Week 8 – Nature of Emotion

Five Perennial Questions

What is an emotion?

What Cases an Emotion?

How many emotions are there?

What good are the emotions?

What is the difference between emotion and mood?

I will summarise these points very briefly as they are important aspects of emotion.

Firstly what is an emotion.  When asked this in the first tute of motivation and emotion in September my personal response was

Emotion = an expression which is a reflection of an internal state of feeling as a response to a stimuli which is either internal or external.

Reeve (2009) argues that emotion is a concept that is hard to define.  Our tute certainly had troubles trying to define it, as everyone had different definitions. The concept of emotion is of a multidimensional construct consisting of feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose and social expressive.  The definition Reeve uses is

“emotions are short lived, feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that help us to adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events.” 

Using the term significant life event is a little strange considering that you express sadness by crying sometimes when watching a movie or TV show which is not considered to be a significant life event. I would use the term situational rather than significant.  To me this is implying that emotions only arise from something significant which could mean a birth or death, I believe we express emotion from situations which aren’t specifically significant.

What causes an Emotion?

There are two perspectives of what causes emotion biology and cognition.  The argument amongst professionals in the field is similar to that of the chicken and egg problem which one comes first, biology or cognition.

How many emotions are there?

Both the cognitive and biological approaches consist of many different researchers all proposing various amounts of emotions. However, there are consistently six basic emotions usually mentioned, or are some variations of theorists views.  These being:

Fear – Perception of physical or psychological danger or threat

Anger – belief situation is not what it should be: the restraint, interference or criticism is illegitimate

Disgust – getting rid or of getting away from a contaminated (bodily, interpersonal and moral), deteriorated or spoiled object.  Function of disgust is rejection.

Sadness – Most negative, aversive emotion arises primarily through separation or failure.

Joy – Desirable outcomes related to personal success and interpersonal relatedness

Interest – Most prevalent in day to day functioning, ever-present, desire to explore, investigate, seek out manipulate and extract information from the objects that surround us.

What good are the emotions?

The purpose of emotions, as originally argued by Darwin is to help cope with hostile situations.  Reeve states that emotions are positive, functional, purposive and adaptive organizers of behaviour.   They serve as coping functions throughout evolution and in our day to day lives and they serve as social functions assisting us with our interactions and communications with others.  The most interesting factor about emotions is that they are so variable between individuals.  Some people show less fear while others may be more prone to anger. Thinking of a person who I work with, she is always crying everything seems to trigger it. It could be a sign of depression but on the other hand she seems to not be able to control her emotional reactions to situations, which are rarely highly threatening. To this individual her emotions are of no use and she is being regulated “by” her emotions.

What is the difference between emotions and mood?

Moods are enduring states which last for days and can be positive and negative in comparison an emotion is something which is a brief, short lived event, lasting for seconds or minutes.

As everyone wants to be happy, I think a very interesting aspect of this chapter is positive affect, and how to find conditions which make us feel good.  Research has shown manipulations of small gain, amusement or pleasure can elicit a positive mood for up to 20 minutes.  These include, receiving a free product or a gift, watching an amusing movie or random acts of kindness.  The benefits of positive affect are outstanding.  Those who are exposed to conditions that allow them to feel good are more likely to: help others, act sociably, express greater liking for others, be more generous to others and themselves, take risks, act more cooperatively and less aggressively, solve problems in creative ways, persist in the face of failure feedback, make decisions more efficiently and show greater intrinsic motivation on interesting activities.  With this list of great things we should all invest in time each day to do something that will make us feel good, for example if you give a surprise gift to another person it may lead to a flow on affect, where that person will then give to another and so on.