ntroduction

Emotion is one of the most controversial topics in psychology, a source of

intense discussion and disagreement from the earliest philosophers and Common representation
other thinkers to the present day. Most psychologists can probably agree of angry emotion experience:
"steamed up" with hot glowing
on a description of emotion, e.g., what phenomena to include in a eyes, and uncontrolled
appearance. Is it the same across
discussion of emotion. The enumeration of these parts of emotion are people?
called the "components of emotion" here. These components are
distinguished on the basis of physiological or psychological factors and
include emotion faces, emotion elicitors, and emotion neural processes.

Components of Emotion

The component that seems to be the core of common sense approaches to

Interpersonal aggression in the
emotion, the one that most people have in mind when talking about form of instrumental behaviors
human emotions, is the feeling component, i.e., the passion or sensation produced by skeletal muscles is
often a concomitant of anger.
of emotion. For example, people generally agree that the state of mind
during anger is different from that when one is happy. This component is
also one of the most contentious in scientific discussions of emotion,
raising many questions such as:

 to what extent are such feelings, especially the claimed

differences in quality, based on real physical differences?
 is the feeling quality of a particular emotion shared among
people?
 what is the nature of the differences in quality among emotions?
 what underlies or produces these feelings?
 what importance or function do such feelings have?
A bright idea can bring a pleasant
emotion, or pleasant emotions
Another obvious descriptive component of emotion is the set of behaviors can foster bright ideas.
that may be performed and observed in conjunction with an emotion.
These behaviors are produced by the striated muscular system and are of
two general types: gross behaviors of the body effected by the skeletal muscles and the so-called
emotion expressions. These categories shade into each other because any behavior can be
interpreted as expressing emotion. The gross body behaviors may have no apparent adaptive
value, e.g., wringing and rubbing the hands or tapping a foot, or they may be directed towards a
goal, e.g., striking something or running away. In the field of animal behavior, discovering the
adaptive function and organization of behaviors in situations analogous to human emotion, and
speculating on the evolutionary patterns of these behaviors is an established endeavor. This
emphasis has not typically been given to the study of human emotions by psychologists. The
facial and bodily behaviors called "emotion expressions" are indicators of emotion, as opposed to
effecting some action or achieving some goal. These expressions can differentiate one emotion
from another. The most widely discussed and investigated emotion expressions are the emotion
faces (see the examples of emotional expressions).
 A less obvious component of emotion is the set of internal
bodily changes caused by the smooth muscles and glands.
Chemicals secreted by the body's various glands are activated
during emotion and spread to other parts of the body, usually
by the blood, to act in diverse ways on the nervous system and
Adrenalin is a secretion that affects many organs and
other organs. Smooth muscles of the digestive system,
may contribute to the felt quality of emotion. circulatory system, and other bodily components can shift
from their typical level or type of operation during emotion
under the effects of chemical and neural action. This component includes some behaviors that
can be observed, such as the constriction or dilation of the iris of the eye, possibly piloerection,
and sweating, blanching, and flushing of the skin, and other responses that are relatively hidden,
such as heart rate, stomach activity, and saliva production.

Another less observable component in emotion consists of the

ideation, imagery, and thoughts that occur during emotion. These
aspects of emotion are also cognitive activities, and can both give
rise to an emotional event and be affected by it, e.g., thinking about
a lost pet may evoke feelings of sadness, which may in turn evoke
memories of a romance now finished. Since thoughts and other
cognitions, like feelings, cannot be directly observed and are hard to
measure, there is less understanding of how they fit into the emotion
picture than other components.

The circumstances that give rise to emotions comprise another

Computers often elicit frustration and anger
component, called the "elicitors" of emotion. These elicitors might
be internal or external to the organism, e.g., a frightening pain in
one's chest or a frightening dog at one's heels. Some events seem to activate similar emotion in
people of all cultures, for example, the death of one's own child typically elicits sadness. Other
things, such as what foods are relished or rejected with disgust, vary widely according to
acculturation.

Finally, the neural processes that underlie much of the preceding

activities can be considered a component of the emotion process,
especially how the neurons and their emotional concomitants are
organized centrally in the brain. Many contemporary research
studies, and thus a lot of the research money, is focussed on
anatomical and functional aspects of brain activity in regard to
emotion.

Theories of Emotion

Beyond the descriptive approach to emotion, there are theories of emotion, which attempt to
specify the interrelationships among components as described above and the causes, sources, and
functions of emotional responses. Disagreement characterizes the intellectual climate
surrounding emotion theories, but there are several works in print that summarize these
approaches for the interested reader. The Theories of Emotion page of this section summarizes
some of the most important theoretical statements on emotion that emphasize the role of the face.

