Emotions shape all aspects of our thinking, perception, and memory. Our feelings and moods filter our experience, acting as a powerful tuning system that determines how we see the world and ourselves. Emotional control of our overall function results from an evolutionarily-adaptive motivational process. Emotions are fundamentally related to our needs and desires. They tell us what we need and want, as well as direct us toward concomitant goals. From the basic feelings of fight or flight, to the complex feelings of compassion and justice, emotions are always present, shaping how we experience our reality and act in our world.
Topics in the text below:
Emotions — Needs — Motivation
What Are Emotions?
The Rhythm of Emotions
Emotions — Needs — Motivation
Emotions are complex conscious and unconscious events that affect our behavior, thoughts, and the very sense of who we are as individuals. All our experiences are categorized and organized around an associated emotion. Then, whenever we are having the same emotion at a later time, all the previously-associated experiences are used to understand the new situation. In this way, emotions organize our past and shape our present. The organizing and shaping power of emotions extends of our sense of self and others, our memories and perceptions, as well as our motivations.
As fundamental to human, psychological function as emotions are, there is considerable lack of agreement as to exactly what constitutes an emotion. There has been endless debate from Descartes to Darwin, and beyond, as to the exact nature, number, and names of emotions. Most psychologists agree with Sylvan Tompkins’ original categorization of the basic emotions as: interest, surprise, joy, anguish, fear, shame, disgust, and rage. These basic emotions arise in various combinations to generate a potentially vast emotional range, in a manner analogous to primary colors, as described in The Emotions, by Robert Plutchik.
Emotions can arise in our awareness or remain outside of our awareness. Our awareness of an emotion is experienced as having a feeling. A feeling can be identified and is frequently connected to a specific sensation in our body. Whereas a mood, being more diffuse, is more difficult to precisely define. The diffuseness and vagueness of moods can lead to our associating them with broad, global causes, such as the world we live in or our overall well-being. However, moods are more than undifferentiated feelings—they are a distinct manifestation of an emotion with its own adaptive value. Moods are integral to our overall functioning, affecting cognition and informing us about our needs and physiological functioning. Whether an emotion manifests as a mood or a feeling, it is a complex mind and body event that always affects our behavior and motivation.
We all have essential needs that are expressed through our emotions. In addition to emotions reflecting our needs, they are tied to our motivation. In this regard, emotions are aspects of complex patterns of behavior that are aimed at getting our needs met. When our mind and body are functioning appropriately, then our emotional experiences accurately reflect our needs and appropriately motivate us to satisfy those needs. If we have had a history of emotional constriction or injury, our emotional motivation may not be adequately adaptive in helping us meet our needs.
We can increase the adaptive quality of our emotional responses by approaching our feelings with an awareness that emotions are information. Emotions are essentially a communication system, telling us about our internal needs and communicating our needs to others. However, unlike a passive communication system, emotions are creating adaptive change while we experience them—the communication is the adaptation. The message is the information, as well as the event. If we develop a working relationship with our emotions, we can increase our awareness of self and other. With an understanding of our emotional world, we can begin to use our emotions for increased physical, psychological, and interpersonal well-being.
What Are Emotions?
Emotions are the result of complex interactions between the body, mind, and brain. This integrative view of emotion is the culmination of various, competing conceptualizations.
The body has always been considered essential to our emotional experiences. An early theory developed in the late nineteenth century placed the emotions directly in the body. Emotions arose like other feelings such as hot or cold, and the brain was seen as a somewhat passive observer of the sensations that were occurring in the body. This passive observation of bodily events by the brain was believed to cause our emotional experience. This perspective, as developed by William James, was called the Somatic Theory of emotions. The theory postulates that we feel a certain emotion as a result of certain reactions in our body, in response to life experiences. An event occurs in the world or in our thinking that triggers a visceral reaction, and the brain then perceives the visceral activity, thereby giving rise to an emotional experience. For example, if we experience ourselves crying, we would infer that we are sad. Or, we might experience fear in response to our heart racing, as opposed to the notion that our heart races because we are afraid. The mechanics of how feeling in the body triggers emotion in the brain was not well developed in the Somatic Theory of emotions. For example, questions about what causes us to cry, in the first place, were not answerable. It was simply inferred that something happens to trigger a crying reaction or other body experience, and the brain’s response to this automatic reaction is the felt emotion.
As inadequate as the somatic theory may be, this conceptualization has been elaborated upon in recent years. Researchers, Carroll Izard and Paul Ekman, have focused on the role that facial expressions play in our experience of emotions. Some of the support for the somatic origin of emotions comes from the universality of facial patterns expressing emotions. Individuals across widely-diverse cultures all share in identifying the same facial displays as being the result of certain emotions. This universality in facial recognition of emotional expression has led researchers to conclude that these ingrained patterns of facial expression correspond to innate emotions. This innate connection between emotions and facial expression cannot be fully overridden by social conditioning. Regardless of how good we may be at trying to mask our facial expression, invariably there is a brief and automatic facial expression corresponding to an emotion, according to research by Carroll Izard.
The consistency of emotional expression in our faces has validated the idea that our emotions are tied to our body. This support has not held up in other areas of somatic expression of our emotions. Generally, it has been very difficult to determine events in the body that correspond directly to specific emotions. Tears do not always lead to sadness. There are tears of fear and tears of joy, to name only two. The same is true for a racing heart. The difference between the emotion of fear and excitement cannot be detected in the body. The thrill-rides at the amusement park are a clear example of the overlap between sweaty palms of fear versus sweaty palms of excitement. The racing heart during a romantic interlude does not represent fear.
