Emotions

Emotions

Emotions: A complex psychological state involving three distinct components, according to Don Hockenbury and Sandra E. Hockenbury’s book “Discovering Psychology,” an emotion is a complex psychological state involving three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioural or expressive response.

Researchers have attempted to define what emotions are as well as identify and categorise the many sorts of emotions. Over time, the descriptions and understanding have evolved:

Fear, contempt, anger, surprise, pleasure, and sorrow, according to psychologist Paul Eckman, are six primary emotions that are common throughout civilizations.

He enlarged this list in 1999 to include embarrassment, enthusiasm, disdain, humiliation, pride, pleasure, and amusement, among other fundamental feelings.

Robert Plutchik proposed a new emotion categorization system called the “wheel of emotions” in the 1980s. This model highlighted how distinct emotions can be merged or blended in the same manner as primary colours can be used to generate new hues.

Emotions

Emotional Analysis

(I) Panic

It’s a feeling triggered by the fear of being in a dangerous scenario. Fear, according to McDougall, is the emotional element of the desire to flee. A loud boom, a dazzling flash of light, a sudden roar of thunder, and other similar events might elicit fear. It is induced by the impression of an item that has previously caused pain or harm.

Fear-inducing circumstances must be confrontational or intrusive in character. Fear is sparked by a rapid and powerful perception. We were terrified by a loud sound for which we were unprepared. Fear manifests itself through rapid heartbeats, trembling, sagging limbs, fleeing, and so on. Extreme dread manifests itself in physical rigidity.

(ii) Resentment

The blocking of conation elicits this sensation. It results from the stifling of any innate or learned propensity. According to McDougall, rage is the emotional element of the drive to fight.

Anger may be triggered by any form of antagonism or thwarting of an instinctual or developed propensity. If you bother a cat’s kittens, it will grow enraged. If you take away a child’s toy, they grow enraged. If you insult or mistreat a guy, he will get enraged.

Anger is the emotive side of the impulse to fight in order to overcome obstacles. The opposing tendencies describe anger and fear. In the automobile, the body adopts a withdrawing posture, but in rage, the body adopts an aggressive posture.

Anger manifests itself by a powerful motor discharge. It takes the form of frowning, yelling, gnashing teeth, clenching fists, kicking, punching, and so forth. Fear manifests itself as trembling, fleeing, and other behaviours.

(iii) Happiness

It is triggered by the acquisition of a prized possession. When one’s heart’s desire is fulfilled, joy follows. It manifests itself as a generalised feeling of heightened tension throughout the body. The manifestations of delight include erect posture, chest outstretched, sparkling eyes, a smiling face, shooting, laughing, bouncing, and so on.

(iv) Sadness

It is triggered by the loss of a prized possession. It is energised by our inability to achieve our goals. When a person’s prized possessions are taken away from him, he feels bereft. Joy is the feeling that arises from the accomplishment of a goal, while sadness is the emotion that arises from the threat of or actual failure.

The manifestations of sadness are diametrically opposed to those of pleasure. Sadness is shown by a drooping posture, a retracting chest, a general relaxation of body tension, and so on. The impact of deep sadness is prostrating.

(v) Affection

The term ‘love’ is a bit of a misnomer. It has three different meanings. To begin with, it denotes sexual feeling. It’s the sensation triggered by the sex urge. It’s what McDougall refers to as the desire emotion. Second, it refers to the mother instinct’s delicate feeling.

Finally, it refers to a mood or a long-term emotional state exhibited in soft emotion. Selfish love is concerned only with its own satisfaction, regardless of the well-being of the loved object. However, it is real love when it is elicited not just by the presence of the loved object, but also by considerations for the object’s well-being.

Attachment and compassion are two components of love. Fondling or touching is a kind of attachment. Sharing or delving into the feelings of another is what sympathy is all about. Attachment or selfish love, according to Sully, is the egoistic part of love, whereas compassion is the altruistic element.

