Question: what are emotions

Ben Brilot answered on 12 Mar 2013:

You’re not going to like this I’m afraid……………..no one really agrees on what exactly ’emotions’ are, so there isn’t a very good answer, yet. Instead I can tell you some of the competing ideas:

Some people say that each emotion is an individual thing that’s clearly defined by what context it happens in and how it feels: so jealousy, fear, depression, happiness all feel like real emotions to us and each feels very different (that’s why they have different names after all). But actually sometimes it’s hard to justify which emotion is which (have you ever felt afraid but also very excited? say you’re about to do a parachute jump….), and actually it looks like there isn’t one clear pattern of brain activity or behaviour that relates directly to each emotion.

Other people say that’s why that idea is rubbish. Instead they argue that emotions are a combination of two things: how overwhelmed you feel in a particular state and whether that feeling is positive or negative.

What do I mean by overwhelmed? Well psychologists actually call it ‘arousal’ (psychologists forget about schoolboys studying psychology) and they think of it as how much the emotion takes over your thoughts and physiology. So you can be afraid of something and have masses of adrenaline running around your system and be sweating and shaking and panicking madly and want desperately to run away. That would be an intense form of fear. But you can also be only a little bit afraid, feel a bit nervous, have slight butterflies in your stomach etc. Neither feels very nice, but the difference between the two is how much your body is involved in the emotion. The other bit (positive or negative feeling) is called ‘valence’ and splits the emotional feeling into whether it’s pleasant/enjoyable or unpleasant (you’d rather not feel like that). Why do you need both ‘arousal’ and ‘valence’? Because your body can respond very similarly in situations where the emotion is completely different. So actually when you’re enjoying playing sport, say a game of football, your body state is not very different from when you’re terrified of something: you’re sweating, breathing heavily, your heart is racing and you have lots of adrenaline in your system. The difference is that one is nice and enjoyable, the other feels horrible.

So there you go, that’s a very short explanation of some of the ideas about emotions (there are others out there), but no one knows yet which is right. My advice would be: if you’re thinking about becoming a scientist, particularly a psychologist, choose emotion research, because you can potentially spend the rest of your life trying to solve an incredibly interesting problem: “what are emotions”?