Key Takeaways
- Emotions are physiological and psychological responses that help people react to events or situations.
- Each emotion involves several components, including thoughts, physical changes, and behaviors.
- While emotions, feelings, and moods are related, they differ in duration, intensity, and the triggers that evoke them.
Emotions are complex reactions that people experience in response to events or situations. They involve physiological changes, thoughts, and behaviors that help us respond to what is happening around us. For example, a person might feel joy after hearing good news or fear when facing danger.
Verywell / Emily Roberts
What Are Emotions, Exactly?
Emotions are complex psychological states that involve three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response.
In addition to attempting to define what emotions are, researchers have also sought to identify and classify the various types of emotions. The descriptions and insights have changed over time.
- Six basic emotions: In 1972, psychologist Paul Ekman proposed that there are six basic emotions that are universally recognized across human cultures: fear, disgust, anger, surprise, joy, and sadness.
- Wheel of emotions: In the 1980s, Robert Plutchik introduced another emotion classification system known as the wheel of emotions. This model demonstrates how different emotions can be combined or mixed together, much like an artist mixes primary colors to create other colors.
- Additional basic emotions: Ekman later expanded his list to include several other basic emotions, including embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction, and amusement.
Plutchik proposed eight primary emotional dimensions: joy vs. sadness, anger vs. fear, trust vs. disgust, and surprise vs. anticipation. These emotions can then be combined to create others, such as happiness and anticipation, which together form excitement.
How Emotions Affect Your Life and Health
Emotions have a strong influence on our daily lives. We make decisions based on whether we are happy, angry, sad, bored, or frustrated. We also choose activities and hobbies based on the emotions they incite. Understanding emotions can help us navigate life with greater ease and stability.
Research has shown that:
- Chronic fear is associated with anxiety, which is linked with inflammation and lowered immunity.
- Happiness is linked with a longer lifespan.
- Csadness is linked with poorer physical health.
- Anger is linked with illnesses like heart disease.
It’s healthy to experience a range of emotions, but it’s essential to develop productive ways of expressing them so they don’t take a negative toll on your well-being.
“Being aware of our internal emotional state and being more mindful and present with how our mind and body respond to situations enables us to manage stress better,” says Annie Miller, MSW, LCSW-C, LICSW. “We can then have improved emotional regulation, as well as emotional resilience and lower levels of anxiety.”
By recognizing and tuning into our own emotions, we become more self-aware, and more mindful, which allows us to make informed decisions and respond to situations more effectively.
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ANNIE MILLER, MSW, LCSW-C, LICSW
The Three Key Elements of Emotions
To better understand what emotions are, let’s focus on their three key elements, known as the subjective experience, the physiological response, and the behavioral response.
Subjective Experience
While experts believe that there are a number of basic, universal emotions experienced by people worldwide, regardless of background or culture, researchers also believe that experiencing emotions can be highly subjective.
Consider anger. Is all anger the same? Not necessarily. Your own experience might range from mild annoyance to blinding rage. Additionally, you may experience anger differently from someone else.
While we have broad labels for emotions, such as “angry,” “sad,” or “happy,” your own experience of these emotions may be much more multi-dimensional, hence subjective.
We also don’t always experience pure forms of each emotion. Mixed emotions over different events or situations in our lives are common.
When faced with starting a new job, for example, you might feel both excited and nervous. Getting married or having a child might be marked by a wide variety of emotions, ranging from joy to anxiety. These emotions might occur simultaneously or you might feel them one after another.
Physiological Response
If you’ve ever felt your stomach lurch from anxiety or your heart palpitate with fear, you’ve already experienced the strong physiological reactions that can occur with emotions. Many of these physiological responses are regulated by the sympathetic nervous system, a branch of the autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous system controls involuntary body responses, such as blood flow and digestion. The sympathetic nervous system is charged with controlling the body’s fight-or-flight reactions.
When facing a threat, fight-or-flight responses automatically prepare your body to flee from danger or face the threat head-on.
While early studies of the physiology of emotion tended to focus on autonomic responses, more recent research has targeted the brain’s role in emotions. Brain scans have shown that the amygdala, part of the limbic system, plays an important role in emotion and fear in particular.
The amygdala is a tiny, almond-shaped structure that has been linked to motivational states such as hunger and thirst as well as behavior and emotion. Brain imaging studies reveal that when people are shown threatening images, the amygdala becomes activated. Damage to the amygdala has also been shown to impair the fear response.
Behavioral Response
The final component is perhaps one that you are most familiar with—the actual expression of emotion. We spend a significant amount of time interpreting the emotional expressions of the people around us. Our ability to accurately understand these expressions is tied to what psychologists call emotional intelligence and these expressions play a major part in our overall body language.
Sociocultural norms also play a role in how we express and interpret emotions. For example, research has found that Western cultures tend to value and promote high-arousal emotions (fear, excitement, distress) whereas Eastern cultures typically value and prefer low-arousal emotions (calmness, serenity, peace).
Some expressions are considered universal, such as a smile to indicate happiness or a frown to indicate sadness.
