Understanding Human Emotions: Types, Dimensions, and Functions

Emotions

Types of Affection

Emotion

• Strong, immediate, and short-lived emotional reactions.
• Clear organ involvement.
• Relatively standardized behavioral response.

Feeling

• Diffuse, softer, and durable affective reactions.
• Mild organic and behavioral reaction.

Dimensions of Emotions

• Tone: How the emotion is experienced (positive-negative, pleasant-unpleasant).
• Intensity: Degree of physiological arousal (blushing, trembling), personal experience (feeling a strong emotion), and later behavior (more or less strong reaction).
• Duration: Short or long-lasting.

Biological or Mental Issue?

• Zajonc: Emotions are biological processes, preceding or following cognition but distinctly different.
• Lazarus-Ellis-Beck: Emotion is post-cognitive. Interpretation of the situation triggers a specific emotion.
• LeDoux: Brain mechanisms generate emotional behavior.

Number of Emotions

• Biological Position: Emotions serve survival; thus, there is a finite number.
  • Plutchik: Fear, sadness, anger, joy, disgust, acceptance, anticipation, and surprise.
  • Ekman: Fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise, and contempt.
• Cognitive Position: Basic emotions are programmed and standardized, but individual variations are endless due to interpretations of specific situations and cultural/socio-historical factors.

Triad of Emotional Response

The emotional response has three components:

• Physiological Components: Physiological changes (e.g., changes in heart rate, dilation of blood vessels).
• Subjective Component: The mood that a person names as an emotion.
• Behavioral Components: Expressive emotional behavior; social function of emotions (e.g., facial expressions, posture, movements, vocalizations).

Functions of Emotions

Roles of Adaptation

• Emotions help the body adapt to changing and complex environments (Darwin).
• Example: Fear protects from harmful situations; disgust rejects spoiled food.
• Neither good nor bad: An emotion can both protect and hinder adaptation.

Social Functions

• Emotions serve as signals to communicate emotional states to others (e.g., a baby communicates needs to the mother).
• Emotions modify the behavior of others and regulate interactions (e.g., an expression of rebuff minimizes approach).

Role of Motivation

• Emotions can motivate action.
• The body tends to seek pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones.

Theoretical Contributions to the Concept of Emotion

Evolutionary Contributions

• Darwin: Emotions have adaptive value, functioning as preparatory signals for action and effective communication (Principle of Utility).
• Lorenz: Investigated differences between innate and acquired behavior in animals and humans.
• Plutchik: Primitive emotions are adaptive reactions fixed in our genetic code.

Behavioral Contributions

• Watson: Three innate unconditioned emotional responses to specific stimuli:
  • Fear: Aversive situations
  • Anger: Situations that prevent movement
  • Love: Erogenous zone stimulation
• Skinner: Emotions as learned behaviors. Emotional responses are associated with reinforcers contingent on expressed emotional behavior.

Cognitive Contributions

• Emotional response requires physiological arousal and cognitive interpretation of that arousal.
• Cognitive interpretation gives quality to the emotional state.
• Emotional experience occurs after the physiological event: The brain receives signals (e.g., racing heart, shaking muscles), interprets them (e.g., as fear), and then experiences the emotion.

Psychodynamic Contributions

• Energy conception of emotions: The libidinal system generates unpleasant psychological tension discharged through dreams, symptoms, or cathartic expression of feelings and emotions.
• Evaluation of events is unconscious.
• Jung: People process the world through thought or feelings. Intense feelings lead to overt emotions and physiological responses.