How Emotions Work
There have been debates in many disciplines for centuries about how emotions work. Some new work has attempted to synthesize all of these understandings (Gross & Thompson, 2007). Basically it goes like this:
1) We have contact with a stimulus (an event, object, situation, sensation, or thought).
2) We pay attention to this stimulus.
3) We have an interpretation of the stimulus.
4) We have an emotional/physiological reaction to the stimulus.