Emotion

Definition

Emotions can be defined as psychological states that comprise thoughts and feelings, physiological changes, expressive behaviors, and inclinations to act. The precise combination of these elements varies from emotion to emotion, and emotions may or may not be accompanied by overt behaviors. This complex of states and behaviors is triggered by an event that is either experienced or recalled. Someone insults you. Depending on the nature of the insult and your perception of the extent to which it was or was not intended to hurt you, you might feel angry or annoyed. If you feel angry, your face may redden, your heart may beat faster, your fists clench, and thoughts of retribution occur to you. In some cases you might take action against the person who was insulting. Days later, recalling the insult may re-evoke at least some features of the original emotional reaction. Similarly, clear-cut cases of emotion could be given for fear, joy, love, disgust, and sadness, among many others. However, there are also emotions that are less clear-cut, in that they do not always involve changes in physiological or motivational states and do not always result in behavioral change. Take the example of regret. Having made a decision or taken a course of action that turns out badly, one may well feel strong regret, but this subjective experience will typically not be accompanied by changes in physiology or behavior.

Further complications arise when considering psychological states that seem to be borderline cases of emotion: physical pain, generalized or free-floating anxiety, sexual arousal, boredom, depression, irritability, all of which can be seen as examples of affective states. Psychologists who study emotion tend to distinguish between affective states that have a clear object and those that do not, arguing that emotion is a term that should be reserved for psychological states that have an object. On this basis, chronic pain, general states of boredom, depression, or irritability would not be classed as emotions, whereas sexual arousal—to the extent that it has a clear object—would be treated as an emotional state. The distinction between affective states that have an object and those that do not is one that separates emotions, on one hand, from moods (e.g., irritability, boredom) and affective dispositions (depression, generalized anxiety), on the other.

Recognizing the difficulties inherent in trying to arrive at watertight definitions of what constitutes an emotion, theorists are generally agreed in regarding emotion as a set of states that has a fuzzy boundary with other psychological states, such as beliefs, attitudes, values, moods, and personality dispositions. What is not in dispute is that the set of states called emotion is defined by good examples, such as anger, fear, and passionate love. Where there is room for doubt, at or near the fuzzy boundary with neighboring states, psychologists are generally unconcerned with whether the state in question is an emotion. The difficulty of defining emotion is thereby finessed.

History and Background

Modern emotion theory is usually traced back to the writings of Charles Darwin or William James. Writing in the second half of the 19th century, these authors focused on issues that are still the subject of research and debate nearly 150 years later. Darwin's focus was on the relation between subjective emotion and overt [Page 286]behavior. He argued that three principles explain the relation between emotions and expressive behavior. Of these, the first, the principle of serviceable associated habits, is the one most commonly linked to Darwinian explanations for expressive behavior. Here the argument is that movements of the face that originally served a purpose during emotional experiences have become automatic accompaniments of those emotions. Thus, the frowning that often accompanies anger might help to protect the eye socket by drawing the brows forward and together, or the eye widening that often accompanies surprise might help to take in more visual information when sudden, novel events occur. Surprisingly, given the general theory of evolution for which Darwin is better known, his writings on emotional expression did not treat this expression as the outcome of a process of natural selection. Rather, he saw the emotion–expression link as a learned habit that then gets passed on to one's progeny. However, modern evolutionary theory can readily be applied to this issue, resulting in the view that it was the adaptive significance for the individual or the group that led to emotions being outwardly expressed. The notion that there is a close relation between emotional experience and bodily expression is certainly one that is echoed in modern emotion theory.

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