   #copyright

Emotion

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Everyday life; Health and
medicine

                                                             Psychology

                                                          Portal - History
                                                                     Areas
                                                                   Applied
                                                                Biological
                                                                  Clinical
                                                                 Cognitive
                                                             Developmental
                                                               Educational
                                                              Evolutionary
                                                              Experimental
                                                            Industrial/Org
                                                               Linguistics
                                                                    Social
                                                                     Lists
                                                              Publications
                                                                    Topics

   Emotion, in its most general definition, is an intense neural mental
   state that arises subjectively rather than through conscious effort and
   evokes either a positive or negative psychological response to move an
   organism to action. An emotion is differentiated from a 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 (and sometimes relationally) oriented; and
   emotion is psychosocially constructed, dramatized feeling."

   In the Triune brain model, emotions are defined as the responses of the
   Mammalian cortex. Emotion competes with even more instinctive responses
   from the Reptilian cortex and the more logically developed neocortex.

   Emotion is complex, and the term has no single universally accepted
   definition. Emotions create a response in the mind that arises
   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 behaviour 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:
   behavioural, 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 (natural or
   artificial) 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 behaviour 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 behaviour to distinguish it from the common
   concept of behaviour. He uses the verbs to describe what is commonly
   seen as emotion. For example, he uses 'to depress' to describe the
   total behaviour commonly known as depression which, to him, includes
   depressing ideas, actions, emotions, and physiological states. Dr.
   Glasser also further asserts that internal choices (conscious or
   unconscious) cause emotions instead of external stimuli.

Theoretical traditions

   According to Cornelius (1996), 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.
     * The Jamesian perspective

   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 (Derry, 1999; McMahon, 1997). Much current
   research in emotion is based on the social constructivist view.
     * The neurological tradition (Plutchik, 1980)

   This tradition draws on recent work on neurophysiology and neuroanatomy
   to explain the nature of emotions. Joseph LeDoux (1986) 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.

   In the psychotherapy field, advocates of Re-evaluation Counselling
   claim that painful emotion is best relieved via the well-known (and
   sometimes automatic) discharge processes of crying, laughing, sweating,
   shaking and trembling.

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, guilt,
   happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and
   uncertainty. Emotions are mammalian elaborations of vertebrate arousal
   patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and
   serotonin) 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 believed to have evolved from
   paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the
   cingulated gyrus) 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 cord. 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 odour pathways
   gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our
   limbic brain.

   Primary (i.e., innate) emotions, such as fear, "depend on limbic system
   circuitry," with the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus being "key
   players".

   Secondary emotions (i.e., feelings attached to objects [e.g., to dental
   drills], events, and situations through learning) 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.

     * An emotional feeling, like an aroma, has a volatile or
       "thin-skinned" quality because sensory cells lie on the exposed
       exterior of the olfactory epithelium (i.e., on the bodily surface
       itself).

     * A sudden scent, like a whiff of smelling salts, may jolt the mind.
       The force of a mood is reminiscent of a smell's intensity (e.g.,
       soft and gentle, pungent, or overpowering), 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 (i.e., pleasant
   or unpleasant) — and rarely neutral. Like odours, 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 (e.g., the paleocortex of the amygdala), 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 (c.f. Fellous, Armony & LeDoux, 2002).
     * See affective computing
     * Neural network models of emotion recognition

Emotion in animals

   There is increasing support for animals having emotions, although it is
   still not clear to what amount those are qualitatively the same as
   human's feelings.

Sociology of Emotions

   Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown emotions to be essential for
   human social life. Rational, reasonable, or otherwise effective
   choosing or decision making are all about differentially valuing, and
   valuing is based on comparing emotional worth attributed to, and
   expected from the available alternatives of action – as much as on
   feelings of confidence or uncertainty in our stimation skills. Affect
   and logic are social competences and their participation in decision
   making varies widely among individuals, situations and cultures.

   Sociologist Randall Collins has stated that a single, specific and
   long-term emotion named emotional energy is the main motivating force
   in social life, for love and hatred, investing, working or consuming,
   rendering cult or waging war. Individually, emotional energy ranges
   from the highests heights of enthusiasm, self-confidence and initiative
   to the deepest depths of apathy, depression and retreat. But this does
   not make it just a psychological emotion.

   Emotional energy comes from variously successful or failed chains of
   interaction rituals, that is, patterned social encounters –from
   conversation or sexual flirtation through Christmas family dinners or
   office work to mass demonstrations, organizations or revolutions. In
   the latter, the coupling of participants' behaviour synchronizes their
   nervous systems to the point of generating a collective effervescence,
   one observable in their mutual focus and emotional entraining, as well
   as in their loading of emotional and symbolic meaning to entities which
   subsequently become emblems of the ritual and of the membership group
   endorsing, preserving, promoting and defending them. Thus social life
   would be most importantly about generating and distributing emotional
   energy. Recent research has shown that most areas of social dynamics
   revolve around some particular emotional cluster. Most significant is
   classic contribution by Thomas J. Scheff, who established that many
   cases of social conflict are based on a destructive and often
   escalating, but stoppable and reversible shame-rage cycle: when someone
   results or feels shamed by another, their social bond comes under
   stress.

   This can be cooperatively acknowledged, talked about and – most
   effectively when possible - laughed at so their social bond may be
   restored. Yet, when shame is not acknowledged, but instead negated and
   repressed, it becomes rage, and rage may drive to aggressive and
   shaming actions that feed-back negatively on this self-destructive
   situation. The social management of emotions might be the fundamental
   dynamics of social cooperation and conflict around resources,
   complexity, conflict and moral life.

Emotion researchers

     * William James
     * Charles Darwin
     * Ivan Pavlov
     * James Papez
     * Paul D. MacLean
     * Paul Ekman
     * Antonio Damasio
     * Robert Plutchik
     * Aaron Ben-Ze'ev
     * Joseph LeDoux
     * Nico Frijda
     * Christine Harris
     * Keith Oatley
     * Robert Zajonc
     * Alice Isen
     * Baruch Spinoza
     * Brian Parkinson
     * Richard Lazarus
     * Lisa Feldman Barrett
     * Klaus Scherer
     * Carroll E. Izard
     * Loic Kessous

Institution/ Research Centre

     * Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
