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The Human Emotions
Human emotion basically involves expressive behavior, physiological arousal and conscious experience. Emotion is a feeling that is connected with personality, disposition, mood, temperament and motivation.
It is motivation that directs and energizes human behavior, while emotions give the sentimental part to motivation. Emotion is the multifaceted psychophysiological experience of a person’s state of mind as inter-relating with biochemical (or internal influences) or environmental (or external influences). Although there is no definite taxonomy of human emotion, many classifications have been proposed theoretically. Some can be categorized as:
- Cognitive vs. non-cognitive emotions
- Instinctual emotions vs. cognitive emotions
- Based on duration (some emotions appear so instantly, in seconds, ex. being surprised; other emotions can last years, ex. love)
An emotion is relatively distinguished from its results, primarily behaviours and emotional expressions. Most often, people behave in a way as the result of their state of emotion e.g. fighting, fleeing, and crying. If a person can emote without a corresponding behavior, it is then considered that the behavior is not of any importance with the human emotions. Apparently, emotion is a controversial issue in psychology, the root of intense discussion, debate and disagreement from the Philosophers of long ago and great thinkers of the present time.
However, many Psychologists agree on one definition of emotion that involves its components. It is the enumeration of the parts of human emotions and the phenomenon behind each. The components of emotions are differentiated on the basis of psychological and physiological factors and can somehow include emotion elicitors, emotion neural processes and emotion faces. We use to experience sort of happiness when we receive good news, a salary raise or upon hearing a joke. We got surprised when we bumped somebody somewhere in our past. We fear when we see horror movies, disgust when we cannot find something. In fact, emotions help us in coping with our everyday life. It allows us to relate what we feel on certain situations, things, people, thoughts, dreams, memories, and including senses. As per Psychologists, there are six (6) basic kinds of emotions:
- Happiness – this is the way how people react to positive and good things
- Anger – this is how people react to aversion
- Fear – a common reaction from danger
- Sadness – this emotion is felt because of loss or having difficulty
- Disgust – sort of revolting emotions
- Surprise- it is how we react to the unexpected
There are varieties of emotions arising from the basic ones mentioned like grief and depression for the variety of sadness. Pleasure is a variety for happiness, horror is for fear, thrilled is for surprise, etc. Actually, secondary human emotions arise out of the extent of basic emotions or a combination of two or more (e.g. disgust and anger produce contempt, sadness and surprise produce disappointments. However, multiple emotions can also produce a single emotion (e.g. love, anger and fear can produce the emotions of jealousy ).
We can therefore state that every emotion can be characterized by behavioral and physiological qualities and that may include posture, movements, facial expressions, voice and even fluctuating pulse rate. The emotion of fear is characterized with tightening and trembling of muscles, whereas the emotion of sadness relaxes the limbs but tightens the throat. Surprise is interestingly a different emotion that can obviously show a dropped jaw or gaping eyes which can only last in seconds, followed by some other type of emotion.
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