Emotion
| Collection | GlossariumBITri |
|---|---|
| Author | Maria del Carmen Requena Hernández |
| Editor | Maria del Carmen Requena Hernández |
| Year | 2010 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Number | 1 |
| ID | 35 |
| Object type | Concept |
| Domain | Evolución Psicología |
| es | emoción |
| fr | emotion |
| de | Emotion |
“Do we cry because we are sad, or rather are we sad because we cry?” (W. James)
Before answering please consider the following simple experiment. In any moment you do feel sad, take a pencil and bite it for a couple of minutes. You eventually find yourself then smiling and finishing your sad state. Now answer the previous question.
Emotion is the affective tone with wich organisms respond to their circumstances. Three research lines are to be highlighted in the study of emotion, with respective antecedents in Charles Darwin, William James and Sigmund Freud.
Emotions arise from filogenetically selected behaviours. It may happen that obsolete conducts remain, even if they are no longer fit to present demands. For example, many persons are still afraid of snakes, while it is so unprobable to find any wild snake in daily life. It would be more fitted for us to be afraid of plugs, hobs or lifts, since they really endanger our lives.
Even if it is common to undistinctively talk about emotion and feeling, there are differences between them, particularly as to their duration. Emotion takes about miliseconds, while feelings are more durable and also later result of filogeny in our brain. Emotions are located in the limbical system while feelings in the orbito ventral area.
References
- BLANCHARD-FIELDS, F. (2005). Introduction to the Special Section on Emotion-Cognition Interactions and the Aging Mind. Psychology and Aging, vol. 20, núm. 4, pp. 539-541.
- CHARLES, S.T. & CARSTENSEN, L.L. (2010). Social and emotional aging. In S. Fiske and S. Taylor (Eds). Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 61, 383-409. [Online] <http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lifespan/publications/annurev.psych.2009.pdf> [Retrieved: 12/2009]
- DARWIN, Ch. (1984). La expresión de las emociones en los animales y en el hombre. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.
- EKMAN, P.; FRIESEN, W.V. (1975). Unmasking the Face. A Guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc. Englewood Cliffs.
- EKMAN, P.; FRIESEN, W.V.; HAGER, J.C. (2002). The new Facial Action Coding System (FACS).
- JAMES W. 1884. What is an emotion? Mind, 9, 188-205.
- ZACKS, R.T.; HASHER, L.; LI, K.Z.H. (2000). Human memory. In: T. A. Salthouse; F.I.M. Craik (eds.). Handbook of aging and cognition (2nd ed., pp. 293–357). Mahwah: Erlbaum.