Emotions: What Makes Emotions Distinctive?
Emotions are unbidden, influenced by both our phylogeny (instinctual evolutionary history) and our ontogeny (the environment in which we matured). Emotions are triggered without our being able to have much influence over the process. Emotions have f...
Emotions: Culture and Emotion
Across cultures, researchers often find similarities in the ways emotion is expressed. Paul Ekman showed photographs of people expressing emotion to people of radically different cultures, and certain emotions, without question, carried universal me...
Emotions: Anger, a Basic Emotion
A basic emotion has a facial signature, cross-cultural similarity; and an early analog in animals. Anger, or example, is associated with higher skin temperatures. It, is an emotion that works well with predators, but not so well when we're dealing w...
Stressed to the Limit: Physiology of Stress, The
The field of psychoneuroimmunology seeks to understand the interaction between the immune system and the central nervous system. Most stress research is focused on the fight-fight reaction, and more recently threats to the social self. The autonomic...
Emotions: What is Emotion?
Emotions chart the landscape of life. People know the words and the facial expressions that are distinctive to feelings like happiness, sadness, fear, anger. When we become emotional, our brain notices and our body reacts. A new view of emotion trea...