Emmett Kelly spent his life influencing people's emotions. As Willie, the little tramp, Kelly could make the audience feel sad when he smashed a peanut into an inedible pulp with a sledgehammer. And just as quickly, Willie could make the audience laugh and feel happy as he frantically chased the light beams with his frayed old broom. All of us are familiar with emotions; we talk about emotions and we experience them many times a day. We seek out situations that arouse certain emotions and avoid other situations because they will arouse unwanted emotions. In a sense, we might regard much of the material we have examined in earlier chapters (learning, perception, physiological processes, and motivation) as the meat and potatoes of life; they guide us through the daily events of life. In this light, emotions can be viewed as the spice of life; they give our lives character and pizazz.
Despite this tantalizing picture of emotions, we will see that the concept has spawned, and continues to spawn, a host of definitions, categorizations, theories, and debates. Let's begin our brief overview with a look at attempts to define and categorized emotions and related concepts.
One of the continuing debates about emotions involved what they are. Some people have argued that emotions is simply another term for motivation. Most investigators, however, take the position that although the two concepts may be related, they are not the same thing (Buck, 1985). As we discussed earlier, motivation is generally see as arousal or energy that directs behavior. Emotions, on the other hand, are viewed as the blending of arousal, behavior, and feeling (or cognition). We are hungry, thirsty, or tired, but we feel happy, sad, or afraid. Hence, emotions are affective states (or feeling) accompanied by physiological changes that often influence behavior.
Before you breath a sigh of relief at the rather painless journey for developing a definition, there are a few other points to consider. No member of the American Kennel Society would be happy with the generic definition of "dog," and similarly, investigators have not rested with a simple definition of emotions. Recently, emotions have been distinguished from moods (Morris, 1987). Moods are viewed as general feeling states that are less intense, less specific, and more long-lasting than emotions. For example, you may have some days where nothing seemed to go right. These events left you in a generally negative state, a bad mood, that dampened your enthusiasm and motivated you to avoid others.
Within the concept of emotions, investigators have attempted to make distinctions. Many investigators have argued that some emotions like dogs, colors, and ethnic groups, are pure or basic whereas other are hybrids or combinations of the basic emotions (Shaver, Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987). Figure 12-1 gives some examples of attempts to categorize and relate emotions. These examples are not give to complicate your life by offering a diabolical instructor fertile ground to design test questions. Rather, they should give you an idea of the intense interest that surrounds efforts to better understand what emotions are and how they relate to each other. Development of these types of classifications have also led investigators to question whether emotions can be divided along some basic dimensions. Most researchers agree that emotions can be classified along pleasantness and arousal dimensions, although other dimensions such as control, anticipated effort, and attention may also separate groups of emotions (Smith & Ellsworth, 1987)
Taken together, we can view emotions as a combination of affect and arousal that influence behavior. Certain emotions are more closely related to each other, and some may be more basic than others. With this view in mind, let's place the study of emotions in a historical and theoretical context.