The Nature of Emotion

What is emotion? I find it interesting that a word so often used and completely understood is so hard to define. Reeve (2009) suggest that emotions have four components, bodily arousal, social expressiveness, sense of purpose and feelings, which interact to form ones reaction to eliciting events. Because this reaction is so subjective for each individual it makes emotion hard to define.

The idea that there is no way of knowing for certain that one’s experiences of a particular emotion is the same as other peoples experience of that emotion, is something I have considered many times previously. It may be that what I perceive as anger or happiness, for example, may be experienced differently by another person, making it difficult to create objective measures of one’s emotions.

Although I think physiological reactions are good objective measures of emotions, these measures can only be first associated with emotion by self report methods of emotion or by inducing emotions which again is limited by the subjective nature of emotional experiences.

It was interesting to think about the adaptive purpose of emotions and the idea that emotions cannot be bad due to their adaptive value of helping indicate to us if a behaviour is adaptive and rewarding, inducing positive emotions, or if a behaviour is maladaptive and thus induces negative emotions as a punishment so that this behaviour is less likely to be performed again. It was also interesting that highly adaptive emotions are more easily triggered suggestive of the genetic component of emotional sensitivity in some individuals.

What causes emotions? The adaptive value of emotions is clear and thus it would make sense that emotions are caused by physiological responses to events in sub-cortical areas, that we then process and label as specific emotions in the cerebral cortex. This idea is supported in that infants and even animals experience emotions when they do not have developed cognitive skills to be making complex appraisals of situations and events that might cause emotion. However, as one develops and more complex cognitive appraisals are possible it may be that our experience of emotions becomes more complex. In support of the cognitive appraisal theories the same physiological experience can be attributed to different emotions by different people and the same event can cause different emotions from different people. Most research suggests then that it is an interaction of cognitive appraisals and biological mechanisms which cause emotion. I found Buck’s two system theory particularly appealing. It suggests that an innate and involuntary system activates the limbic system response to some emotional stimuli producing more innate emotions such as fear and aggression, while other times more complex emotions such as gratitude or hope stem from a more cognitive, social and experienced based system in the cortex.

How many emotions are there? Reeve (2009) suggest that there may be an infinite number of emotions but that there are some which are core or fundamental. Researchers disagree about the specific number of core emotions but Reeve suggest most are similar to these 6 which are Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, Joy and Interest. I found it really interesting that in all the models discussed, more negative emotions than positive emotions were considered core. This may relate to the adaptive value of emotions with it being more important to stop harmful behaviours from causing injury or even death, relying on negative emotions, than to appreciate adaptive behaviours, relying on positive emotion.

What good are emotions? I found it really interesting to consider the idea that emotions may be a consequence of adaption passed down for their adaptive value for our ancestors but may now be redundant or even maladaptive in today’s society. For example the flight or fight response to threat which may have helped our ancestors from the threat of attack be predators may cause us to be unnecessarily aggressive in situations that do not require such an intense emotional response.

The social function of emotions becomes very obvious when you consider interactions with friends most often involve expressing your emotional reactions to events and these expressions make one feel closer or more intimately involved with others. Personally the relationships I have that do not involve sharing of emotional experiences are the ones I see as more superficial and less intimate relationships.

Finally this week we discussed the difference between emotions and mood. Reeve (2009) suggest that moods differ from emotions in their antecedent, action specificity and time course. Thus moods are usually not caused by a specific event like an emotion generally is, do not direct behaviour in a specific manner and last for a longer period time than emotions do.


Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Personal Control Beliefs and The Self

This week we discussed how the self and how personal control beliefs influence motivation. Firstly expectancy of our own capabilities and abilities to perform a task and our expectancy that performing this task will lead to a positive result, both influence one’s motivation. As such one can believe they have the skills to complete a task but if completing the task doesn’t lead to desired outcomes then they will lose motivation to perform.

Self efficacy refers to the cognitively held belief that one can cope with a situation given their set of skills. One can acquire a high self efficacy from referring to their history of performance with repeated success in a domain influencing high self efficacy as well as being influenced by other people’s success in the domain and through acts of encouragement from others.  Those with high self efficacy are then more motivated in that domain and thus are more likely to persevere when the task becomes difficult. High self efficacy also positively influences creativity as well as increasing positive emotions.

Related to self efficacy is mastery beliefs; the perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and presenting aversive ones. If one perceives that their actions will influence outcomes they will be more motivated to act and will be more likely to see negative feedback or failures as information which they can use to improve their performance rather than internalise the failure and becoming helpless.

Learned helplessness refers to the idea that if one persistently experiences situations where their behaviour does not effect outcomes they begin to believe they have no control over what happens to them, thus they learn to be helpless. This causes one to have very low motivation to act and can lead to depression. It is interesting to consider that this is an adaptive response that stops one from wasting energy on tasks or situations that are indeed out of their control however they perceived lack of control is then generalised to all aspects of one’s life.

Learned Helplessness was originally studied using chambers like this one

I found it very interesting that learned helplessness research lead to the finding that those with depression are more likely to realistically assess when they actually do have no control. Thus, it appears to be good for one’s wellbeing to perceive one has control in situations where they do not, or perceive they are more capable at coping that they actually are.  

Perceptions of one’s self also influence motivation. I found Reeve’s (2009) discussion on self esteem very interesting as it does seem intuitive that raising self esteem would positively influence motivation and achievement however the research suggest this is not the case. Rather that increases in achievement increase self esteem not the other way round. This doesn’t detract from the positive influence self esteem can have on wellbeing but questions the assumption that self esteem motivates one to perform well.

The different aspects of the self can greatly influence one motivation. We are motivated to act in ways that are consistent with ones cognitive schema of one’s self and motivated to consistently improve ourselves by differences between out ideal self and our actual self. This motivates us to approach tasks that we believe will confirm our self schema’s but also to avoid tasks that might disconfirm them. Thus this relates to self efficacy as described earlier because if we have a strong belief in our abilities we are more likely to try and achieve things consistent with our self schema than to be motivated to avoid failing at such tasks.

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.