Emotions and their expression

Emotions are complex patterns of arousal, subjective feeling and cognitive interpretation:

• Arousal: physical changes such as a racing heart, faster breathing or sweating.
• Subjective feeling: how the emotion feels to you, which can differ from person to person.
• Cognitive interpretation: how you understand the situation and your body's reaction. The same sudden loud bang may be read as danger (fear) or as fireworks at a festival (excitement).

Emotions move us internally, involving both bodily and psychological reactions. Mood is an emotional state that lasts longer but is less intense than an emotion: you may be in a low mood all day without any strong outburst.

Basic emotions. Psychologists disagree on how many there are:

• A widely accepted list has six: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.
• Carroll Izard proposed ten.
• Robert Plutchik proposed eight basic emotions, which can mix (like colours) to form other emotions.

How emotions are expressed:

• Verbal channel: words, the most common way of telling others how we feel ('I am upset').
• Paralanguage: not the words but how they are said: pitch, tone, loudness and speed of the voice. 'Fine' said cheerfully and 'Fine' said flatly mean very different things.
• Non-verbal channels: facial expressions, gestures and body posture, eye contact (gaze), and the distance we keep from others (proxemics).

Culture and emotion. Charles Darwin argued that facial expressions of basic emotions are inborn and universal: a smile or a look of disgust is understood everywhere. But culture shapes much else:

• Gaze: in many Western cultures, looking someone in the eye while talking shows honesty; in many Indian homes, a child is taught to lower the eyes, especially with elders, as a sign of respect.
• Gestures: folded hands in greeting mean respect in India but may puzzle someone unfamiliar with them.
• Labels: languages differ in how finely they name emotions. Tahitians have many separate words for different kinds of anger, but few for sadness.

So some emotions and their expressions are universal, while the rules for showing and naming them are culture-specific.