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...
Emotions: Research Related to Happiness Expands
Happiness, or "subjective well being," includes such positive emotions as feelings of love, joy, and life satisfaction. Research reveals that factors like financial well being and success have a relatively small bearing on happiness in comparison to...
Emotions: Predicting the Intensity of Emotional Reactions
People often overestimate the intensity and duration of negative emotions is because they do not recognize the tendency to rationalize or make the best of bad situations. It is human nature to reframe events that affect us personally to ease the sit...
Emotions: Gender and Emotion
Women tend to be slightly more emotionally expressive and sensitive than men in nonverbal communication. Men are better at regulating their emotions. There is only a narrow range of emotional options considered appropriate for men. Men can express a...
Emotions: Forgiveness
Forgiving is not condoning, tolerating, minimizing or excusing an act that hurt you. It does not mean that you like or will reconcile with the offender. Forgiveness is holding someone accountable for their negative acts. Unlike holding a grudge, for...
Emotions: Relationship Between Thinking and Emotion, The
Most emotion researchers agree that cognitions can elicit emotion and emotions can shape cognition. The argument is over whether or not cognition is required for emotion. Brief emotions, researchers believe, have a specific functional form of cognit...
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...