Encyclopedia
Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an
organism to action. Emotion is differentiated from feeling.
Definition of emotion
Although a widespread word, it is not so easy to come up with a generally acceptable definition of emotion. Growing consensus does agree that the distinction between emotion and feeling is important. Feeling can be seen as emotion that is filtered through the cognitive brain centers, specifically the frontal lobe, producing a physiological change in addition to the psycho-physiological change. Daniel Goleman, in his landmark book
Emotional Intelligence, discusses this differentiation at length.
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 oriented; and emotion is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling."
In the Triune brain model, emotions are defined as the responses of the
Mammalian cortex. Emotions competes with even more instinctive responses from the Reptilian cortex and the more logically developed neocortex.
Elaborations
Emotion is complex, and the term has no single universally accepted definition. Emotions create energy in the body that arise spontaneously, rather than through conscious effort. It is unclear whether
animals or all
human beings experience emotion. Emotions are physical expressions, often involuntary, related to feelings, perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or relations between them, in reality or in the imagination. The study of emotions is part of psychology, neuroscience, and, more recently, artificial intelligence. According to Sloman , emotions are cognitive processes. Some authors emphasize the difference between human emotions and the affective behavior of animals.
Emotion is sometimes regarded as the antithesis of reason. This is reflected in common phrases like
appeal to emotion or
your emotions have taken over. Emotions can be undesired to the individual feeling them; he or she may wish to control but often cannot. Thus one of the most distinctive, and perhaps challenging, facts about human beings is this potential for entanglement, or even opposition, between will, emotion, and reason.
Emotion as the subject of
scientific research has multiple dimensions: behavioral, physiological, subjective, and
cognitive. Sloman and others explain that the need to face a changing and unpredictable world makes emotions necessary for any intelligent system with multiple motives and limited capacities and resources.
Current research on the neural circuitry of emotion suggests that emotion makes up an essential part of human
decision-making, including long-term planning, and that the famous distinction made by
Descartes between reason and emotion is not as clear as it seems .
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 on the one hand and emotion on the other, is one which merits careful study.
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 cause emotions instead of external stimuli.
Relation to cultural and social factors
It is not clear whether emotion is a purely
human phenomenon, since animals seem to exhibit conditions which resemble emotional responses such as anger, fear or sadness, and some animals also exhibit similar neural phenomena to humans in tandem with possible emotional response.
It has been hypothesized that emotions typical of human beings have evolved and changed in many ways since the species first emerged. Nonetheless, as noted above, it may well be the case that human and non-human animal emotional responses lie on a constant continuum, rather than being two completely distinct categories of human and animal.
Much of what is 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 say specific emotional responses, as well as a group's interpretation of their significance, may be influenced by cultural norms of propriety. For instance, certain responses to emotions such as love, hate, and the desire for vengeance are treated very differently in differing societies. This methodological relativity is entirely different from the question of whether emotions are universal or are culturally determined. Many researchers would agree that a vast proportion of human behavior, no matter how close to the lowest biological substrates - including sexual behavior, food consumption, feelings in response to physiological changes and responses to environmental conditions - are conditioned based on social surroundings and non-human environmental factors. Thus it is not difficult to defend the position that emotion is, to a high degree, dependent on social phenomena, expectations, norms, and conditioned behavior of the group in which an individual lives. The influence of politics, religion, and socio-cultural customs can be sometimes traced or hypothesized. Among many pertinent examples: behaviors or activities considered highly cruel in some societies may in fact provoke responses of enjoyment in others; or, sexual acts considered highly desirable in some cultures would provoke shame or disgust in others.
Contrary to this view, Paul Ekman has shown that at least some facial expressions and their corresponding emotions are universal across human cultures and are not culturally determined. These universal emotions include anger, disgust, fear,
joy, sadness and surprise.
Theoretical traditions
According to Cornelius , four main theoretical traditions have dominated research in emotions starting in the 1800's with Darwin's observations of emotion in man and animals. These traditions are not mutually exclusive and many researchers incorporate multiple perspectives in their work.
- The Darwinian perspective
First articulated in the late 19th century by
Charles Darwin, emotions evolved via natural selection and therefore have cross-culturally universal counterparts. Most research in this area has focused on physical displays of emotion including body language of animals and facial expressions in humans. Paul Ekman's work on basic emotions is representative of the Darwinian tradition.
