What is Emotion?

Emotion is feeling. The states of mind may be classified as knowing, feeling, or willing. The first term includes perceiving with eyes, ears and by other senses, remembering and reasoning, and includes the intellectual or cognitive operations. The second term includes all pleasurable and painful conditions of the mind, whether simple, such as hunger, or complex, such as love; and it is in this class of mental states that the emotions or affects are included. The third term includes all active mental operations e.g. walking, speaking, and also effort, active impulses and resolutions.

Feeling marks any state of consciousness which is pleasurable or painful. Those affects which depend merely upon nerve stimulation, such as the pains of hunger or thirst, and their corresponding pleasures, are sensations, and are included under the term feelings, as well as those affects which depend upon some amount of mental activity, such as fear, hope or regret, which are known as emotions.

The correlations between states of feeling and their physical accompaniment illustrates the close connection between mind and body. Facial movements, gestures, modification of voice and even internal organic effects are well known to accompany feeling.

Feelings may be divided into those arising directly from nervous stimulation or the excitation of sensory nerves, and those depending on some manner of mental activity. The first which may be termed bodily feelings, involve processes in the outlying parts of the organism, and may be called sense feelings. The second being connected with the central nervous system (the brain) may be called emotions. There is also a close correspondence between the instincts and the emotions; thus the instinct of self-preservation gives rise to the emotion of fear; and the instinct of self-perpetuation or reproduction gives rise to the emotion of love.

Sense feelings may arise from disturbances of some part of the organism, as in hunger, thirst, heat or cold; from pleasures or-pains connected with the excitation of special senses; and from the pleasures or pains of muscular sensation. The general laws which apply to mental development also apply to the development of the emotions. They are deepened by exercise and there is a progress from simple feelings to complex emotions. Emotions arise when the appropriate circumstances occur, and are usually present early in life, e.g. the child has a disposition to feel anger when he is annoyed or injured. On the other hand, although an instinctive element enters into feelings that are largely the result of individual experience, this instinctive capacity for any particular emotion is not the same in all cases. There appear to be constitutional differences in an individual's propensity for different kinds, and different degrees of emotions.

Emotions could be grouped into three orders. First we get individual or personal emotions which are confined to the individual and depend on more or less distinct personal reference. These grow up around the self and activities important to the self, such as hope, success or reputation, or they attach themselves to objects having a special personal relation, as in the child's love of its mother. Secondly we have sympathetic emotions, which involve participation in other people's emotions and experiences. They presuppose a certain amount of personal emotional experience and are non-personal and common to human experience. Thirdly we have the highly complex emotions, derived from sentiments, such as love of humanity.

Emotions may also be seen as affects with a certain amount of energising potential, which may disrupt a state of equilibrium but which may also function to direct and effect change in one's mental organisation, and to facilitate ego functions. What we feel determines to some extent what we do and what we think. In some instances the effect may be so powerful and overwhelming that it leads to a state of emotional paralysis in which it is not possible for the time being to do or think anything. In other instances the emotion may be expressed in action, for example in making a loving reparative move towards another person.