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Emotion

In psychology and common terminology, emotion is the language of a person's internal state of being, normally based in or tied to their internal (physical) and external (social) sensory feeling. Love, hate, courage, fear, joy, and sadness can all be described in both psychological and physiological terms: Emotion is the realm where thought and physiology are inextricably entwined, and where the 'self' is inseparable from our individual perceptions of value and judgement toward ourselves and toward others in our emotional space.
Emotion is also sometimes regarded as the antithesis of reason; as is suggested by phrases such as appeal to emotion or don't let your emotions take over. Again, there is no empirical support for any generalization of this kind: indeed, anger or fear can often 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 and emotion 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 which resemble 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 say specific 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 culturally determined.

Schemes

Since humans can experience such a wide range of emotion, many have developed schemes for classifying emotion so that it can be better understood.

Basic Four

The basic states of Commedia dell'arte are fear, anger, sorrow, and joy.

Psychoevolutionary Thoery

Emotions are in this view a complex of motivational factors which force us to act in a certain way. The conscious mind can actively change the emotions by changing our "belief" or "unconsciousness" out of which the emotions come from (if you believe you're being attacked by a giant monster, you will feel fear, if you are being attacked by a giant monster but are not aware of it, you will feel safe). Since emotions can compel us to change our beliefs or our practices, they clearly play a role in learning. There is a fair amount of emerging theory on the relationship between emotions and learning. One theory posits that, if learning measures the rate of change of knowledge (or beliefs), then emotions influence the rate of change of learning, itself. That is, emotions correspond to the time-derivatives of learning, and learning corresponds to the time-derivative of knowledge. There are many methods of learning, including direct instruction, games and simulation, play acting, and direct experience. Each of these generates corresponding kinds of emotion (including curiosity, fascination, confusion, anxiety, surprise, bewilderment, frustration, chagrin, despair, hope, satisfaction, and confidence). Part of the theory of emotions and learning ties into drama theory.

Mental Health and Emotion

Emotions are generally regarded as an indicator of mental health. For example a wide class of psychiatric disorders relating to mood are classified as affective disorders. Depression for instance, is an affective disorder with a range of symptoms such as the prolonged and painful experience of sadness. On the other hand individuals that are incapable of experiencing emotions such as sadness or anger are referred to as suffering from emotional poverty reflective of many personality disorders. Repression and/or Suppression of emotions is believed by some to be harmful to physical health.

Psychological Views

Questions concerning the mystery of human emotion were the territory of a number of disciplines until the development of modern psychology. Over the last century, psychologically-based theories have provided 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 to physiological changes occurring in the body. This was proposed by William James and Carl Lange independently in the 1880s.
• The Cannon-Bard Approach proposes that the lower brain initially receives emotion-producing information and then relays it simultaneously to the higher cortex for interpretation and to the nervous system to trigger physiological responses.
• The Schachter-Singer Approach gives highest importance to the cognitive skills that create an interpretation of the situation 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 an emotion-producing stimulus is present, one of the pair is suppressed so that the more situationally appropriate emotion is felt intensely.

The feeling component of emotion encompasses a vast spectrum of possible responses. Psychologists have attempted to offer general classifications of these responses, and as with the colour spectrum, systematically distinguishing between them largely depends on the level of precision desired. One of the most influential classification approaches is Robert Plutchik's eight primary 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 limbic system, 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 of the first modern attempts to classify emotions was Adam Smith's study, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This book is based largely on data from Western Europe. Some anthropologists have explored the relationship between emotional disposition or expression and culture, most notably Ruth Benedict in her ethnological study, Patterns of Culture; Jean Briggs in her ethnography Never in Anger, Michelle Rosaldo in her ethnography Knowledge and Passion; Lila Abu-Lughod in her ethnography Veiled Sentiments; and Katherin Lutz in her ethnography Unnatural Emotions. Paul Ekman has found that some facial expressions of emotion appear to be culturally independent, as described in his book Emotions Revealed.

In his book Descartes' Error, the neurologist Antonio Damasio has developed a universal model for human emotions. This model is based on a rejection of the Cartesian body-mind dualism that he believes has crippled scientific attempts to understand human behaviour, and draws on psychological case-histories and his own neuropsychological experiments. He began with the assumption that human knowledge consists of dispositional representations stored in the brain. He thus defines thought as the process by which these representations are manipulated and ordered. One of these representations, however, is of the body as a whole, based on information from the endocrine and peripheral nervous 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 body state, but also toward the brain itself (neurotransmitter nuclei in the brain stem), resulting from additional mental changes. amasio distinguishes emotions from feelings, which he takes to be a more inclusive category. He argues that the brain is continually monitoring changes in the body, and that one "feels" an emotion when one experiences "such changes in juxtaposition 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 which feelings allow people to form "systematic connections between categories of objects and situations, on the one hand, and primary emotions, on the other." Damasio has suggested that the neurological mechanisms of emotion and feeling evolved in humans because they create strong biases to situationally appropriate behaviours that do not require conscious thought. He argued that the time-consuming process of rational thought often decreases one's chances of survival in situations that require instant decisions. Daniel Goleman and other investigators have researched what is entailed 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 for thousands 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 can actually show us thoughts and thought processes, a certain level of subjectiveness is unavoidable.