Emotion

Emotion include bodily changes such as glow and smile of happiness, the pounding heart of anxiety, the clenched fist of anger. It is the perception of any such bodily change. Emotion is associated with mood, temperament, personality and disposition.

The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means 'out' and movere means 'move'. The related term "motivation" is also derived from movere.

No definitive taxonomy of emotions exists, though numerous taxonomies have been proposed. Some categorizations include:

• 'Cognitive' versus 'non-cognitive' emotions

• Instinctual emotions (from the amygdala), versus cognitive emotions (from the prefrontal cortex).

• Basic versus complex: where base emotions lead to more complex ones.

• Categorization based on duration: Some emotions occur over a period of seconds (e.g., surprise), whereas others can last years (e.g., love).

A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviors and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting or fleeing. If one can have the emotion without the corresponding behavior, then we may consider the behavior not to be essential to the emotion. Neuroscientific research suggests there is a "magic quarter second" during which it's possible to catch a thought before it becomes an emotional reaction. In that instant, one can catch a feeling before allowing it to take hold.

The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The functionalist approach to emotions (e.g., Nico Frijda) holds that emotions have evolved for a particular function, such as to keep the subject safe.

No aspect of our mental life is more important to the quality and meaning of our existence than emotions. They are what make life worth living, or sometimes ending. So it is not surprising that most of the great classical philosophers—Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Hume—had recognizable theories of emotion, conceived as responses to certain sorts of events of concern to a subject, triggering bodily changes and typically motivating characteristic behavior. What is surprising is that in much of the twentieth-century philosophers of mind and psychologists tended to neglect them— perhaps because the sheer variety of phenomena covered by the word "emotion" and its closest neighbors tends to discourage tidy theory. In recent years, however, emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science. In view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researches of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology, evolutionary biology and even economics. While it is quite impossible to do justice to those approaches here, some sidelong glances in their direction will aim to suggest their philosophical importance.

Most emotions have an intentional structure: we shall need to say something about what that means. Psychology and more recently evolutionary biology have offered a number of theories of emotions, stressing their function in the conduct of life. Philosophers have been especially partial to cognitivist theories, emphasizing analogies either with propositional judgments or with perception. But different theories implicitly posit different ontologies of emotion and there has been some dispute about what emotions really are and indeed whether they are any kind of thing at all. Emotions also raise normative questions: about the extent to which they can be said to be rational, or can contribute to rationality. In that regard the question of our knowledge of our own emotions is especially problematic, as it seems they are both the object of our most immediate awareness and the most powerful source of our capacity for self-deception. This results in a particularly ambivalent relation between emotions and morality. I will conclude with a recapitulation of the main positions defended by some three dozen philosophers of emotion in the past half century.

• Emotions and the Topography of the Mind

• Feeling Theories

• Emotions and Intentional Objects

• Psychological and Evolutionary Approaches

• Cognitivist Theories

• Perceptual Theories

• The Ontology of Emotions

• Rationality and Emotions

• Emotions and Self-knowledge

• Morality and Emotions

• Summary and Guide to the Recent Literature

• Conclusion: Adequacy Conditions on Theories of Emotion

• Bibliography

• Other Internet Resources

• Related Entries