Attachment, according to Bain, is a delicate feeling that is conveyed in some kind of physical contact—touching, stroking, hugging, and so on. In reality, joy in the company of, or in the presence of, the loved object is the natural release of love in all of its manifestations.

(vi) Discrimination

The term ‘hate’ is a bit of a misnomer. It may be used to express both feeling and emotion. Hate, according to McDougall, is a multi-faceted emotion. It is made up of three emotions: rage, fear, and disgust. We are provoked, frightened, and repelled by the object of our hate. I am enraged when a powerful person insults me. But you can’t show your rage by attacking him. He is just too strong for me to handle.

As a result, he makes me fearful. This significant wrath, along with dread, is complicated further by disdain or detest for the individual. The polar opposite of love is hatred. It causes a person to retreat from the object of their hatred. Hate is a constricting feeling, while love is an expanding one. It causes a person to withdraw from others and shield himself from them. It’s a protective feeling.

Emotional Factors

Every emotion has two physical and mental aspects. Mellone discusses the following aspects of emotion:

(I) From a Mental Perspective

The individual’s perception, recollection, imagination, or idea of a circumstance that impacts his or her material, mental, social, or higher interests.

• Affective quality that leans toward pleasure or suffering.
• a proclivity towards action
• Organic and muscular feelings are combined in this condition.

(ii) On a Physical Level

Internal organ alterations that aren’t obvious

Muscle contractions

Emotional Theories

Emotional Theory of James-Lange

An emotion, according to popular belief, develops from the perception, recollection, or imagination of an event and manifests itself in biological changes. According to popular belief, observation, ideation, or cognition of a situation occurs first; then an emotion forms; and last, the emotion manifests itself in biological changes.

As a result, emotion comes first, followed by organic expression. You see a tiger in the wild; it makes you fearful, and the fearful reaction causes you to tremble and flee.

William James takes the polar opposite position. According to him, the observation of an item causes organic changes in the internal organs in a reflex manner, which are then communicated to the brain through sensory nerves, resulting in organic feelings. An emotion is the combination of these physiological feelings and the perception of the thing.

At first, there is a cold or emotionless perception of a specific object, which is immediately followed by certain bodily or organic changes by a pre-organized mechanism, and then when these organic “reverberations” are reported back to the brain, the conscious correlates of these organic changes, along with the original perception, form an emotion.

James defines emotion as “a cluster of reflexively stimulated biological sensations gathered around the sense of an item.” In an emotion, there is no aspect of sensation. It’s a jumble of biological feelings that have been reflexively triggered.

Cannon’s Emotional Emergency Theory

The sympathetic system, according to Cannon, activates in a physical emergency to prepare the body for fight or any other exceptional effort. The heart beats faster when it perceives a complicated scenario.

The faster the heart beats, the faster the blood flows through the blood vessels, washing away the tiredness products faster. Furthermore, blood is diverted from the stomach and intestines, inhibiting digestion processes while providing greater blood supply to the skeletal muscles.

The liver excretes more sugar, resulting in increased strength. Adrenin is a hormone produced by the adrenal gland that stimulates the heart, raises blood pressure, and tones up tired muscles. Cannon seeks to explain how emotions cause changes in internal organs, ductless glands, and muscles.

However, an emotion theory based on such well-coordinated physiological activity seems to be at odds with the reality that emotion is a diffuse and disruptive reaction. If an emotion appeared only in a ’emergency,’ the person would be severely hampered in his everyday activities, since an emotion would only appear in an emergency.

An emergency is a unique condition that necessitates extraordinary effort. To respond to the emergency, a new level of coordination is required, including complicated body adjustments. The outcome may be successful if higher physical strength and endurance are necessary.

However, if a careful coordination is necessary to accomplish the intended result, the overwhelming reactions generated by the autonomic nervous system’s activity may not be sufficient. The autonomic nervous system’s physical changes may be useful in overcoming or fleeing an attacker, but they are inefficient in repairing a watch or planning an experiment.

