Authors unknown
The concept of emotion is closely related to affect, which is an encompassing term and it consists of emotions, feelings, moods, and evaluations (Simon, Clark, & Fiske, 1982). The most important concept is probably emotion. Nevertheless, in psychology, the theories about emotion consider it a 'very confused and confusing field of study' (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988) and thus there is no consensus on a definition. Various factors are associated with emotions, including subjective factors, environmental factors, and neural and hormonal processes. In this chapter, we make use of the summary of emotion provided by Kleinginna and Kleinginna (1981), which incorporates the key elements of definitions in psychology as follows: (1) Emotions give rise to affective experience, such as pleasure or displeasure. (2) Emotions stimulate us to generate cognitive explanations to attribute the cause to ourselves or to the environment, for example. (3) Emotions trigger a variety of internal adjustments in the autonomic nervous system, such as an increased heart rate and a decreased skin conductance response. (4) Emotions elicit behaviors that are often, but not always, expressive (laughing or crying), goal-directed (approaching or avoiding), and adaptive (removal of a potential threat).