William James in the 1800's believed that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. These changes might be visceral, postural, or facially expressive. However, the physiological aspects of his theory were empirically discredited by Walter Cannon in the second edition of
Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage.
- The cognitive perspective
Many researchers believe that thought and in particular cognitive appraisal of the environment is an underlying causal explanation for emotional processes.
- The social constructivist perspective
Social constructivism emphasizes the importance of culture and context in understanding what occurs in society and constructing knowledge based on this understanding . Much current research in emotion is based on the social constructivist view.
- The neurological tradition
This tradition draws on recent work on neurophysiology and neuroanatomy to explain the nature of emotions. Joseph LeDoux reviews relatively current knowledge on the neurophysiology of emotion.
Etymology
Etymologically, the word emotion is a composite formed from two
Latin words.
ex/out, outward +
motio/movement, action, gesture. This
classical formation refers to the immediate nature of emotion as experienced by humans and attributed in some cultures and ways of thinking to all living organisms, and by scientific community to any creature that exhibits complex response traits similar to what humans refer to as emotion.
Physical responses to emotion
The body frequently responds to
Shame by warmth in the upper chest and face,
Fear by a heightened heartbeat, increased "flinch" response, and increased muscle tension. The sensations connected with
anger are nearly 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 by a feeling of tightness in the throat and eyes, and relaxation in the arms and legs.
Desire can be accompanied by a dry throat and heavy breathing.
Neurobiology
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. Specifically, these states are manifestations of non-verbally expressed feelings of agreement, anger, certainty, control, disagreement, disgust, disliking, embarrassment, fear, happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and uncertainty. Emotions are mammalian elaborations of
vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals 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.
The human emotion of love is said to have evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain 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 cords. They evolved in the earliest mammalian ancestors, the jawless
fishes, to control motor function.
Before the mammalian brain, life in the non-verbal world was automatic, preconscious, and predictable. Reptilian motor centers reacted to vision, sound, touch, chemical, gravity, and motion sensory cues with preset body movements and programmed postures. With the arrival of night-active mammals, circa 180 million years ago, smell replaced sight as the dominant sense, and a newer, more flexible way of responding--based on emotion and emotional memory--arose from the olfactory sense. In the Jurassic Period, the mammalian brain invested heavily in aroma circuits to succeed at night as reptiles slept. These odor pathways gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.
Primary emotions, such as fear, "depend on limbic system circuitry," with the
amygdala and
anterior cingulate gyrus being "key players".
Secondary emotions require additional input 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.
- 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.
- Like an emotional feeling, aroma has a volatile or "thin-skinned" quality because sensory cells lie on the exposed exterior of the olfactory epithelium .
- Like a whiff of smelling salts, a sudden feeling may jolt the mind. The force of a mood is reminiscent of a smell's intensity , 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.
Like aromas, emotions are either positive or negative --and rarely neutral. Like odors, feelings come and go, defy logic, and clearly show upon our face in mood signs. It is likely that many emotions evolved from aroma paleocircuits a. in subcortical nuclei , 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.
Computer models of emotion
A flurry of recent work in modeling emotional circuitry and recognition has come out of computer science, engineering, psychology and neuroscience .
- See affective computing
- Neural network models of emotion recognition
Emotion in animals
The question of whether animals have emotions, that is, feelings, and if those are qualitatively the same as human's feelings or in fact simple stimulus responses, is under debate at the moment. See Emotion in animals.
References and notes
- Cornelius, R. . The science of emotion. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
- Ekman P. . "Facial Expressions" in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Dalgleish T & Power M, Eds. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. New York, New York.
- Fellous, J.M., Armony, J.L., & LeDoux, J.E. . "Emotional Circuits and Computational Neuroscience" in 'The handbook of brain theory and neural networks' Second Edition. M.A. Arbib , The MIT Press.
- Frijda, Nico H. . The Emotions. Maison des Sciences de l'Homme and Cambridge University Press.
- LeDoux, J.E. . The neurobiology of emotion. Chap. 15 in J E. LeDoux & W. Hirst Mind and Brain: diologues in cognitive neuroscience. New York: Cambridge.
- Plutchik, R. . A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman , Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion . New York: Academic.
Emotion researchers
Institution/ Research Center
See also
- Affective neuroscience
- Affective science
- Emotion and memory
- List of emotions
- Empathy
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