While the study of emotional psychology is vast and complex, researchers have discovered quite a bit about what constitutes our emotions and our behavioral and physical reactions to them.
Emotions are often confused with feelings and moods, but the three terms are not interchangeable. Emotional experiences have three components: a subjective experience, a physiological response and a behavioral or expressive response. Feelings arise from an emotional experience.
Because a person is conscious of the experience, this is classified in the same category as hunger or pain. A feeling is the result of an emotion and may be influenced by memories, beliefs and other factors. For example, insults can trigger the emotion of anger while an angry mood may arise without apparent cause. Defining emotions is a task that is not yet complete.
Many researchers are still proposing theories about what makes up our emotions, and existing theories are constantly being challenged. While there is debate about sequence, there is general agreement that emotions, as mentioned earlier, are made up of three parts: subjective experiences, physiological responses and behavioral responses.
All emotions begin with a subjective experience, also referred to as a stimulus, but what does that mean? While basic emotions are expressed by all individuals regardless of culture or upbringing, the experience that produces them can he highly subjective.
Subjective experiences can range from something as simple as seeing a color to something as major as losing a loved one or getting married. No matter how intense the experience is, it can provoke many emotions in a single individual and the emotions each individual feel may be different. For example, one person may feel anger and regret at the loss of a loved one while another may experience intense sadness. We all know how it feels to have our heart beat fast with fear. The autonomic nervous system controls our involuntary bodily responses and regulates our fight-or-flight response.
According to many psychologists, our physiological responses are likely how emotion helped us evolve and survive as humans throughout history. In other words, facial expressions play an important role in responding accordingly to an emotion in a physical sense. The behavioral response aspect of the emotional response is the actual expression of the emotion. Behavioral responses can include a smile, a grimace, a laugh or a sigh, along with many other reactions depending on societal norms and personality.
While plentiful research suggests that many facial expressions are universal, such as a frown to indicate sadness, sociocultural norms and individual upbringings play a role in our behavioral responses.
For example, how love is expressed is different both from person to person and across cultures. A study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that while watching negative and positive emotional films, suppression of behavioral responses to emotion had physical effects on the participants. The effects included elevated heart rates. This suggests that expressing behavioral responses to stimuli, both positive and negative, is better for your overall health than holding those responses inside.
Thus, there are benefits of smiling, laughing and expressing negative emotions in a healthy way. The physiological and behavioral responses associated with emotions illustrate that emotion is much more than a mental state.
Emotion affects our whole demeanor and our health. Theories and hypotheses about emotions date back centuries. In fact, basic or primary emotions are referenced in the Book of Rights , a first-century Chinese encyclopedia. Emotion is much harder to measure and properly define than many other human responses. Much of the study that has been done in emotional psychology is about basic emotions, our psychological and behavioral responses, and the role of emotional intelligence in our lives.
Basic emotions are associated with recognizable facial expressions and tend to happen automatically. Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that emotion-induced facial expressions are universal. This suggestion was a centerpiece idea to his theory of evolution, implying that emotions and their expressions were biological and adaptive.
This entire collection of predictions comes from your past experiences of fear. Same thing. Your brain predicted someone you know, based on past experience, and just for a second, you saw them. When your face feels hot as a driver cuts you off in traffic, you might experience the heat as anger. Or if you feel the same sensation as you walk out of the sea and realise your swimming costume has fallen down, you might experience it as embarrassment.
Your brain makes meaning from the identical sensation in different ways, depending on context. They are not built-in at birth. They are built in the moment. In a sense, your emotions are constructed unconsciously from three ingredients: your body budget, your current situation, and predictions from past experience. If you modify any of these ingredients, you can take some control over your emotions. Changing your body budget is the most straightforward of the three but again, not easy. That means your mood will be less negative and your brain will have fewer opportunities to create unpleasant emotions.
You can change the second ingredient, your current situation, in a variety of ways. You can directly adjust your surroundings by moving to another location, like leaving the room or taking a walk.
To deal with these feelings, we took inspiration from the real flu. Likewise, we worked hard to view the wretchedness as purely physical, and to treat the symptoms with naps, walks, exercise, hugs, or whatever works. That said, this way of thinking about emotion does have implications for understanding mental illness.
For hundreds of years, people have drawn a boundary between mental and physical illness. Cancer, heart disease and diabetes are seen as disorders of the body, while depression and anxiety are often viewed as ailments of the mind.
This suggests that problems with metabolism, traditionally associated with the body, are at the core of mood-related mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety. It also helps explain why physical illnesses like diabetes and heart disease have persistent mood symptoms.
The boundary between the physical and the mental is more porous than previously thought, and understanding this is key to finding new pathways for prevention and treatment. This new view of emotion suggests something important about artificial intelligence. Companies such as Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are betting that the answer is yes. This means these approaches are asking fundamentally the wrong questions.
A tougher question is, can we build a computer that can feel emotion? Our new view of emotion offers an intriguing possibility.
If emotion is constructed in part by regulating a body budget, then for a machine to experience emotion, it must have something like a body. About the Author. References Craig ADB. How do you feel--now? The anterior insula and human awareness. Nat Rev Neurosci. Neuroimaging of the Periaqueductal Gray: State of the Field. Researchers Pinpoint Fear of Heights in the Brain. Are You Watching Me? Trending Popular articles on BrainFacts.
The Neuron. Proteins That Balance Our Moods. Find a Neuroscientist Engage local scientists to educate your community about the brain. Educator Resources Explain the brain to your students with a variety of teaching tools and resources.
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