These limitations to the somatic basis of emotions have not fully undermined the fact that the body does play a significant role in the experience of having an emotion. Even in the absence of a specific correspondence of an emotion to a specific somatic experience, we all are familiar with emotions as sensations in our body. This common wisdom is validated in clinical interviews with individuals who have suffered severe, bodily loss or injury. For example, quadriplegics consistently report a change in how they experience their emotions, reporting a subjective decrease in the quality or intensity of the emotions, subsequent to the loss of bodily sensation. This is not to say that a quadriplegic does not have a full range of emotions, but rather that there is a very real difference in the way the emotion is felt.
Although the body is clearly involved in our experience of emotion, as is supported by the wide range of research and common wisdom, not all theories of emotion accord the body a primacy in determining emotions.
At the other extreme polarity from the somatic origin of emotions lies the Cannon-Bard Cognitive Theory of emotions, which places the origin of our emotional experience in how we think about an event. For example, if we see a lion and know that the beast is a danger to us, we become frightened. The fear results from our intellectual appraisal of the situation, and what we think of the situation determines the emotion that emerges. From a cognitive perspective, our recognition and awareness of the meaning of the experience is the source of our emotional life.
The debate between the somatic and cognitive origin of emotions is the contemporary, psychological version of the age-old question about reason and passion. Is reason paramount in directing the conscious experience of emotionality or are the visceral passions the trigger and director of emotional experience? This contest raged in the psychological community in the first three or four decades of the twentieth century. However, brain research since the mid–twentieth century has led to an integration of various theories of emotion. Although James Papez began neurophysiology research in the 1930s, it was not until the 1950s that Jose Delgado, and others, identified certain locations in the brain that seem tied to the experience of emotions. They found that electrical stimulation of the subcortical areas of the brain resulted in emotional experiences. This area of the brain, known as the limbic region, lies at the interface between the body and higher, cognitive functioning of the frontal cortex. This localization of emotional experience led to calling this region the emotional brain.
The emotional brain is an aspect of our mammalian, evolutionary development and has been widely believed to be the origin of our emotional experience. The mechanics of our emotional experience seemed to start with a release of neurotransmitters in the emotional brain that trigger a cascade of visceral responses in the body. These responses, in turn, effect hormonal and metabolic changes that alter the longer-term state of the body, generating a cascade of emotion, as well as enduring mood-states.
The activity in the emotional brain also affects higher, mental functioning through its extensive interconnection with the cortex. Via these connections, the emotional brain can influence perception, memory, and reasoning. During these early years of brain research, the emotional brain was seen as being able to overwhelm mind and body, with the mind having only a limited power over the limbic system.
The view that emotions arise from primitive areas of the brain contributed to interpreting emotions in an evolutionary, psychological context, as primitive, evolutionary remnants of our past, which emerged prior to the cerebral cortex. Although this remains a popular perspective on the nature of emotions, there is little neuropsychological validation that emotions arise in specifically-identifiable, sub-cortical areas of the emotional brain. Advances in neurobiology indicate that isolating brain structures and attributing to these centers specific functions is overly simplistic. The limbic region of the brain, like most brain regions, is interconnected via reciprocal neuronal networks to the neocortex, indicating that emotions, like most all brain functions, are diffusely mediated.
The Rhythm of Emotions
The most viable theories on the origin of emotion are contemporary, integrative ones. Emotions are fully interconnected throughout the physiology of the brain and the body. Rather than viewing somatic, cognitive, and autonomic origins of emotion as competing theories, we find each focusing on one component of a fully-integrated system. Each of these three areas of emotional activity represents interrelated phases of the complex processing of emotional responses. This interrelationship was the focus of research by Karl Pribram, who holds that brain functioning is simultaneously localized and diffuse. A structure he calls holonomy.
The construct of homeostasis is essential to an integrationist understanding of the nature of emotions. Homeostasis arises when a certain level or pattern of activity has been established. Subsequent shifts away from this level in activity are analyzed against the establish homeostasis. A general rule of the nervous system is that information is obtained from changes in homeostasis. Emotions arise as a result of a particular shift in activation in the body, limbic system, or cortex. Our emotional experience is the felt sense of these shifts in homeostasis. These shifts of activity occur along a continuum between arousal and readiness. Readiness is the emotional state experienced during the current, homeostatic period. Arousal is the process of orienting to new stimulation, change, or novelty. In this way we shift from one emotional state to another. As we become accustomed to the new emotional state, we return to readiness and preparation for the next, new arousal.
This pattern of recognition and familiarity oscillating with orientation in the face of stimulation or novelty, will develop into a unique rhythm for each of us. This rhythm of arousal and readiness will shape the way we interact with our emotions. This rhythm is what we identify as our emotional life, the specific manner in which we experience emotions. For example, some people crave and relish the shift in emotions from familiar to novel, whereas other individuals may be very averse or avoidant of shifts in their homeostasis. However, emotional well-being is the appropriate oscillation between the familiarity of readiness and the stimulation of arousal. Our relationship to these rhythms is based on our conditioning and temperament.
By remaining aware of the nature of our emotions, we can gain the ability to use them to provide the most information possible about ourselves and our world. Recognizing that emotions can arise as thoughts, or bodily sensations, or spontaneously from our emotional brain, can help us to remain open to these three sources of information. Accepting and understanding our temperamental and conditioned rhythms for experiencing our emotions can help us interpret and filter our reaction to our emotions. In this way we add to our emotional and moral intelligence.