Concept

Emotion

Overview

Emotions are physical and mental states brought on by neurophysiological and neuropsychological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.

Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades, with many fields contributing, including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, computer science and philosophy. The numerous attempts to explain the origin, function, and other aspects of emotions have fostered intense research on this topic. Theorizing about the evolutionary origin and possible purpose of emotion dates back to Charles Darwin. Current areas of research include the neuroscience of emotion, using tools like positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging scans to study the affective picture processes in the brain.

From a mechanistic perspective, emotions can be defined as "a positive or negative experience that is associated with a particular pattern of physiological activity". Emotions are complex, involving multiple different components, such as subjective experience, cognitive processes, expressive behavior, psychophysiological changes, and instrumental behavior. At one time, academics attempted to identify the emotion with one of the components: William James with a subjective experience, behaviorists with instrumental behavior, psychophysiologists with physiological changes, and so on. More recently, emotion has been said to consist of all the components. The different components of emotion are categorized somewhat differently depending on the academic discipline. In psychology and philosophy, emotion typically includes a subjective, conscious experience characterized primarily by psychophysiological expressions, biological reactions, and mental states. A similar multi-componential description of emotion is found in sociology. For example, Peggy Thoits described emotions as involving physiological components, cultural or emotional labels (anger, surprise, etc.), expressive body actions, and the appraisal of situations and contexts. Cognitive processes, like reasoning and decision-making, are often regarded as separate from emotional processes, making a division between "thinking" and "feeling". However, not all theories of emotion regard this separation as valid.

Nowadays, most research into emotions in the clinical and well-being context focuses on emotion dynamics in daily life, predominantly the intensity of specific emotions and their variability, instability, inertia, and differentiation, as well as whether and how emotions augment or blunt each other over time and differences in these dynamics between people and along the lifespan.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Emotion is discussed.

The best proof that the immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect on the nerves is furnished by _those pathological cases in which the emotion is objectless_. One of the chief merits, in fact, of the view which I propose seems to be that we can so easily formulate by its means pathological cases and normal cases under a common scheme.
William James, Psychology
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An emotion in its entirety is, of course, something much more complex than a perception. An emotion is essentially a process, and it will be only what one may call a cross-section of the emotion that will be a perception, of a bodily condition according to James, or (in certain cases) of an external object according to his opponents. An emotion in its entirety contains dynamic elements, such as motor impulses…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
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A parallel criticism applies to his definition of Emotion. Here, too, he has departed from the ordinary acceptation of the word; and, as we think, in the wrong direction. Whatever may be the interpretation that is justified by its derivation, the word Emotion has come generally to mean that kind of feeling which is not a direct result of any action on the organism; but is either an indirect result of such action, or…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
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The mode of diffusion of an emotion is one of its outside aspects; the institutions it generates form another of its outside aspects; and though the peculiarities of the emotion as a state of consciousness, seem to express its intrinsic and ultimate nature, yet such peculiarities as are perceptible by simple introspection, must also be classed as superficial peculiarities. It is a familiar fact that various…
Herbert Spencer, Essays
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This whole question of the symbolic transfer of emotion lies at the base of any theory of the Æsthetics of art. For example, it gives the reason for the importance of a rigid suppression of irrelevant detail. For emotions inhibit each other, or intensify each other. Harmonious emotion means a complex of emotions mutually intensifying; whereas the irrelevant details supply emotions which, because of their…
Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism, its meaning and effect
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Emotion

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Emotion

Related ideas

Opposing perspectives

Place in the tradition