McDougall’s Emotional Theory

Emotions, according to McDougall, are instinctive functions. The conscious correlates of instincts are primary emotions. “Each of the main instincts conditions some one form of emotional arousal with a feature that is distinct or exclusive to it,” he explains.

He lists the instincts and emotions that are connected to each other as follows:

When McDougall asserts that every emotional circumstance appeals to an inbuilt propensity, he is correct. However, his list is unscientific since it is founded on this idea. Anger, for example, is not necessarily the result of abrasion; delicate feeling may be the result of instincts other than maternal impulses.

McDougall identifies a few instincts that have less well-defined emotional responses, such as the reproduction instinct, the gregarious inclination, and the acquisition and building impulses. There are, however, well-defined sentiments of security, self-expansion, ownership, and so on that McDougall has not discussed.

His notion is intriguing, but it hasn’t been fully developed. Some instincts (for example, the instincts of walking, sitting, standing, sprinting, and so on) seem to be emotionless. Anger and fear are quite similar in terms of physiological states, yet they vary in terms of impulses.

The number of really distinct emotions is substantially lower than the number of instincts. As a result, McDougall’s notion might be considered a working hypothesis. When we encounter an emotion, we also encounter a proclivity to do action that leads to an end-result.

Despite the fact that emotion and instinct are intimately linked, we cannot assume that an emotion corresponds to every instinct and an instinct corresponds to every feeling. There are a lot of instincts that aren’t accompanied by any feelings.

Furthermore, the same emotion’s system may have a range of instincts. In the feeling of dread, the instincts of hiding and flight are both active. The same phrase may be associated with a variety of emotions. The same instinct may be arranged in multiple feelings, just as the same emotion can be structured in different sentiments.

Birds’ flight instincts may be activated in both fear and rage. Furthermore, when an individual’s instinctual reaction to a circumstance goes well, he or she does not experience any emotion. When an individual’s instinctive reaction is impeded and he is unable to successfully deal with the circumstance, he experiences emotion.

As a result, an instinctive behaviour may or may not be accompanied by an emotion. As a result, McDougall’s notion might be considered a working hypothesis. It includes a kernel of truth; it emphasises the close link between instinct and emotion.

The Emotions Theory of Philips Bard

Cannon (1927) disproved James-theory Lange’s of emotion by demonstrating that experimental participants felt and reported emotions before any other physical sensations. As a result, physiological experiences did not precede or form emotions.

After removing the cortex and thalamus from certain animals and leaving just the posterior portion of the hypothalamus, Bard (1934) discovered that they still raged. They didn’t display the integrated fury pattern when he eliminated the hypothalamus as well.

As a result, he demonstrated that the hypothalamus is required for the manifestation of wrath. His research did not show that the thalamus or hypothalamus caused wrath (or any other emotion), nor that the cortex suppressed the thalamus regularly.

Masserman demonstrated this with various tests. He used bipolar electrodes to activate the hypothalamus in some normal cats, and they displayed the integrated anger pattern, such as hissing, spitting, and claw unsheathing. However, their routine activities were not disrupted by these displays.

In a similar approach, Bard and Masserman acquired the flight response in terror. In cats that demonstrated a combat reaction in response to air-blast, Bard removed the cortex and thalamus. Masserman induced a flight response in intact cats by stimulating the hypothalamus.

However, their fear pattern was different from that of regular animals. These cats experienced bouts of aimless and rapid running rather than the intense efforts at escape exhibited by terrified animals.

Theory of Laughter: Emotions of the Ludicrous

It’s important to note right away that absurd is not the same as laughable. Laughter may come from a variety of places. Purely physical stimulation, such as tickling, may elicit it. It’s a reflex response by definition. Automatic mimicry may elicit laughter. If you smile at a youngster, the child will return the grin. People laugh in unison when they are in a crowd.

They aren’t always sure why they are laughing. Laughter may result from a sympathetic replication of another’s sentiments. Emotions have an infectious quality to them. They were passed down from one person to the next. When others laugh out loud in delight, we catch the bug and laugh as well.

