Emotion, for most people, is a feeling, such as happiness, anger, or fear, that is triggered by certain events or thoughts. Emotions can cause changes in the body or behavior without personal effort or control. An emotion can be pleasant or unpleasant. People often seek out such pleasant emotions as love and happiness. They often try to avoid feeling unpleasant emotions, such as fear and grief. These experiences lead people to believe that emotions are innate (inborn) responses.
However, not all scientists believe in the common sense view that emotions are automatic responses to a trigger, or that a certain class of emotions, such as fear, anger, sadness, happiness, and disgust, are innate. Through the ages, philosophers, scientists, and authors have debated the nature of emotion. Today, scientists have not agreed on a formal definition that adequately distinguishes the variety of emotions seen in human beings and other animals. They have, however, developed three approaches to explaining how emotions occur. These are: (1) the basic emotion approach, (2) the appraisal approach, and (3) the constructivist approach. All three approaches have some scientific evidence to support them.
The basic emotion approach
to emotion is similar to most people’s understanding of emotion. It began with Charles Darwin, the British scientist who developed the theory of natural selection, who later wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In this book, Darwin proposed that all mammals express internal mental states in a similar way, through body postures and facial behaviors, that he called expressions. Darwin considered human emotions to be little more than remaining traces of our evolutionary past.
Other psychologists expanded on Darwin’s ideas. They described emotions as complex biological reflexes that are automatically triggered by events in the environment. Scientists who believe that emotions are biologically basic do not agree on how many emotions there are or what they are called. But, most agree that there are at least five basic emotions: (1) happiness, (2) anger, (3) sadness, (4) fear, and (5) disgust. They believe that each emotion issues from specific nerve networks in the brain. Thus, people are supposed to experience the same bodily sensations with a particular emotion, regardless of the situation that triggers it.
The appraisal approach
to understanding emotion began with the work of the American psychologist David Irons in the 1890’s. It was further developed by American psychologist Magda Arnold in her landmark book Emotion and Personality (1960). According to this approach, emotions are not simply triggered by an event. Instead, they result from a person’s meaningful interpretation, or appraisal, of an event or situation.
In some versions of the appraisal approach, an event triggers a meaning analysis (a series of appraisals) in the person’s mind. The combination of these appraisals results in an emotional experience that can be unique to that person and situation. Generally, different combinations of appraisals produce a variety of different degrees of anger, sadness, fear, and other emotions. In other versions of this approach, appraisals merely describe the situations in which emotions take place. For example, anger may occur when people feel that their goals are being blocked or their standards are being violated.
The constructivist approach
to understanding emotion began when American psychologist William James published his article What is an emotion? in 1884. James, along with Danish physiologist Carl Lange, believed that emotions were physical states that are perceived or understood as telling a person something meaningful about the world. In 1962, the American psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed a popular constructivist view, where emotions are produced by two factors: (1) physical changes in a person’s body and (2) the reason the person gives for those changes. For example, both pleasant and unpleasant events can trigger a person’s heartbeat to increase. But memories and experience help the brain determine whether the person is experiencing fear or joy. Other scholars have since developed more complex constructivist theories of emotion.
Constructivist theories maintain that emotions are not basic elements in the mind. Instead, the mind constructs emotions by combining more basic psychological processes. This approach helps explain how the same emotion can be felt differently over time, among different people, and among different cultures.
Emotion and the brain.
Research on people with brain injuries once suggested that specific locations in the brain control particular emotions, such as fear and disgust. But brain imaging studies suggest that there are no regions of the brain that are specific to emotion. Nerve connections in the brain that are involved in memory, thought, and perception, along with those that represent a person’s physical state, are all routinely active when a person experiences an emotion.