Theories Explaining Emotions
- Evolutionary theory: Charles Darwin proposed the evolutionary theory of emotion, which suggests that emotions are adaptive to our environment and improve our chances of survival. According to this theory, emotions like love are adaptive because they promote mating and reproduction, while fear is adaptive because it keeps us safe from predators.
- James-Lange theory: The James-Lange theory of emotion maintains that our physical responses are responsible for emotion. If someone sneaks up on you and shouts, for instance, your heart rate increases, causing you to feel fear.
- Facial-feedback theory: The facial-feedback theory builds upon the James-Lange theory, suggesting that facial movements can influence emotions. If you force a smile, for instance, you will feel happier than if you didn’t smile.
- Cannon-Bard theory: The Cannon-Bard theory refutes the James-Lange theory, asserting that people experience emotional and physiological responses at the same time, with each response acting independently. An example would be feeling fear when you see a deadly snake while your body prepares to run.
- Schachter-Singer theory: The Schachter-Singer theory is a cognitive theory of emotion that suggests our thoughts are actually responsible for emotions. Similar to this theory is the cognitive appraisal theory. It states that someone must first think before experiencing an emotion. For instance, your brain judges a situation as threatening, and as a result, you experience fear.
Different Types of Emotions
In addition to different theories about the development of emotions, there are also various theories as to how many types of emotions humans experience. As mentioned, psychologist Paul Ekman established the following six universal emotions:
- Happiness: Many people strive for happiness as it is a pleasant emotion accompanied by a sense of well-being and satisfaction. Happiness is often expressed by smiling or speaking in an upbeat tone of voice.
- Sadness: All of us experience sadness now and then. Someone might express this emotion by crying, being quiet, and/or withdrawing from others. Types of sadness include grief, hopelessness, and disappointment.
- Fear: Fear can increase heart rate, cause racing thoughts, or trigger the fight-or-flight response. It can be a reaction to actual or perceived threats. Some people enjoy the adrenaline rush that accompanies fear in the form of watching scary movies, riding roller coasters, or skydiving.
- Disgust: Disgust can be triggered by a physical experience, such as seeing or smelling rotting food, blood, or poor hygiene. Moral disgust may occur when someone sees another person doing something they find immoral or distasteful.
- Anger: Anger can be expressed with facial expressions like frowning, yelling, or violent behavior. Anger can motivate you to make changes in your life, but it’s also important to find a healthy outlet to express anger so it doesn’t cause harm to yourself or others.
- Surprise: Surprise can be pleasant or unpleasant. You might open your mouth or gasp when you’re surprised. Like fear, surprise can trigger a fight-or-flight response.
Primary vs. Secondary Emotions
Emotions can also be categorized based on whether they are primary or secondary.
- Primary emotions are the emotions that humans experience universally. There are different theories as to what these specific emotions are, but they often include happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise.
- Secondary emotions stem from—and are variations of—primary emotions. Sometimes, we have secondary emotions in response to our primary emotions (i.e., “I’m frustrated that I’m so sad”). Secondary emotions may include frustration, pride, envy, and jealousy.
What are negative emotions?
All emotions can be positive or negative, but the emotions people usually refer to as “negative” are those that can be unpleasant to experience and cause disruption to daily life. Negative emotions include envy, anger, sadness, and fear.
Understanding Emotions, Feelings, and Moods
In everyday language, people often use the terms emotions, feelings, and moods interchangeably, but they actually mean different things.
Emotions
Emotions are reactions to stimuli, but feelings are what we experience as a result of emotions. An emotion is normally quite short-lived, but intense. Emotions are also likely to have a definite and identifiable cause.
Feelings
Feelings are influenced by our perception of the situation, which is why the same emotion can trigger different feelings among people experiencing it. Take the example of disagreeing with your friend. You might both walk away from the conversation having experienced the emotion of anger.
Your anger might feel like frustration because you feel that your friend never listens to you when you speak. Your friend’s anger, on the other hand, might feel like jealousy because they feel you know much more about the topic than they do.
Both of you have the same emotion, but your feelings are different based on your separate interpretations.
Moods
A mood can be described as a temporary emotional state. Sometimes moods are caused by clear reasons—you might feel everything is going your way this week, so you’re in a happy mood. But in many cases, it can be difficult to identify the specific cause of a mood. For example, you might find yourself feeling gloomy for several days without any clear, identifiable reason.
What Emotion Are You? Take the Quiz
Our fast and free emotion quiz can help you better understand your emotional responses to certain situations, and why you may think or behave the way you do.
This emotion quiz was medically reviewed by Rachel Goldman, PhD, FTOS.
Most of us experience a wide variety of emotions. The feelings that stem from these emotions can feel overwhelming at times, but a helpful first step can simply be to label the emotion. Understand that it’s okay to experience any type of emotion—even emotions that can be difficult to cope with like sadness or anger.
If you are having trouble coping with your emotions or feelings, consider talking to a mental healthcare professional who can help you address your concerns.
