Emotion and Feelings: Understanding Feelings and emotion

An emotion is a subjective state of being that we often describe as our feelings. Emotions result from the combination of subjective experience, expression, cognitive appraisal, and physiological responses (Levenson, Carstensen, Friesen, & Ekman, 1991).The source of our emotions remains elusive. No one knows exactly where emotions come from, what makes us feel the way we do, or whether we can fully control the way we feel. Emotion is intimately related to cognition and culture, and it affects us physically: our bodies react to different emotional states, and we often show emotion physically. Researchers have proposed many theories about the source, purpose, and expression of emotion.
In many ways, our emotions define our existence-without them, most of us would not feel truly alive. We've all felt fear of a lurking stranger, pride at scoring well on a test, love, sadness, and loneliness. And between emotional extremes are the ups and downs of everyday life: frustration in a traffic jam, contentment over a satisfying lunch, amusement at a cartoon. We have much to learn about emotion-but we have also learned simply by being human and feeling things every day.
As we move through our daily lives, we experience a variety of emotions. An emotion is a subjective state of being that we often describe as our feelings.
However, as discussed later in the chapter, the exact order in which the components occur is not clear, and some parts may happen at the same time. An emotion often begins with a subjective (individual) experience, which is a stimulus. Often the stimulus is external, but it does not have to be from the outside world. For example, it might be that one thinks about war and becomes sad, even though they never experienced war. Emotional expression refers to the way one displays an emotion and includes nonverbal and verbal behaviors (Gross, 1999). One also performs a cognitive appraisal in which a person tries to determine the way they will be impacted by a situation (Roseman & Smith, 2001). In addition, emotions include physiological responses, such as possible changes in heart rate, sweating, etc.
Emotions are a pervasive feature of human life, and much of what we take to be meaningful and significant is inextricably linked with our capacity to experience emotions. Consider how impoverished our lives would be without love, hate, jealousy, joy, happiness, despair, anger, sadness, regret, hope, admiration, reverence, fear, horror, and doom. Great writers of literature have a knack for capturing emotional experiences in all their richness. For example, consider one of Proust's descriptions of Swann's jealous love in In Search of Lost Time:
But then at once his jealousy, as though it were the shadow of his love, presented him with the complement, with the converse of that new smile with which she had greeted him that very evening - and which now, perversely, mocked Swann and shone with love for another - of that droop of the head, now sinking on to other lips, of all