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WHAT IS EMOTION?

It is difficult to define an emotion, in part because our emotional experience is so varied and complex. There are hundreds of emotion words in the English language, from “abashed” to “xenophobia”. Do all these terms mean that there are actually hundreds of emotions?

Psychologists have tried to sort out this profusion of emotion terms by identifying a few underlying dimensions of emotional experience. Virtually all accounts of emotion agree that emotions can be classified along two broad dimensions – degree of pleasantness and degree of physical excitement. Some emotions such as fear – are clearly negative or unpleasant, and others – such as joy – are just as clearly positive or pleasant. Some emotions – such as anger and joy – involve high levels of activity, excitement or physiological arousal, whereas others – such as sadness – involve decreased energy and low levels of arousal.

Although researchers agree that pleasantness and arousal are two important dimensions of the emotional experience, they have not agreed about other dimensions. Yet it is clear that emotions are more complex than a two – dimensional model suggests. Consider, for example, anger and fear. Both of these emotions are negative and both are high arousal, yet they are quite distinct emotional experiences.

Another way to make sense of the variety of emotion terms is to identify which emotions are basic, in the sense that they share some kind of underlying biological foundation or are universal, and which are subordinate, or variations on the basic emotions. The majority of emotion researchers agree that the list of basic emotions is limited to five or six: the positive emotions of love, joy and possibly, surprise; and the negative emotions of anger, fear and sadness. These emotions appear in most scientific theories of emotions, and they also seem to organize the way all people talk and think about emotions. Yet even here, there is some disagreement. Some researchers consider disgust a basic negative emotion; some think surprise is a reflex rather than an emotion; and others strike love from the list.

Given this lack of agreement and the complexity of the issue, how are we to define emotion? We can say that an emotion is a pattern of responses to an event that is relevant to the goals and needs of the organism. The responses include physiological arousal, impulses to action, thoughts and expression of all these. According to this definition, individuals who do not have needs, goals, or concerns cannot experience emotions. The needs or goals may be as fundamental as food, shelter and survival, or they may be as complex as the yearning for love, an ambition to win a Nobel prize, or a will to build self-respect.

Each component of an emotion plays an important role in our subjective experience of it.

Дата добавления: 2014-12-27