Abstract

Background: This study endeavours to define and analyze one of the most important faculty of human mind ‘emotion’. The ‘emotion’ is a specific sensation or feeling in the mind that provides directional drive to the other faculties of the mind - memory, intelligence, and physical activities - for their actions to be performed to pursue a specific goal. It should be astutely differentiated from ‘mood’, as ‘mood’ is the ‘energy level’ of the mind at a given particular moment. As a power house of the mind, the centers for ‘mood’ not only stimulate the activities of the faculty of emotion, but activities of other mental faculties - ‘memory’, ‘intelligence’, and ‘physical activities’ also. Emotion can be logically represented on ‘Pleasure and Pain’ or ‘Positive and Negative’ scale. That means every emotion has both these two ends. That is true for the emotion like, ‘anger’, ‘fear’ also. The concept of primary and secondary emotions does not exist. Every emotion has been developed as a trait in the process of ‘biological evolution’, and they all have survival roles. Thus all emotions are physiologically distinct, different, and could be both qualitatively and quantitatively determined.

Keywords: Emotions; Mood; Affect; Cognition; Perception; Depression