Expression of Emotion

Emotion expression is another area of controversy, but at the descriptive level, some behaviors
tend to occur with other components of emotion, and seem to reveal the quality of the emotion to
an observer. The Emotion Expressions page of this section discusses the relations between
emotion and facial expression.

Theories of Emotion and Emotional Expression

When it comes to theories of emotion, there is no shortage of ideas, and they have come from
diverse sources. Philosophers have offered many proposals concerning emotion, throughout the
ages, from the ancient Greeks to Sartre and modern scholars. Creative artists have proposed
explanations for emotion, its meaning and impact, and ways to portray it in sculpture and
painting. Natural scientists, such as physiologists and animal behaviorists, etc., have speculated
on the origins, evolution, and functions of emotion. Psychologists, anthropologists, and
sociologists have proliferated theories about emotion and its significance to the individual and
society. Other disciplines also have their views on emotion, including political science,
economics, performing arts, etc. In this dicussion, we focus on theories that have to do with
emotion and facial expression. To put these theories in perspective, it helps to understand
emotional expression.

Emotional Expression as Essential to Emotion Experience

In some theories, emotional expression is regarded as an integral aspect of the emotion process.
Some theorists have proposed that emotional expression underlies the experience of emotion,
which includes the felt quality of emotion. William James, a Harvard professor in the late 19th
century, is a well known proponent of the view that perceiving the bodily changes during
emotion constitutes the emotional experience, and without this perception, emotion would be
pale and colorless. James argued strongly that there is no thing in the mind called emotion that
precipitates bodily activity, rather the reverse is true. James collaborated with the German,
Lange, a student of Wundt, who independently proposed a similar theory, to develop this idea.
James thought that the body acted like a sounding board, struck by neural impulses to create the
waves of change that could then be sensed by the brain as a quality of emotional feeling. Thus,
the varieties and shades of emotion are as infinite as the bodily patterns that neural action can
create, and the categories of emotion are arbitrary and academic. James himself proposed the
crucial test of this hypothesis in the experiments of nature where the neural system is damaged so
that bodily changes cannot be sensed. Although several experiments on this theme have been
reported in the literature, their interpretation is problematic, though generally viewed as failing to
support James's hypothesis. Another aspect of James's theory of emotion is that the bodily
changes are immediately effected by the nervous system, in a process only slightly more
complex than a reflex or instinctual reaction. More recent research indicates that some emotional
changes may take rather longer to occur. James thought that every instinctual response sets off an
emotion, but there are many other sources of emotional response, which may be as gross as rage
or as subtle as an aesthetic appreciation of beauty. He believed there are no brain centers specific
to emotion nor to any specific emotion, an idea that recent research casts serious doubt upon. He
argued that people vary in their ability to preserve and recall experiences of emotion, and the
degree to which they experience emotion in general. Repeated emotion results in blunting more
readily than in other types of feelings. He thought that facial expressions, and other bodily
changes, result from either weakened repetitions of formerly useful actions or continue to be
physiologically useful reactions.

Silvan Tomkins, a mid-20th century psychologist, took part of the James-Lange theory a step
further by proposing that the sensations provided by emotional expressions, vascular changes,
and other changes in the face are the source of the qualitatively different feelings of emotion,
e.g., happy from sad, fear from anger. Perception of other bodily changes provides less specific
feelings of emotion. He argued, contrary to James, that there are specific categories of emotion
that have evolved for certain functional, adaptive reasons, which are likewise reflected in neural
organization. These categories of emotion correspond to specific categories of facial expressions
and are organized around their facial expressions. For example, emotions related to disgust
derive from the prototype of rejecting food that is noxious or dangerous to eat, with a core
expression of opening the mouth and lips, and pushing out with the tongue. This prototype
disgust reaction has generalized to other rejection scenarios, such as the emotion of contempt,
where the object is another person, and the emotion of shame, where the object is the self. He
enumerated the emotion categories, specified their expressions, and described each emotion
extensively in a multi-volume work. The main thesis of this work is that the emotion system is
the primary motivational system for a wide range of human behaviors. Another distinctive aspect
of his theory is accounting for the elicitors of emotion in terms of a general level and rate of
increase or decrease of neural stimulation. His theory of emotion (affect in his terms) has many
other aspects and weaves into the account many interesting facets of psychology. He did not
hesitate to take on difficult philosophical issues, such as free will and consciousness, and to
connect emotion with significant areas of psychology, such as cognition and abnormal
psychology. Silvan Tomkins's new look at facial expression and emotion, together with his
persuasive charisma, was largely responsible for encouraging the work of colleagues in the late
20th century that resulted in a heightened place in psychology for these topics. He also had a
reputation of being an acute judge of others and an insightful interpreter of faces.

