Everybody has a rich inner landscape contoured by emotions; they not only give meaning and color to everyday experience, but they can also influence decision-making. They may be humanity’s earliest guide to meeting basic needs.
Yet science is not quite clear what emotions are. Whether they are inborn, genetically determined reactions, each with its own mechanism; patterns of response to stimuli, each distinctively etched into neural circuitry; or in-the-moment interpretations of experience is a subject of keen debate.
The Roots of Emotions
Many experts today believe emotions are brief, felt mental states that arise from the mind’s conscious interpretation of bodily sensations that occur automatically and unconsciously in response to stimuli in an ever-changing environment; they regulate arousal, direct attention, and motivate behavior. Typically reflected in posture and facial expressions, they are thought to function as a silent communication system to get one's needs met.
Emotions are a fast-track, inescapable source of information about how to stay safe, survive, and thrive in an ever-changing environment. Emotion is closely linked to motor activity—both are mediated by the autonomic nervous system—and is thought to motivate a behavioral response. The emotion of fear, for example, stimulates a withdrawal response without any thought required.
Emotions are thought to originate in the amygdala, as it codes the nature of incoming stimuli. Through two-way circuitry, the prefrontal cortex, the seat of decision-making, receives and interprets emotional signals from the amygdala, orchestrating a response and influencing the amygdala's reactivity.
While all emotions give information, emotions are generally classified as positive or negative. Positive emotions include happiness, love, and pride; they foster expansion and psychological growth. Negative emotions include fear, anger, sadness, and disgust; they create discomfort and warn us. Do I need to attend to something important?
In an evidence-based context, feelings and emotions are distinct concepts; however, we conflate them in everyday conversation. Emotions are the automatic, unconscious physical reactions to stimuli, while feelings are the conscious, subjective, and mental interpretations we make of those physical changes. Emotions are thought to be universal, experienced by all people in the same way. Feelings, however, are thought to differ to some degree among cultures, with some cultural learning involved.
What Is Emotion Regulation?
Controlling one’s emotional state requires several cognitive skills—to change either one’s thoughts or one’s behaviors—to prevent the emotion from launching or to prevent it from being expressed. Most often, emotion regulation helps us down-regulate, or dampen, the intensity of negative emotions, such as anger, disappointment, or anxiety. A healthy repertoire of emotion regulation skills keeps people from behaving in counterproductive ways when they are emotionally activated. They are especially essential for maintaining social relationships.
Self-awareness is noticing what you feel and naming it. Emotional acceptance means accepting the discomfort of negative emotions without judging; you acknowledge them. Cognitive reappraisal is reframing a negative event as a more positive one, a key component of emotion regulation. Finally, distancing means gaining perspective by looking at your situation “as a fly on the wall,” which can also be a useful approach.
Emotions matter, and they affect human behavior; people benefit from being aware of, controlling, and expressing their emotions well. Pioneering psychologists Peter Salovey of Yale and John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire defined this as emotional intelligence. People can refine their ability to reason with their emotions; people can deploy it to further their personal and social goals, handle relationships well, and promote coping and creativity.
The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence identifies five component skills of emotional intelligence: recognizing, understanding, labeling, expressing, and regulating emotions. Recognizing and understanding one’s emotions, in turn, hinge on self-awareness. Managing emotions, especially difficult ones, is a critical skill and a major underpinning of success in life. Another key facet of emotional intelligence is empathy, the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of others; the success of long-term relationships hinges on it.
If sustained, negative emotions generally are associated with detrimental physiological effects. The quick burst of physiological arousal we usually interpret as anger, for example, motivates justice-seeking. If sustained or chronic, increased heart rate, blood pressure, blood flow to muscles in preparation for action, body temperature, and skin perspiration can damage the body. This can promote inflammation and raise cardiovascular risk.
How to Read Emotions
The basic human emotions have signature facial expressions that people are wired to recognize, even from a distance—the smile of happiness, the widened eyes and open mouth of surprise, the downturned mouth of sadness, the knitted eyebrows and reddened face of anger, the wrinkled nose of disgust. Detecting others' emotions can guide us. How can we react effectively? Knowing this can be a survival skill.
People can mask their emotions, and accurately perceiving those emotions hinges not just on detecting facial expressions, but also on detecting short-lived flickers of emotion known as microexpressions. Recognizing the posture patterns and nonverbal gestures that accompany emotional expression can improve accuracy. But perhaps most revealing, recent studies show, are vocal signs of inner states.
The voice is a powerful tool for expressing emotions, and researchers have identified distinct audio signatures of 24 emotions, from anger (growls and forceful staccato bursts) and awe to sympathy and triumph. While past research focused on the looks of emotions, sounds are discernible; the most accurate way to identify emotions is to listen with your eyes closed.
