Differentiate between emotions, feelings and mood.

  What is an emotion? It appears too simplistic to the common people to define it. Common emotions experienced are joy, happiness, anger, sadness, jealousy, love and so on. We eat good food and feel contented. We see a good movie and feel happy. We spend time with loved ones and feel loved. We lose a game and feel sad.

Emotion is a complex chain of loosely connected events that begins with a stimulus and includes feelings, psychological changes, impulses to action and specific goaldirected behaviour (Plutchik, 2001)

Woodworth (1945) defines emotion as a stirred-up state of an organism that appears as feelings to the individual himself and as a disturbed muscular and glandular activity to an external observer.

Morris (1979) states that emotion is a complex affective experience that involves diffuse physiological changes and can be expressed overtly in characteristic behavior patterns.

Thus, emotions are experienced in response to a particular internal or external event. A response of this kind involves physical arousal in the body- heart rate, blood pressure, perspiration, release of hormones etc. Secondly, a motivation to take action is activated- seeking things and activities that provide pleasure and avoiding those that give rise to pain or unpleasantness. Thirdly, emotions arise out of our sensations, perceptions and thoughts related to objects, persons and situations. It depends on how do we perceive something, think about it and interpret it. Fourthly, emotions vary in their intensity, for example, happiness can be experienced as pleasant and contented at the lower end of the continuum whereas excited and thrilled at the higher end of the continuum. Similarly being irritated and upset are the milder forms of anger whereas furious and enraged are high intensity anger feelings.

Emotions can be desirable or undesirable to an individual, depending on whether the said event is perceived as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ or performs an adaptive function for an individual. They are responsible for driving a range of human behaviours such as attacking, fleeing, self- defence, forming relationships, reproducing etc. However, some of these functions may translate into negative consequences such as ‘freezing’on stage, intense expressions of anger, unwarranted aggression etc. Regardless of whether the consequences are positive or negative, emotions create significant impact when they arise and adapting to our environment demands that we understand and express emotions appropriately.

Emotions are not the same as feelings, even though we may use both the terms similarly. The term feeling is used to refer to a person’s private emotional experience or self- perception of a specific emotion. When an event occurs, one first responds automatically at a physical level even without awareness (emotion) and then registers or evaluates this (feeling). For example, when one sees a snake nearby, their heartbeat, breathing, perspiration (physiological arousal) might increase immediately, causing the action of running away. Only later might one realise that the feeling they experienced was fear. Feelings are created by emotions. Thus, although we may use the terms emotion and feeling interchangeably in our daily lives, they differ considerably from each other.

Another related concept is mood. While emotions last for short periods of time and arise in response to a particular event, moods are of lower intensity, generally last for longer periods of time, even days and may not necessarily be associated with a certain, immediate event or cause. While emotions are directed at something or someone (e.g. you are angry at your brother or you are frustrated about waiting in line), moods can arise for no apparent reason, such as waking up irritable one morning without anything unpleasant having occurred the previous day. Nevertheless, moods are important because they too influence our actions. For example, wanting to socialise more with friends when in a good mood and avoiding social situations when feeling low over the weekend.

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