Emotion

An emotion is a brief, intense psychophysiological reaction that quickly and coordinates attention, behavior, memory and several biological systems to respond to something important the person perceives, whether an object, a person, a place, an event or a memory.

The term is relatively recent. It comes from Latin and literally means a movement of something from inside towards the outside. The French humanist Étienne Dolet used it in the sixteenth century in his translation of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, and it entered English around 1579. For centuries people spoke instead of passions, sentiments or affections. The modern concept of emotion as a theoretical category of its own took shape in the nineteenth century, largely through the work of Thomas Brown, who grouped vivid feelings within the science of the mind.

For the authors who have studied it, emotion has several components: a subjective experience, physiological changes such as facial expression, voice or autonomic nervous system activity, action tendencies, and an appraisal of the situation. Robert Plutchik argued that these reactions evolved to help organisms survive and adapt to their environment. Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), proposed that emotional expressions have an evolutionary origin and could be compared across species. In psychobiology, William James and Carl Lange proposed in 1884 that bodily changes come before the felt emotion, while Walter Cannon and Philip Bard held that both occur at once.

A simple example: when a car suddenly swerves towards you, the body tenses, the heart speeds up, attention narrows on the threat and fear appears. If the feeling lasts and can be put into words, it becomes what is called a sentiment.

The current debate is lively. Some models propose basic, universal emotions, such as the six described by Paul Ekman (surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear and happiness), while others describe them as continuous dimensions such as valence (pleasant or unpleasant) and arousal. Recent research on emotion dynamics in everyday life, along with cross-cultural studies, keeps questioning how far emotion categories are universal.