What Are Emotions?

for me or your body

and professor of psychiatry at the University of Birmingham

And I'm also a consultant psychiatrist

at the National Centre for Mental Health in Birmingham.

This course is on anxiety and anxiety related conditions

in this module. I'm going to be talking about emotions and the nature of emotions,

and this is necessary and and important because

in order to understand the nature of anxiety,

we need to place it in the context of what emotions

are and how anxiety relates all the kinds of emotions.

So the first question is, what are emotions

and the answer.

That question put very simply,

is emotions are the positive or negative experiences that

human beings have in relation to different contexts.

Uh,

and what we mean by positive and negative

are whether people feel happy or whether they feel

angry or whether they feel sad in relation to

particular social events that are occurring around them.

It is said that there are probably six basic emotions,

and researcher called Beckman confirmed

that these basic emotions are recognisable

by all human beings wherever they live on on the planet.

So these basic emotions include sadness,

happiness, anger, surprise, disgust, fear

and you can see straight away that these are emotions that

we all recognised because all of us have experienced them.

And one of the interesting things about basic emotions is that

the facial displays of these emotions are recognised across the planet,

irrespective of of culture.

So if you were to see somebody's face when they're happy,

then practically all human beings will recognise that this is true,

that this is a display of happiness.

Or if you saw somebody who looked sad,

we would all recognise that this is indeed a display of of sadness,

and the same will be said for fear and and and and surprise and disgust.

So that's

the display of basic emotions

now the There's been a lot of discussion about how we come to know in experience,

that we are going through how we come to recognise and

to label these emotions that we all recognise in ourselves.

Um, and this is not the subject of today's course,

so I'm not going to say very much about about that matter.

That I think is a is a subject in its own right for another, another course.

So what I want to do is then to say something about

how the what are the component parts of emotions in general?

Um, and and again, these are You could say that these ideas are common sensical.

So So there's this subjective experience that we all know about.

Uh and then there are the ways in which the body itself the physiology of the body, uh,

codes for these experiences

and thirdly, and lastly,

the ways in which we display,

which have already said a little bit about the way in

which we display or behave when we're going through these experiences.

So if we take, uh, fear for an example, so we have an experience of fear,

and when we have that experience,

we may also recognise that we feel heart's pounding.

We may recognise that we find that, uh, mouth is dry.

We may discover that we feel as if we might faint.

Uh, and so that's the physiological response that we have.

The technically speaking people will say the autonomic nervous system response

that we have in relation to the subjective experience of fear,

and then the the display would be the look that we have on on our faces.

The way in which our body, uh,

the demeanour that we carry as human

beings when we're fearful and and that demeanour

might include the readiness to run or the readiness to defend oneself or to fight

and and so and so so you can

see very straightforwardly that these three component parts,

even though they're desperate, they are, of course,

unified in the individual when they come to experience

whatever emotion it is that they are going through.

So that's essentially just talking in very

general terms about the nature of emotions.