Nature of Emotions

Joy, sorrow, hope, love, excitement, anger, hate — feelings of this kind are part of everyone's day-to-day experience. The word emotion is often loosely used as if it meant the same thing as 'feeling' or 'mood', but psychologically the three are distinct. Feeling refers narrowly to the pleasure–pain dimension of an emotional experience, usually tied to bodily sensations. Mood is an affective state that lasts a long time but is comparatively low in intensity. Emotion is the broader concept that includes both: it is a complex pattern involving physiological arousal, a subjective feeling, and a cognitive interpretation of what is happening — in other words, emotions move us internally through both bodily and psychological processes working together.

Because emotion is fundamentally a subjective experience, it varies from person to person, which has made it genuinely difficult for psychologists to agree on a definitive list of 'basic' emotions. Even so, several influential attempts exist. One widely cited view holds that at least six emotions are experienced and recognised virtually everywhere: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Izard proposed a longer list of ten basic emotions — joy, surprise, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, guilt, interest and excitement — with combinations of these producing further emotional blends. Plutchik, differently again, proposed eight primary emotions, arranged in four pairs of opposites: joy–sadness, acceptance–disgust, fear–anger, and surprise–anticipation, with every other emotion arising as some mixture of these eight. …