Laughter might be a reaction to our awareness of our own superiority over others. When we triumph against a formidable foe, we burst out laughing. Laughter may be sparked by consideration of the absurd.

As a result, absurd and laughable are not synonymous. Whatever is ridiculous is amusing, but what is amusing is not silly. Additional than humorous items, laughter has numerous other causes. The following are the qualities of the humorous, feeling, or ridiculous emotion.

It is a feeling of pure pleasure or exhilaration that is not tinged with suffering. It is significant in terms of societal relevance. Incongruity in a circumstance, which is established by a societal norm of propriety or impropriety, elicits it. It’s a disinterested feeling with no practical purpose.

Humans are the only creatures that can laugh. The only animal that laughs is man. He never learns how to laugh. Nature has given him the complicated machinery of laughing. Laughter is a natural reaction.

Emotional Types

McDougall divides feelings into three categories:

1. Primary feelings
2. Emotions that are secondary or mixed
3. Emotions that have been derived

• Primary feelings

Primary emotions are the effective correlates of instincts at their most basic level. Fear, wrath, disgust, delicate feeling, anguish, desire or sex-love, curiosity, amusement, and other fundamental emotions stem from instincts of escape, fight, repulsion, parental instinct, appeal, sex, curiosity, and laughter. They don’t assume any other feelings.

• Emotions that are secondary or mixed

Secondary emotions, also known as mixed emotions, are the result of the interaction of two or more fundamental emotions. A secondary or blended emotion is elicited when a complicated circumstance elicits two or more cooperative or conflicting innate impulses.

It may or may not be a combination of two or more fundamental emotions. It may occur as a result of a complicated scenario that elicits two or more cooperative or conflicting innate inclinations, which in turn elicit two or more fundamental emotions.

It’s a quick reaction to a difficult issue. McDougall claims that his approach of secondary emotions is free of J.S. Mill’s “mental chemistry” flaws. A youngster has a mixed reaction when he approaches a snake and retreats from it out of fear and interest. Scorn is a combination of rage and disgust. It may also be a mix of rage, contempt, and a pleasant sense of self-worth or elation.

It’s either a binary or a tertiary compound. Admiration is a combination of awe and a negative sense of self-worth, or self-abasement. Awe is a combination of awe, humility, and terror. Pity is a combination of compassionate feeling and sympathy for someone who is in suffering or sorrow. Reproach is a combination of tenderness and rage. Hate is the result of a combination of rage, fear, and contempt. Jealousy, guilt, vengeance, gratitude, respect, and other mixed emotions exist.

• Emotions that have been derived

Derived emotions are complicated sentiments that are connected to wants but are neither main emotions nor blended movements. They are not the result of instinctual instincts. Derivative emotions include confidence, hope, worry, depression, despair, regret, remorse, and sadness, among others.

The potential feelings or desires include confidence, hope, worry, sadness, and despair. When a group of mountaineers sets out on a quest to climb a summit, they are confident in their ability to succeed. Their self-assurance stems from a strong drive to succeed.

When a party member becomes gravely sick for an extended length of time, their confidence is reduced to hope. Their optimism turns to fear as they are hampered by a succession of avalanches and landslides. When they reach the end of their trek and confront severe temperatures, a scarcity of food, and some get paralysed by frostbite, their concern turns to despair.

When bad weather, heavy snowfall, and blizzards stymie their progress, their depression escalates to despair. Shand refers to these derived emotions as “prospective emotions or desire” since they are linked to desire that is focused on the future.

Regret, remorse, and regret are derived emotions known as “retrospective emotions of want” because they are linked to desire that looks backward in time. Regret stems from the disappointment of a prior desire, and it is accompanied by suffering.

When a wish was previously frustrated owing to a misjudgment or a breach of duty, regret becomes remorse. It is accompanied with self-reproach. Sorrow is a heartfelt regret caused by the loss of a prized possession. It is a terrible yearning for something that has happened in the past. Aversion to anything in the future or in the past may also cause derived feelings.

