what is emotion means and definition

EMOTION: It is extraordinary that there are entire schools of treating human emotion which do not ever give a proper definition of emotions, or what these strange things actually are. What are emotions? What are "feelings"? Can you die of a broken heart? These and many other questions about emotions are successfully resolved when one quite scientifically inserts the Factor X into the equation

What is emotion? A feeling? Then what is a feeling? These terms are difficult to define and even more difficult to understand completely. People have been attempting to understand this phenomenon for thousands of years, and will most likely debate for a thousand more. This section will present the various theories related to the acquisition of emotion.

The mainstream definition of emotion refers to a feeling state involving thoughts, physiological changes, and an outward expression or behavior. But what comes first? The thought? The physiological arousal? The behavior? Or does emotion exist in a vacuum, whether or not these other components are present? There are five theories which attempt to understand why we experience emotion.

Proposed independently by psychologist William James and physiologist Carl Lange, the James-Lange theory of emotion proposes that emotions occur as a result of phyiological reactions to events. According to this theory, you see an external stimulus that leads to a physiological reaction.

Your emotional reaction is dependent upon how you interpret those physical reactions. For example, suppose you are walking in the woods and you see a grizzly bear. You begin to tremble and your heart begins to race. The James-Lange theory proposes that you will interpret your physical reactions and conclude that you are frightened ("I am trembling, therefore I am afraid.")

The variety and complexity of emotions

Emotions,” wrote Aristotle (384–322 bce), “are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites.” Emotion is indeed a heterogeneous category that encompasses a wide variety of important psychological phenomena. Some emotions are very specific, insofar as they concern a particular person, object, or situation. Others, such as distress, joy, or depression, are very general.

Some emotions are very brief and barely conscious, such as a sudden flush of embarrassment or a burst of anger. Others, such as long-lasting love or simmering resentment, are protracted, lasting hours, months, or even years (in which case they can become a durable feature of an individual’s personality). An emotion may have pronounced physical accompaniments, such as a facial expression, or it may be invisible to observers.

An emotion may involve conscious experience and reflection, as when one “wallows” in it, or it may pass virtually unnoticed and unacknowledged by the subject. An emotion may be profound, in the sense that it is essential to one’s physical survival or mental health, or it may be trivial or dysfunctional. An emotion may be socially appropriate or inappropriate. It may even be socially obligatory—e.g., feeling remorse after committing a crime or feeling grief at a funeral.

For the sake of simplicity, researchers and laypeople alike often divide the emotions into those that are “positive” and those that are “negative.” (Scientific researchers call this quality of an emotion its “affective valence.”) But the complexity of emotions renders such oppositions suspect. Although love and hate, for example, are often conceived of as polar opposites, it is worth noting (as the plots of so many novels and dramas have made clear) that they frequently coexist not as opposites but as complements.

Moreover, love is often painful and destructive, and hatred, sometimes, can be positive. (As the American psychologist Shula Sommers asked, “Is hatred of evil a negative emotion?”) But an emotion like anger, another so-called negative emotion, shows the futility of such a classification. Anger is indeed a negative feeling (if not a hostile one) directed toward another person, but it can be edifying for the person who is angry, and, in the appropriate context—a context in which one ought to get angry—it can have beneficial effects on a situation or a relationship.

Thus, the feminist movement took a major step forward when women realized that they had a right to be angry and much to be angry about. It may be, as Aristotle noted, that emotions are accompanied by pleasure or pain (often both), but they are too complex and often too subtle to be classified on this basis alone.

The study of emotions was long the province of ethics. Emotions were central to Aristotle’s ethics of virtue and part and parcel of the medieval Scholastics’ concern with vices, virtues, and sin. For Aristotle, having the right amount of the right emotion in the right circumstances is the key to virtuous behaviour.

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) distinguished between “higher” and “lower” emotions, the former exemplified by faith and love, the latter by anger and envy. Although moral thinking about emotions has always been concerned with emotional extremes and malformations, as in psychopathology and madness, these phenomena have never been the primary reason for interest in the emotions. As Aristotle and the medieval moralists understood quite well, emotions are essential to a healthy human existence, and it is for this reason that their malfunction is so serious.

The structure of emotions

Emotions have been studied in several scientific disciplines—e.g., biology, psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, anthropology, and sociology—as well as in business management, advertising, and communications. As a result, distinctive perspectives on emotion have emerged, appropriate to the complexity and variety of the emotions themselves.

It is important, however, to take these different perspectives not as competitive but as complementary, each potentially yielding insight into what may be called the different “structures” of emotions. To say that emotions have structures (or a structure) is to reject the view that they are merely amorphous “feelings” or that they have no order, logic, or rationality.

On the contrary, emotions are structured in several ways: by their underlying neurology, by the judgments and evaluations that enter into them, by the behaviour that expresses or manifests them, and by the larger social contexts in which they occur.

Thus, one might say that an emotion is an “integrated neuro-physiological-behavioral-evaluative-experiential-social phenomenon.” Different emotions will manifest these different structures to different extents and in different ways, depending on the specific emotion, its type, and the circumstances.