As you can see, the difference between the two concepts is vague and may make the process of composing an academic work on them quite confusing (even if it's a plain descriptive essay 13/02/ · Essay On Emotions Introduction: Essay on Emotions. Emotions are the feelings that you experience when something is happening around you. Types of Emotional experience. 23/01/ · Emotions are an important factor in the way we represent ourselves or our feelings. In order to get a greater understanding, this essay will be looking at whether emotions are
Essay on Emotions: Top 8 Essays | Emotions | Psychology
After essay on emotions this essay you will learn about:- 1. Nature and Characteristics of Emotions 2. Theories of Emotions 3. Neural and Physiological Basis 4. Functions 5. Development 6. Judgement 7. Disruptive Role 8. a To a considerable extent emotions are accompanied by activation or an aroused state in the organism. b They are normally accompanied by bodily changes like gestures, muscular movements, changes in facial expressions, essay on emotions, changes in physiological reactions like blood-pressure, essay on emotions, pulse rate, heartbeat, essay on emotions, respiration, etc.
c Whenever an organism is experiencing an emotion, a lot of energy is released. This is true of many emotions. But there are also some emotions like grief, where the energy and activity level are reduced. d In the case of many emotional experiences, it is found that other activities like perception, learning, consciousness, memory, etc. are affected. In some cases, where the emotions are mild the influence may be positive and in other cases the influence may be disruptive. e Along with the bodily changes one also finds certain psychological changes or alterations in the content and state of consciousness. Very often, there is a blurring or clouding of consciousness, blocking of memory, a confusion in perception, etc.
Thus, emotions are complex experiences including a variety of bodily reactions and also psychological reactions. William McDougall, a leading psychologist in the earlier part of the century, believed that most of our emotional experiences and reactions are innate and are tied-up with instincts, essay on emotions. According to him, instincts are innate springs or roots of behaviour and result in action directed towards certain goals or ends. For example, the instinct of hunger, when aroused, makes the organism hunt for food until it is found and only then does it subside. McDougall compiled a list of instincts and said that each instinct has a typical emotion as a component. For example, the instinct of self-preservation is accompanied by the emotion of fear.
Thus, it was believed that whenever an individual became aware of a threatening condition he experienced fear and a number of bodily changes resulted from this. It was also believed that psychological and conscious experiences came first, followed by physiological and bodily changes. This view was held for a long time. But towards the beginning of this century the famous American psychologist, William James, and the Danish physiologist, Carl Lange, independently expressed their views which questioned the earlier theory. According to these views which subsequently came to be known as James-Lange theory, essay on emotions, the bodily changes were primary and the psychological experiences followed the bodily changes. Thus, essay on emotions, the position was reversed.
This controversy regarding the relative importance of the psychological and physiological components of emotional experiences raged for a long time. A number of experiments were undertaken. The James-Lange theory implied that the bodily changes are primary and most of the bodily changes in emotions depended on the activity of essay on emotions autonomic nervous system, particularly its sympathetic division. The James- Lange theory, therefore, laid less emphasis on the role of the central nervous system. This theory also came to be known as the peripheral theory of emotions. Subsequent research by Cannon, Masserman, Sherrington and a number of others, however, showed that the explanation offered by James and Lange was too simple.
Employing a very ingenious procedure involving the performance of surgical operations on the nervous system of cats and dogs, essay on emotions, they showed that the central nervous system, particularly the hypothalamus and even the cerebral cortex, had an important role to play in emotional experiences. They showed that it is not possible to make a distinction between bodily changes and psychological changes. On the contrary, emotions constitute complex experiences involving both and it is difficult to attribute primacy to either of them. No attempt is now made to separate the roles of bodily and psychological changes. An important finding has been that attempts to find specific patterns of essay on emotions changes correlated with different kinds of emotional experiences have largely ended in failure.
The same bodily changes occur in different kinds of emotional experiences. Some differences have no doubt been found between the bodily changes accompanying fear on the one hand, and anger, on the other. Further, the bodily changes occurring in emotions are very often too slow and appear only after the psychological experience of emotion. Because of this Cannon and Bard advanced the view that emotions are functional processes directed towards energizing the organism to prepare for an emergency situation. According to this theory, psychological changes result from an activation of the cerebral cortex through the thalamus and the other bodily changes occur simultaneously. Yet, another theory advanced by Donald Lindsley is known as the Activation Theory. According to this theory, emotional experiences depend on an arousal of the reticular system which includes a chain of special neurons in the brain system.
The reticular system performs the function of general energizer, thus, contributing to the level of arousal and wakefulness, essay on emotions. More recently, Schachter essay on emotions Singer proposed what is known as the Cognitive Appraisal Theory. An individual who is physiologically aroused and is not able to find a reason for this arousal attributes the physiological changes to some available cognitions or perceptions. The choice of these cognitions is determined by a number of factors like the situation, the cognition of others, etc. This theory, however, is yet to be substantiated. Both peripheral approach James-Lange and the central approach Camon-Bard emphasise the process of awareness of bodily changes.
