18 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
W hat A re Emotions?
Although scientists have invested a great deal of research in
studying the underlying nature of emotions, it has been
rather difficult for them to specify exactly what the term
“emotions” involves. That’s because emotions are incredibly
broad and complex. Often, people can think of general con-
cepts associated with emotions, such as “feelings” or
“moods,” or they can list several examples of emotions, such
as “joy,” “fear,” “sadness,” and “surprise.” However, by failing
to identify core characteristics that apply to a wide range of
individual emotional states, we all seem to be sidestepping
what we really mean by “emotions.”
The following exercise may give you some insight and
help you identify most of the relevant features of an emotion.
Practice Close your eyes and recall a situation in which you
experienced a very strong emotion, such as happiness or anger.
Ref lect on what happened immediately before the onset of the
emotion— what specific events or interactions contributed to
that reaction? Consider what subjective and physical experiences
accompanied this emotional state. Focus on what the emotion was
guiding you to do. (It’s likely that a strong emotion, such as happi-
ness or anger, would encourage you to respond to your emotional
experience in some way.)
Klaus Scherer, a distinguished research psychologist,
was responsible for a very prominent and widely adopted
framework for understanding both the function and nature
of emotions. An important aspect of Scherer’s component
process model (Scherer 2005) is that it goes beyond the com-
monly held belief that emotions amount to nothing more