This turned out to be a more difficult question than I anticipated. Exactly what an emotion is, is up for debate. A lot of debate. The term itself, emotion, is relatively new. There are languages spoken today in which the term “emotion” has no direct translation. In the ancient West what we call emotions were called passions. Passions were emotion, pleasure, and pain. Passion was desire. Think Homer and characters breaking down in manly tears left, right, and center. The ancient Stoics were not about passion. For them passion meant suffering, so suppression and control were the order of the day.
When Christianity came along Christian theologians, like Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, did to the passions what they did to everything. Kept the idea but put a Christian twist on it. From them we get feelings. Particularly virtuous feelings otherwise known as the affections. These affections were the passions of Christ. These good passions encompassed things like love between family or compassion and empathy. They were distinct from the bad passions, like rage and lust.
The actual word emotion comes into being sometime in the mid 16th century. Deriving from the Latin movere, ‘to move out, remove, agitate’ the notion of passivity, that emotion or passions are something that happen to us, is retained. To endure an emotion is to be besieged from within. But it wasn’t until around the mid-18th century that passions and affections were lumped together under the umbrella of emotion in the common parlance. The current sense the word emotion dates from the early 19th century a time during which Thomas Brown, Scottish philosopher, proposed emotion as a theoretical, scientific, category. But even he couldn’t define it.
An oft quoted 1884 article by William James, “What Is An Emotion?”, posited that the brain’s “…cortex contains centres for the perception of changes in each special sense-organ, in each portion of the skin, in each muscle, each joint, and each viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme perfectly capable of representing the process of the emotions.” Other scientists and philosophers may categorize emotions based on behaviors, physiological responses, or feelings. The only consensus seems to be that there is no consensus.
On the one hand is the argument that emotions are feelings. We feel them as completely and viscerally as we do pain of fire or the satiation of a full belly. But emotions are more than that. Emotion is an experience. Emotion is the feeling of contentment that comes with that full belly or the anguish that comes with the burn. It is both conscious and unconscious and influenced by our thoughts, our beliefs, and our desires.
Then there is the idea that feelings are subjective whereas emotions are subconscious. Emotions are physical and automatic responses to things happening to and/r within us. Feelings are the experiences of emotion and are the result of conscious thought. In this scenario we cannot have feelings without an accompanying emotion, but we can have emotions without feelings. Confused yet?
Then there is the idea of emotions being a purely physical manifestation. Emotions as nothing more than a byproduct of the neural networks of the brain. Joy is associated with the orbitofrontal cortex. The nucleus accumbens is connected to desire. The most basic (and mostly negative) emotions: stress, fear, and disgust, come swelling out of the lizard brain, the oldest brain structures like the amygdala. Take surprise. Surprise is always based in uncertainty and uncertainty, as previously discussed, is something brain finds stressful. So, surprise triggers flight or fight. But whether or not flight or fight triggers fear depends on the circumstance. The adrenaline could also trigger a rush of euphoria. In the end, goes this theory, emotions are a chemical reaction formed as a result of visual and auditory input.
Antonio Damasio, a scientist at the University of California, says, “Feelings are mental experiences of body states which arise as the brain interprets emotions themselves physical states arising from the body’s response to external stimuli.”
Our survival has long depended on our ability to recognize external stimuli and categorize their importance. Does it harm or help? Does it offer safety? Sex? Food? Pain? This is all in the moment. And for the most part, this all happens unconsciously. When we are safe in our homes watching a horror movie or snugly confined within the constraints of a rollercoaster, we still feel a rush. We breathe faster, our hearts speed up, we get up to check the locks on the doors, we scream. The flight or fight stimulus courses through even though we know we are safe and we react to that stimulation.
In 1967 scientist V.J. Wukmir proposed that emotion forms in reaction to the survivability of any given situation. Things that promote survivability stimulate positive emotions. Things that are not favorable to survival provoke negative emotion. In this way all living being feel emotion to some extent. Heck, based on this theory one could argue that plants experience emotion on some level. They, too, fight for survival.
From horror films to first impressions a lot of our rational thought is influenced, if not forcefully directed, by emotion. According to psychologist Kendra Cherry, emotions serve the purposes of helping us understand others and ourselves. They provide information on which we may choose to act, that will aid in our survival. A lot of this, emotion, is happening in our older lizard brain. The older parts of the brain are more independent, we don’t have to think about making our hearts beat or breathing. Emotional/feeling information comes from this deeper part of the brain and may or may not be processed by the new cognitive parts of the brain like the neocortex.
So why do our emotions linger long after the emotional experience is over? Why do we still feel even when we are no longer in the moment? The feelings triggered by an emotional experience can last years, decades, after the experience itself is over. Those feelings then influence the way we think, what we believe, and what we do. We all have feelings and emotions sparked by a stray thought. The whiff of a familiar aroma can throw us right back into our childhoods. Our memories are linked to our experiences and tied to our emotions. Yet our experience, reaction, and response to emotion can be so vastly different on an individual and cultural level.
For my purposes here I am going to use emotion and feeling interchangeably as we do in modern English. Feeling in English can be things felt on an emotional or physical level in part because emotions affect us physically. Our responses are physical.
But, however we define them, emotions don’t exist in a vacuum. They play a compelling role in how we experience our world. How we experience our selves. The thing is, most of what makes us human is shit we just made up. Everything from nationality, race, money, all of these things are social constructs that carry the weight of reality. Which means how we feel, and how we process those feelings, has a lot to do with the context of our worlds.
Sources
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-purpose-of-emotions-2795181
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201601/what-is-emotion
https://imotions.com/blog/emotions-matter/
https://www.thebestbrainpossible.com/whats-the-difference-between-feelings-and-emotions/
https://www.biopsychology.org/biopsychology/papers/what_is_emotion.htm
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11040893_What_is_emotion
https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/emotion.htm
Other
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01217/full
https://www.orkestra.deusto.es/en/latest-news/news-events/beyondcompetitiveness/1403-the-social-construction-reality
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21047162