Even simple emotional states appear to be much more complicated than states as hunger and thirst.

"The word emotion includes a broad repertoire of perceptions, expressions of feelings and bodily changes."

Emotions are physcological and physiological states that evoke predisposed feelings,thoughts and behavior associated in various ways pertaining to each individual emotion. Emotions are subjective experiences, or experienced from a individual point of view. Emotion is often associated with mood, temperament, personality and disposition.

Emotions can be divided between 'cognitive' theories of emotions and 'non-cognitive' theories of emotions; or instinctual emotions (from the amygdala), and cognitive emotions (from the prefrontal cortex). Some psychologists divide emotions into basic and complex categories, where base emotions lead to more complex ones. Emotions can be categorized by their duration. Some emotions occur over a period of seconds (e.g. surprise) where others can last years (e.g. love). No definitive taxonomy exists.

A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviours and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting or fleeing. Yet again, if one can have the emotion without the corresponding behaviour then we may consider the behaviour not to be essential to the emotion. The James Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The functionalist approach to emotions (e.g.,Nico Frijda) holds that emotions have evolved for a particular function, such as to keep the subject safe.