known to demonstrate impaired emotional abilities. Selective activation of different brain areas has been experimentally shown to arouse different emotions in infants and adults. One of the earliest physiological theories of emotion was given by James ( ) and N ATURE OF E MOTIONS ‘Swati is very happy. Her examination result has been declared today and she has topped the class.
She is feeling euphoric. However, her friend Pranoy is feeling sad, as he has not done well. Among her friends some are feeling jealous of Swati’s achievement. Jeevan who has not performed up to his expectation is angry with himself; he feels unhappy that his parents would be very disappointed’.
Joy, sorrow, hope, love, excitement, anger, hate, and many such feelings are experienced in the course of the day by all of us. The term emotion is often considered synonymous with the terms ‘feeling’ and ‘mood’. Feeling denotes the pleasure or pain dimension of emotion, which usually involves bodily functions. Mood is an affective state of long duration but of lesser intensity than emotion.
Both these terms are narrower than the concept of emotion. Emotions are a complex pattern of arousal, subjective feeling, and cognitive interpretation. Emotions, as we experience them, move us internally, and this process involves physiological as well as psychological reactions. Emotion is a subjective feeling and the experience of emotions varies from person to person.
In psychology, attempts have been made to identify basic emotions. It has been noted that at least six emotions are experienced and recognised everywhere. These are: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Izard has proposed a set of ten basic emotions, i.e.
joy, surprise, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame, guilt, interest, and excitement with combinations of them resulting in other emotional blends. According to Plutchik, there are eight basic or primary emotions. All other emotions result from various mixtures of these basic emotions. He arranged these emotions in four pairs of opposites, i.e.
joy-sadness, acceptance- disgust, fear-anger, and surprise-anticipation. Emotions vary in their intensity (high, low) and quality (happiness, sadness, fear). Subjective factors and situational contexts supported by Lange,