The instincts that are triggered by a situation are the source of primary emotions. Derived emotions are not directly based on instincts, but they pre­suppose some desire or aversion which operates when a situation is apprehended. Primary emotions are comparatively simple and elementary, while derived emotions are complex and presuppose some mental development and operation of prospective or retros­pective desire or aversion.

Development of Emotions

Primary emotions are refined in three ways. First, they are refined by modifications of the motor response by which socially acceptable reactions are substituted for the primitive emotional expressions such as crying, kicking, scratching, biting, etc.

The emotional expressions of a cultured person are different from those of a child or a savage. Secondly, primary emotions are modified by new attachments on the side of the stimulus.

The primary emo­tion of fear is originally excited by the perception of a dangerous situation, e.g., the sight of a tiger at large. But later it is excited by the imagination or thought of a serious situation, e.g., the loss of a job, the imminent death of an earning member of a family, the fall of a Government, etc.

Thirdly, primary emotions are modified by a combination of one with another. Awe is a compound of wonder, fear and humility. Hate is a compound of anger, fear and disgust. Pity is a compound of grief and tenderness”.

The situations which excite specific emotions in older children and adults excite only general excitement in new born infants. Gradually distress, delight, fear, disgust, anger, affection and joy are differentiated from the general excitement in two years.

Maturation and learning both play important roles in the develop­ment of emotion. As the organism matures the infant exhibits such emotional responses as crying, weeping, smiling and laughing without earning them.

They appear almost at the same age in all children even when they are not allowed opportunities to imitate them from others. Facial expressions of deaf-blind children also confirm the influence of maturation in emotional development.

The stereotyped facial and gestural expressions which are peculiar to persons of a particular culture are learned from others. The clapping of hands is a sign of happiness in us, but of disappoint­ment in the Chinese. The raising of the eyebrows and the opening of the eyes widely are expression of surprise in us, but the sticking out of tongues, in them. These peculiar expressions show the in­fluence of learning and culture.

Emotions and their expressions are due to conditioning. A child of nine months exhibited fear reactions to a loud noise. When a rat was placed before him, he had no fear response. But when a rat was placed before him subsequently a number of times when a loud noise was produced on each occasion, the child showed fear reaction. Later when only a rat was placed before him, he exhibited fear reaction.

Thus his fear was conditioned by a substitute stimulus. Sometimes emotions are learned by imitation. If the parent is afraid of particular objects (e.g., darkness, lightning, snakes, etc.), the children get afraid of them. Obviously, their emotion is influenced by imitation

Degrees of Emotional Responsiveness

Normal persons differ in their general emotional responsiveness. There are calm persons who are generally not perturbed, by emo­tions. There are excitable persons who are deeply stirred by emo­tions. These are two extremes. There are many degrees of emo­tionality between these two extremes.

Emotional Excess

Some persons have an excess of emo­tionally. They are susceptible to all emotions. Their emotions are easily excited by slight stimuli. Joy, fear, anger, sorrow, and other emotions are easily and frequently aroused. They are usually intense. Joy becomes ecstasy, fear becomes terror, anger becomes violent rage, and sorrow becomes’ intense grief. Emotions are felt in their intensity.

Emotionally Instability

Generally the persons who have an excess of emotionality have also emotional instability. They often shift abruptly from joy to sorrow, from love to hate; from self-confidence to diffidence. This is called emotional instability. It is generally accompanied by emotional sensitivity and excess of response.

But excessive emotionality and emotional instability do not invariably go together. Sometimes emotional instability is found along with nervous and mental instability.

Unemotional Nature

The extremely unemotional individual is not dead to all emotions. But his emotions are not easily aroused. They are by no means unemotional. Unemotional persons do not experience difficulties in adapting themselves to the social environ­ment. But over-emotional persons cannot easily adapt themselves to it.

In the emotional person the sympathetic nervous system is readily excited and brings about visceral changes. Excessive sensi­tivity of the sympathetic systems is the cause of excessive emotionality and emotional instability.