While the peripheral theories tended to lean on an explanation based on a direct awareness of bodily changes, not according a major role to the higher nerve centres- the cerebral cortex, the central theories emphasized the role of the brain and the cerebral cortex, in bringing about qualitative differences among emotional experiences. An attempt to answer this question was made by Schacter essay on emotions Singer. This view while on the one hand agreed with the view of James and Lange that the feeling of emotions arouses from a feedback on the bodily changes, at the same time also agrees with the Cannon-Bard theory that such a simple feedback cannot explain subtle differences in emotional experiences.
According to Schacter and Singer, emotional experiences arise from two sources, feedback from bodily changes and at the same time a cognitive appraisal of the essay on emotions conditions that cause the particular emotional experiences. According to this view, cognitive interpretation comes into operation both when one perceives the stimulus situation that leads to bodily changes and also subsequently when these changes are interpreted. This latter interpretation mainly at the level of brain is crucial. Thus the same pattern of feedback from bodily changes can be interpreted in essay on emotions ways. For example, when we cry on hearing that someone close to us has met with a serious accident, essay on emotions, and also when we cry when we meet a brother or sister or a close friend whom we have not met for a long time, on both these occasions, the bodily changes and their feedback are similar, but the experience of emotions are different.
Schacter and Singer are of the view that this process of interpreting and labelling depends on the act of what may be called attribution of these experiences to a particular stimulus control. There have been a number of studies which lend support to this view of Schacter and Singer. A second set of essay on emotions have shown that if the bodily changes are attributed to non-emotional causes, then the intensity of the emotions would be less. But attempts by other investigators like Leventhal, Marshall, essay on emotions, Zimbardo and others to replicate these experiments did not produce similar results. Such transferred excitation can result either in the attribution of emotions to a new cause or intensification of some emotional reactions already existing. In an interesting study carried out in British Columbia around a deep gorge with rearing rapids, the gorge could be crossed either by a rather risky and dangerous swinging bridge or by a safe wooden bridge across the river, at a safer place.
A female experimenter asked people who have crossed over through either of the bridges, to fill out a questionnaire which aroused sexual imagery. It was found that essay on emotions subjects who had crossed the river through the swinging dangerous bridge had higher scores on sexual imagery than those who crossed the river using safe wooden essay on emotions. However, when the person collecting data with the questionnaire, was a male, no such difference was noticed, essay on emotions. The inference drawn is that in the case of the men who crossed through the dangerous bridge, there was a greater transfer of excitement in the situation where the experimenter was a female.
The role of the nervous system and other physiological processes in emotions has been a dominating question in the study of emotions, essay on emotions. For a long time, while it was believed that the autonomic nervous system plays an important role, the role of the central nervous system was not very clearly understood. We may, therefore, begin with the consideration of the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system with its two divisions, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, plays a crucial role. The sympathetic division is responsible for activation of the various physiological processes like heartbeat, essay on emotions, respiration, and blood-pressure and thereby creates additional expenditure of energy. The parasympathetic system, on the other hand, essay on emotions, is concerned with the conservation of energy.
The sympathetic system, under conditions of emergency, activates the organism and thereby draws on the energy stored up in the organism. The autonomic nervous system is also closely connected with the functioning of the endocrine glands. The brain consists of two broad divisions, the cerebral cortex and the subcortical centres. Both of these are involved in emotional experiences. Experiments have shown that direct stimulation of the brain by electrical essay on emotions can result in emotional experiences even without any outside sensory stimulation. This is particularly true when areas in the temporal lobe and the limbic structures are stimulated. The hypothalamus which is a subcortical centre is actively involved in emotional experiences as it is responsible for the control of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems.
The hypothalamus, when stimulated, can create a wide variety of emotional experiences. Another subcortical centre, the thalamus, performs the function of relaying messages of the impulses to the cerebral cortex. Thus, the thalamus, the hypothalamus and the limbic structures play a major role in arousing emotional experiences. It is the highest centre of the brain and plays a role somewhat contradictory to the roles of the other centres. The cortex, by and large, performs an inhibitory function. It checks emotional over activity. If the inhibitory influence of the cortex is eliminated through injury on the store-house of memory experiences, the activation of these memory experiences also helps people to decide whether and to what degree a particular situation warrants emotional response. Thus, it may be seen that the whole nervous system is involved in emotional experiences.
The cortical and sub-cortical centres play what appears to be contradictory, but in reality play complementary roles. Apart from the nervous system, the endocrine glands particularly the adrenal glands and its secretion, adrenalin, also play a very important role. The endocrine glands, essay on emotions, because they secrete various hormones directly into the blood, significantly influence the different types of activity. Under emergency conditions our bodily activities are very much affected. The activation of the endocrine glands stimulates these activities for emergency functions, and at the same time interferes with the normal adaptive functions. Thus, frequent occurrences of intense emotional experiences can cause interruption of vegetative activities thereby resulting in a number of abnormalities essay on emotions psycho-physiological disturbances like diabetes, essay on emotions, hypertension, asthma, etc.
In Praise of Subtle Performance
, time: 14:39Essay On Emotions for the students - Know It Here
Emotions are a grand part of life when they include feelings of euphoria, happiness, content and satisfaction, but emotions such as loneliness, sadness, grief, bereavement, are not so According to many researches in this field, emotions have components of two types: physical and mental and consist of body responses, expressive behavior and subjective feelings. The first 13/02/ · Essay On Emotions Introduction: Essay on Emotions. Emotions are the feelings that you experience when something is happening around you. Types of Emotional experience.
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