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Having emotions is a universal experience, and every person in the world has felt angry, shy, scared, or embarrassed at some point in their lives. According to psychology Professor James Gross, there are four components of feeling an emotion:
- the situation you are in (whatever is happening to you at that moment);
- the details you pay attention to;
- your appraisal of what the situation means for you personally; and
- your response, including the physical changes (like blushing or shaking), and your behaviors (like shouting or crying).
This four-step situation-attention-appraisal-response sequence is called the Modal Model of Emotion.
You would feel an emotion when something about the situation you are in draws your attention. That is, you notice some aspect of the situation that is relevant to you and your goals or needs. If there's nothing happening that matters to you, you will not have any strong feelings.
Once the relevant part of the situation has drawn your attention, you would interpret what this means for you. This meaning-making is a thought process called appraisal.
Once you have appraised the situation's meaning, then you will have an emotional response to the situation. The type of response (e.g., feeling happy versus angry) would depend on how you appraised the situation. For example, if you thought it was unfair, you might feel angry. If you thought your goals were being blocked, you might feel frustrated. If you thought there was a potential threat, you might feel anxious.
Let's go through an example of how this process of feeling an emotion would happen.
The situation. For an emotion to happen, there must be something happening around you (the situation you are in). You might be on a crowded bus, jostling along a busy road in the rain on your way to work.
Your attention. You will only pay attention to the parts of the situation that are relevant to you. There would likely be a lot of things happening on the bus ride. There might be people on their phones, windscreen wipers going, the rustle of people turning pages of a book, shopping bags, backpacks, people having conversations, or trees and birds and cars out the window. You would not notice every small detail. You will only notice the things that matter to you.
Maybe someone says your name. Maybe a person stares at you. Maybe you overhear part of a conversation about a TV show you like. You would pay attention to these things because they have personal meaning to you.
Your appraisal. Once a relevant-to-you thing attracts your attention, you interpret what that thing means for you. This thought process could be automatic (below your conscious awareness) or it could be intentional (conscious thoughts you could say aloud about what this means for you).
The way you think about the situation will determine the feelings you have. That is, the situational appraisals generate the type of emotion you experience.
Your response. Based on the thought processes you have (the appraisals), you will then have a response. This emotional response involves several components.
First, there are action tendencies. These are the desire to perform certain actions. For example, the action tendency for disgust is to reject. If you were disgusted, you may feel compelled to spit out spoiled food or drink, or to lean far away from a disgusting thing.
Second, there are the emotion expressions you make with your face, voice, or body (like frowning when you are sad, or shouting if you are angry). To go back to the disgust example, you might wrinkle up your nose so you don't have to breathe in a disgusting smell.
Third, there are the physical changes in your body that happen when you feel an emotion. For example, your heart rate would increase when you feel scared.
Professor Klaus Scherer proposed that there are five different components to an emotion. These are the components of his component-process model of emotion.
- feelings (subjective feelings, like "I feel scared")
- appraisals (thought patterns, like "I am under threat")
- expressions (facial and bodily expressions of emotions, like being wide-eyed with fright)
- action tendencies (the tendency to perform certain actions, like freezing or hiding); and
- physical changes (physical symptoms of emotion, such as butterflies in the stomach).
Emotions are thus more than just a feeling, they are a complex blend of actions, expressions, and internal changes to the body that occur in response to the meaning we make of our environment.
