Emotions
Senior 6 · Psychology
Emotions
Lesson 1 of 5
25 min
A penalty shoot-out decides a cup final in Kigali. As the last kicker walks forward, thousands of hearts beat faster. When the ball hits the net, half the stadium leaps, shouts and hugs strangers; the other half sits in silence, some with heads in their hands. One event, two very different reactions, and in each of them the body, the face, the thoughts and the actions all change together within a second or two.
That coordinated burst is what psychologists call an emotion. This lesson asks what an emotion is made of, what it is for, and how psychologists sort emotions into types.
Definition
Emotion: a short-lived, coordinated reaction to an event that matters to a person. It combines an appraisal of the event, bodily (physiological) arousal, a subjective feeling, an expression in face, voice and posture, and a readiness to act. Example: fear when a dog suddenly charges at you.
Feeling: the conscious, subjective part of an emotion, what it is like from the inside ("I feel scared").
Mood: a weaker, longer-lasting state (hours or days) that is often not about any one thing, such as feeling irritable all afternoon.
Affect: the general term for emotions, feelings and moods together.
Valence and arousal: how pleasant or unpleasant a state is, and how activated or calm the body is.
Most psychologists today describe an emotion as several processes that happen together. Take Keza, an S6 student who is walking home at dusk when a large dog runs at her, barking.
| Component | What happens | Keza's fear |
|---|---|---|
| Cognitive appraisal | The event is judged as important for the person's goals or safety | "This dog could bite me." |
| Physiological arousal | The autonomic nervous system and hormones prepare the body | Heart pounds, breathing quickens, palms sweat |
| Subjective feeling | The conscious experience | A rush of terror |
| Expression | Face, voice and posture show the state to others | Eyes wide, a sharp cry |
| Action tendency | A readiness to act in a particular way | The urge to run or to climb onto a wall |
The components usually go together, but not always. A person can blush (arousal and expression) while insisting she feels nothing, and an actor can display anger without feeling it. This is why emotion researchers measure several components (self-report, heart rate, facial movement, behaviour) instead of trusting only one.
(a) Basic (primary) emotions. Paul Ekman proposed a small set of basic emotions, each with its own facial expression, that are found in every culture: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust, with contempt added later. His best-known evidence came from Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen (1971), who told short stories to Fore villagers in Papua New Guinea, people with very little contact with Western media, and asked them to pick the matching face from photographs. Agreement was well above chance.
How well has this held up? Recognition above chance has been found in many countries; a meta-analysis by Hillary Elfenbein and Nalini Ambady (2002) confirmed it, and also found an in-group advantage: people read faces from their own culture more accurately. But the method mattered. When participants were given a fixed list of emotion words to choose from, agreement was high; when Maria Gendron and colleagues (2014) asked Himba people in Namibia to sort faces freely, the six categories did not appear clearly. A major review by Lisa Feldman Barrett and colleagues (2019) concluded that people do scowl when angry or smile when happy more often than chance, but far less reliably than the classic theory claims, and that context shapes what a face means. Today's balanced view: there is some universality in expression and recognition, alongside large cultural and individual variation.
(b) Self-conscious (secondary) emotions. Pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment and jealousy need a sense of self and an understanding of other people's standards. They appear later in development, from roughly the second half of the second year of life, after children begin to recognise themselves in a mirror (Michael Lewis). June Tangney's research distinguishes guilt ("I did a bad thing", which tends to motivate repair) from shame ("I am a bad person", which tends to lead to hiding or defensiveness).
(c) Plutchik's wheel. Robert Plutchik (1980) arranged eight primary emotions in four opposite pairs: joy and sadness, trust and disgust, fear and anger, surprise and anticipation. Each varies in intensity (annoyance, anger, rage), and neighbouring emotions blend into mixtures, for example joy and trust give love, and anger and disgust give contempt.
(d) Dimensional models. Instead of separate boxes, James Russell (1980) placed all feelings on two continuous dimensions, valence and arousal (Figure 1). This explains why fear and excitement can feel physically similar (both are high-arousal) while being opposite in pleasantness.
Figure 1. The circumplex of affect (after Russell, 1980). Every feeling is a point on two dimensions: left to right is how pleasant it is (valence), bottom to top is how activated the body is (arousal). Fear and excitement are both high-arousal; they differ in valence.
(e) Positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions such as fear narrow attention onto a threat. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory (2001) proposes that positive emotions such as joy and interest broaden attention and help people build lasting resources such as friendships and skills. A later claim that flourishing requires a positivity ratio of exactly 2.9 to 1 was shown to rest on faulty mathematics, and that part of the work was formally withdrawn in 2013. The broader theory remains under study.
Peter Salovey and John Mayer (1990) defined emotional intelligence as the ability to perceive emotions, use them to help thinking, understand them and manage them, in oneself and in others. Daniel Goleman's best-selling book (1995) made the idea famous. Evaluate it carefully: ability measures of emotional intelligence do predict some outcomes, such as the quality of relationships, but popular claims that it "matters more than IQ" go far beyond the evidence, and many questionnaire measures overlap heavily with ordinary personality traits.
Ekman and Friesen used the term display rules for a culture's unwritten norms about who may show which emotion, to whom and when. A student may laugh loudly with friends but keep a straight face in front of the head teacher. Display rules govern expression; they do not stop the emotion itself from occurring.
TED: "You aren't at the mercy of your emotions: your brain creates them", Lisa Feldman Barrett (about 18 minutes). She argues that emotions are constructed by the brain from bodily signals, past experience and context, the main challenge to the basic-emotions view. Ask yourself which parts of Ekman's evidence her view can and cannot explain.
Warning
A face is not a lie detector. Programmes and apps that claim to read hidden emotions or lies from tiny facial movements are not supported by the evidence. In a review of 206 studies, Charles Bond and Bella DePaulo (2006) found that people detect lies with about 54% accuracy, little better than tossing a coin. Never judge a classmate's honesty or feelings from the face alone.
Tip
"Think, body, face, feel, act." The five components of an emotion are appraisal (think), arousal (body), expression (face), subjective experience (feel) and action tendency (act). In an exam scenario, name all five.
Important
Discuss. Think of the display rules you learned at home, at school and in church or mosque. When is it acceptable to cry, to laugh loudly or to show anger, and who may do so? Does following a display rule change what a person actually feels?
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the diagram (Figure 1), the table and the exercises.
