Blog
Save
Email
Print
ShareEmotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need.
See also:
Linda Davidoff defines emotion as a feeling that is expressed through physiological functions such as facial expressions, faster heartbeat, and behaviors such as aggression, crying, or covering the face with hands.
Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. Defined as such, these emotional states are specific manifestations of non-verbally expressed feelings of agreement, amusement, anger, certainty, control, disagreement, disgust, disliking, embarrassment, fear, guilt, happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and uncertainty.
If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures.
In mammals, primates, and human beings, feelings are displayed as emotion cues. For example, the human emotion of love is proposed to have evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulated gyrus) designed for the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring.
For more information about the topic Emotion, read the full article at Wikipedia.org, or see the following related articles:
Mental confusion — Severe confusion of a degree considered pathological usually refers to loss of orientation (ability to place oneself correctly in the world by time, ... > read more
Anger — Anger is a term for the emotional aspect of aggression, as a basic aspect of the stress response in animals in which a perceived aggravating stimulus ... > read more
Anxiety — Anxiety is a physiological state characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioral components. These components combine to create the ... > read more
Happiness — Happiness is a prolonged or lasting emotional or affective state that feels good or pleasing. Overlapping states or experiences associated with ... > read moreEditor's Note: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Recommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
and Google +1:
Other bookmarking and sharing tools:
more 