Facial Expression as an Adaptive Communications Mechanism

Some theorists have focussed on the power of emotional expression to convey messages about
the expressor as the center of their theories about emotion. Charles Darwin cast the topic of
emotional expression, and especially facial expressions, into a modern scientific treatment in the
mid-nineteenth century, and provided a basis for considering facial expressions as behaviors that
evolved as a mechanism of communication. Although Darwin himself put little emphasis on the
communicative potential of facial expression of emotion as an object of adaptive selection, the
thrust of his general work suggests this connection and encouraged later scientists to elaborate
upon this mechanism. One branch of this tradition is the approach to studying animal behaviors
known as ethology. Early ethologists, such as Konrad Lorenz, studied stimulus-response patterns
in animals, where fixed action patterns are elicited by distinct sign-stimuli having evolutionary
significance, or releasers. Later, ethologists studied human behavior in light of these concepts
and findings, and began to elaborate the communicative significance of both human and animal
facial expressions. Eibl-Eibesfeld, for example, studied facial expressions, such as smiling, and
other specific facial behaviors, such as the eyebrow flash, in the context of their adaptive value in
a communicative framework.

Some psychologists have also emphasized the communicative functions of facial expressions in
relation to emotion.

These two general ways, in which facial expressions play a role in theories of emotion, are
discussed further in the online document The Inner and Outer Meanings of Facial Expression.

Emotion and Facial Expression

Neither emotion nor its expression are concepts universally embraced by psychologists. The term
"expression" implies the existence of something that is expressed. Some psychologists deny that
there is really any specific organic state that corresponds to our naive ideas about human
emotions; thus, its expression is a non sequitur. Other psychologists think that the behaviors
referenced by the term "expression" are part of an organized emotional response, and thus, the
term "expression" captures these behaviors' role less adequately than a reference to it as an
aspect of the emotion reaction. Still other psychologists think that facial expressions have
primarily a communicative function and convey something about intentions or internal state, and
they find the connotation of the term "expression" useful. Some of these theoretical views are
discussed briefly on the Theories of Emotion page. Regardless of approach, certain facial
expressions are associated with particular human emotions. Research shows that people
categorize emotion faces in a similar way across cultures, that similar facial expressions tend to
occur in response to particular emotion eliciting events, and that people produce simulations of
emotion faces that are characteristic of each specific emotion. Despite some unsettled theoretical
implications of these findings, a consensus view is that in studies of human emotions, it is often
useful to know what facial expressions correspond to each specific emotion, and the answer is
summarized briefly below.

To match a facial expression with an emotion implies knowledge of the categories of human
emotions into which expressions can be assigned. For millennia, scholars have speculated about
categories of emotion, and recent scientific research has shown that facial expressions can be
assigned reliably to about seven categories, though many other categories of human emotions are
possible and used by philosophers, scientists, actors, and others concerned with emotion. The
recent development of scientific tools for facial analysis, such as the Facial Action Coding
System, has facilitated resolving category issues. The most robust categories are discussed in the
following paragraphs. This page shows some thumbnails of emotion faces, and there are links to
other emotion faces. Click on the thumbnail image for each emotion category to access other
facial expression illustrations and facial analysis commentary on the expressive elements of each
emotion face.

Happy
Happy expressions are universally and easily recognized, and are interpreted as
conveying messages related to enjoyment, pleasure, a positive disposition, and
friendliness. Examples of happy expressions are the easiest of all emotions to find in
photographs, and are readily produced by people on demand in the absence of any
emotion. In fact, happy expressions may be practiced behaviors because they are
used so often to hide other emotions and deceive or manipulate other people. Consider this point
when viewing invariably smiling political figures and other celebrities on television. Detecting
genuine happy expressions may be as valuable as producing good simulations. Some of the
differences in genuine versus false smiles are shown in the action of zygomatic major in
Expression section, and more illustrations are available by clicking the happy thumbnail on the
right.

Sad

Sad expressions are often conceived as opposite to happy ones, but this view is too
simple, although the action of the mouth corners is opposite. Sad expressions convey
messages related to loss, bereavement, discomfort, pain, helplessness, etc. Until
recently, American culture contained a strong censure against public displays of
sadness by men, which may account for the relative ease of finding pictures of sad
expressions on female faces. A common sense view, shared by many psychologists,
is that sad emotion faces are lower intensity forms of crying faces, which can be
observed early in newborns, but differences noted between these two expressions challenge this
view, though both are related to distress. Although weeping and tears are a common
concommitant of sad expressions, tears are not indicative of any particular emotion, as in tears of
joy.

