Question: Is it possible to define emotions completely in terms of chemicals etc.?

Ben Brilot answered on 14 Mar 2013:

Hi Fiona, so I’m glad you wrote this for me to answer in more detail. The answer to that is no, very simply put. Emotions have lots of different dimensions to them:

there is the physiological part of it (when you’re angry your blood pressure rises, your stress hormone levels rise, your heart races, you start sweating etc.);
then there’s also the behavioural part of it, you’re more likely to physically lash out or shout at someone in an angry mood than if you’re feeling calm;
thirdly there’s the cognitive (thinking) part of it: if you’re feeling angry you’re unlikely to be able to focus on something else that’s unrelated to your anger (think about if someone asked you to play chess when you were feeling peeved at something else, you wouldn’t play as well);
then finally there’s the ‘conscious’ or ‘felt’ component: it feels like something to be angry, sometimes unpleasant, distressing although sometimes it can be good to feel a little angry.

Each component on its own can’t define an emotion because many emotions look the same in one component: your heart beats very fast if you’re feeling angry or if you’re feeling afraid. So emotions are likely defined by the combination of all of these components. Luckily we can measure the first three in animals, and often what we see looks pretty much like what we might see in a human in a similar context (in a situation where they should be afraid for example). What we obviously can’t measure is the ‘conscious’ element and that might well be the most important bit, because the overwhelming thing about emotions for us is that they ‘feel’ a particular way: really awful for things like depression, but amazing for happiness and joy. So we still have to figure out are animals experiencing an emotion in the same way we might. If you fancied a job as a psychologist or zoologist, it’s definitely one place where answering that question will take many years yet….