Emotion is a mental state or feeling associated with our evaluation of our experiences. One way we express our thoughts and feelings is by showing an emotion through our facial expressions.
Everyone experiences emotions. In the first part of this chapter the author talks about the various different theories of emotion that attempts to explain what causes our feelings. The theories mentioned in this chapter are discrete emotion theory, cognitive theories of emotion, James-Lange theory of emotion, Cannon-Bard theory, somatic marker theory, and two-factor theory.
People recognize and generate the same emotional expressions across cultures. There are a set of primary emotions which are small number of emotions believed by some theorist to be cross culturally universal. These emotions are...
Happiness
Sadness
Surprise
Anger
Disgust
Fear
Contempt
and Pride
It was really interesting to me that Charles Darwin (1872) pointed out the similarities between the emotional expressions of humans and many nonhuman animals because it may be true after all that EVERYONE experiences emotions. Something else that struck me was Eugene Morton (1977, 1982) pointing out the similarities in communication across most animal species, especially mammals and birds which suggests that the emotions of humans and nonhuman animals share the same evolutionary heritage because it amazes me that we are similar to other creatures on this planet.
Robots Showing Emotion
I think emotions are really interesting because they are a big factor in our lives and contribute to many of the things that we do and the decisions that we make. I would agree that nonhuman animals and humans both share some sort of evolutionary characteristic that aids us in generating out emotions and developing them throughout our lifetimes.