Anger

Anger expressions are seen increasingly often in modern society, as daily stresses
and frustrations underlying anger seem to increase, but the expectation of reprisals
decrease with the higher sense of personal security. Anger is a primary concomitant
of interpersonal aggression, and its expression conveys messages about hostility,
opposition, and potential attack. Anger is a common response to anger expressions,
thus creating a positive feedback loop and increasing the likelihood of dangerous
conflict. Until recent times, a cultural prohibition on expression of anger by women,
particularly uncontrolled rage expressions, created a distribution of anger expressions that
differed between the sexes. The uncontrolled expression of rage exerts a toxic effect on the angry
person, and chronic anger seems associated with certain patterns of behavior that correspond to
unhealthy outcomes, such as Type A behavior. Although frequently associated with violence and
destruction, anger is probably the most socially constructive emotion as it often underlies the
efforts of individuals to shape societies into better, more just environments, and to resist the
imposition of injustice and tyranny.

Fear
Fear expressions are not often seen in societies where good personal security is
typical, because the imminent possibility of personal destruction, from interpersonal
violence or impersonal dangers, is the primary elicitor of fear. Fear expressions
convey information about imminent danger, a nearby threat, a disposition to flee, or
likelihood of bodily harm. The specific objects that can elicit fear for any individual
are varied. The experience of fear has an extremely negative felt quality, and is reduced, along
with the bodily concommitants, when the threat has been avoided or has passed. Organization of
behavior and cogitive functions are adversely affected during fear, as escape becomes the
peremptory goal. Anxiety is related to fear, and may involve some of the same bodily responses,
but is a longer term mood and the elicitors are not as immediate. Both are associated with
unhealthy physical effects if prolonged.

Disgust

Disgust expressions are often part of the body's responses to objects that are revolting
and nauseating, such as rotting flesh, fecal matter and insects in food, or other
offensive materials that are rejected as suitable to eat. Obnoxious smells are effective
in eliciting disgust reactions. Disgust expressions are often displayed as a
commentary on many other events and people that generate adverse reactions, but
have nothing to do with the primal origin of disgust as a rejection of possible
foodstuffs.

Surprise

Surprise expressions are fleeting, and difficult to detect or record in real time. They
almost always occur in response to events that are unanticipated, and they convey
messages about something being unexpected, sudden, novel, or amazing. The brief
surprise expression is often followed by other expressions that reveal emotion in
response to the surprise feeling or to the object of surprise, emotions such as
happiness or fear. For example, most of us have been surprised, perhaps
intentionally, by people who appear suddenly or do something unexpected ("to scare
you"), and elicit surprise, but if the person is a friend, a typical after-emotion is happiness; but if
a stranger, fear. A surprise seems to act like a reset switch that shifts our attention. Surprise
expressions occur far less often than people are disposed to say "that surprises me," etc., because
in most cases, such phrases indicate a simile, not an emotion. Nevertheless, intellectual insights
can elicit actual felt surprise and may spur scholarly achievements. Surprise is to be
distinguished from startle, and their expressions are quite different.

Other emotion expressions and related expressions

Some psychologists have differentiated other emotions and their expressions from those
mentioned above. These other emotion or related expressions include contempt, shame, and
startle. Contempt is related to disgust, and involves some of the same actions, but differs from it,
in part, because its elicitors are different and its actions are more asymmetrical. Shame also has a
relation to disgust according to some psychologists, but recent evidence suggests it may have a
distinct expression. Most psychologists consider startle to be different from any human emotions,
more like a reflex to intense sudden stimulation. The startle expression is unique.

Human Emotional Needs

Here are some of the basic human emotional needs expressed as feelings. While all
humans share these needs, each differs in the strength of the need, just as some of us
need more water, more food or more sleep.

One person may need more freedom and independence, another may need more
security and social connections. When a person's natural emotional needs are met,
healthy behavior naturally follows. (See note below about children, adolescents and
schools.)

In various degrees, each according to his or her own unique nature, we each have a
natural emotional need to feel:

accepted free private

acknowledged fulfilled productive / useful
admired heard reassured
appreciated helped recognized
approved of helpful respected
believed in important safe / secure
capable in control supported
challenged included treated fairly
clear (not confused) listened to trusted
 competent loved understandng
confident needed understood
forgiven noticed valued
forgiving powerful worthy

An earlier, longer list

Childen, Adolescents and Schools

One problem in typical schools is the treatment of all students as if their emotional and
psychological needs were identical. The result is many needs are unsatisfied. For
example, one child, or adolescent, may have a greater curiosity and a greater need for
understanding than is provided in traditional schools, while another is content to accept
whatever is told to him.

Those with unmet emotional needs become frustrated, as any of us do when our needs
are unmet. They can be expected to "act out" their frustration in various ways which are
typically seen as "misbehavior." This is especially evident when children are expected to
all do the same thing for the same length of time. The better we identify their unique
needs and satisfy them, the fewer problems.

If a young person's emotional needs are signficantly unmet, there is a much higher
chance for them to have serious mental health problems, including depression and
suicidal feelings, by the time they reach their teen years.