Emotional And Universal Emotions

What are emotions defined as? And are there any universal emotions? Well the definition of emotion can be defined as the body’s adaptive response to certain situations. As for universal emotions. There are 6 emotions set by Ekman et al. (1972) as universal emotions. These emotions are most commonly known as Fear, Anger, Surprise, Sadness, Happiness and Disgust. What did Ekman et al. mean by universal emotions? Well they meant that these emotions are expressed in the same way (or at least in very similar ways).

Is there a difference between mental and biological factors when it comes to emotion? The short answer is yes. When one talks about biological factors interacting with emotion one often talks about emotion as a bodily process. Such as arousal, facial expressions, hormones, brain damage etc. however, when talking about the cognitive factors one often talks about emotion being affected by the conscious and unconscious mental processes. More simply put its how when one acquires and processes knowledge and understanding through experiences and senses they had once experienced before can affect their emotions.

Emotion,

Le Doux conducted an experiment on rats, he attempted to investigate how lesioning affected fear conditioning. He conducted this experiment by first playing a certain sound for rats (in this case a bell ringing) proceeded by the rats getting shocked. He did this to them continuously to the point where immediately after hearing the bell ringing the rats would react in fear. After that he took a bunch of rats and lesioned (took out) their auditory cortex and for the others he took out their auditory thalamus. He then played the sound again (followed again by a shock). What his findings showed was that the rats that had the lesion in their auditory cortex still feared the sound. On the other hand, the rats that had their auditory thalamus removed showed now fear when the sound was played after