There are several types of emotional states

The last thirty years have been marked by an explosive development of theory and research on emotions, but so far no common way of interpreting the laws governing them has been established.

There are a number of terms for emotional states, e.g. emotions, feelings, passions, affects, emotions; this is especially true of higher emotionality.

The reason for the imprecision of these terms is their complexity and interpenetration.

According to Reykowski [19]

The emotional process is a specific reaction of the organism to changes in the internal and external environment, which includes 3 basic components

1. emotional arousal, which leads to mobilisation changes in the organism;
2. the realisation of the significance of these changes for the subject;
3. the specific and qualitative characteristics of the event of significance to the human being.

An example of the first component is emotional disturbance, manifested by changes in other mental, vegetative activities, and both in terms of the rate and intensity of the course of the reaction. The second component is related to the meaning of the emotional event for the subject, i.e. whether it is positive or negative. A positive emotional process stimulates actions that maintain contact with the positive event, while a negative one stimulates actions that aim to break contact with the negative event. The third component of the emotional process is related to the specific, qualitative characteristics of the event of human significance. Reykowski characterises this as the content of emotion.

Wilhelm Wundt and his view

A pioneer of scientific psychology, Wilhelm Wundt (cited in [10, 19]) understood emotional processes as "a separate kind of mental phenomena, the particular multiplicity of which does not allow for the possibility of putting forward unitary determinations". He proposed to frame feelings in three fundamental dimensions: pleasure-pleasure, excitement-soothing, tension-relief [22, 23].

Wundt's opponent Titcherner

Wundt's opponent was the American psychologist Titcherner (cited in [19]), who distinguished only two types of feelings: pleasure and annoyance. He saw the division as emotional states, not feelings. Furthermore, he acknowledged the existence of a complexity of emotional phenomena, distinguishing between: affects (e.g. joy, hatred), moods (e.g. satisfaction, anxiety) and complex feelings (e.g. intellectual, moral, religious and aesthetic feelings). With this division, he initiated a wave of polemics among introspective psychologists who differed in defining the most basic features of emotional phenomena, questioning the distinction between simple feelings, complex feelings and affects.

The discussion so far on the classification of emotional states is intended to help distinguish the phenomena covered by the terms feeling, emotion, affect and mood.

So far it has not been possible to develop satisfactory criteria to differentiate emotion from mood, temperamental traits and other affective states. The small number of empirical studies devoted to this issue does not allow for clarification. Many emotion researchers postulate a certain relationship between mood and emotion, consisting of a change in the thresholds of emotion arousal under the influence of mood.

According to Ekman [6, 8], emotions - unlike moods - are characterised by a distinctive pattern of facial expression. However, at this stage of research, this concept is only of theoretical value, as it has not been possible to establish a pattern of mimetic expression specific only to mood.

A high degree of difficulty characterises the empirical verification of Davidson's hypothesis [5], which states that mood directs the course of cognitive processes, while emotion directs the course of behaviour. The distortion of cognitive processes after emotion arousal should be smaller, as they last for a shorter time than the aroused mood.

However, since the mood lasts longer, the distortion of cognitive processes will also be longer. The psychological mechanisms probably responsible for this phenomenon may be related to the fact that emotion is more often directed towards a specific object than mood. Mood, in turn, may distort the processing of information about a wider range of objects [8].

Are emotions and feelingsunambiguous terms?

Two terms are used interchangeably in the scientific literature and in everyday language: emotion and feeling. Although they are not contradictory terms, they can denote two opposite poles of a continuum that leads from simple emotions through complex emotions to the most complex feelings such as friendship or love. Emotion is defined as a process related to the activity of subcortical centres, mainly the hypothalamus and adjacent interbrain structures, taking into account the coordinating activity of the cerebral cortex. Feelings, on the other hand, are seen as processes related to the cerebral cortex [19].

According to linguistic tradition, the term emotion has been reserved for higher emotions related to social needs (e.g. patriotic feelings), and the term emotion is referred to motivational-physiological states. The Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Psychiatry [11] treats emotion and feeling as synonyms, denoting "the subject's attitude towards people, phenomena, things, himself, his organism and his own actions". It is most often assumed that emotions or feelings are mental processes involving an attitude towards objects, persons and phenomena, constituting a direct stimulus for conscious or unconscious action [12].

Although numerous contentious and unclear issues concerning the nature of emotional phenomena have not been resolved by means of introspection, attention has been drawn to the interconnectedness of emotional and physiological processes [19]. The development of research on this issue has led to changing views on the nature of emotions.

What are emotions?

For more than a century, there have been discussions from psychological, physiological and philosophical positions on a precise and unambiguous definition of emotions. The difficulties arise from the quantitative preponderance of subtle shades of emotion over the words required to describe them.
The term emotion derives from the Latin verb movere, meaning to move, and suggests the propensity to act contained in every emotion. Emotions are commonly recognised as important elements of the motivation to act. In other words, they constitute a more or less fixed 'urge to act'. Thus, two meanings of emotion can be distinguished: a momentary experience, or a fixed disposition [9]. At the phenomenological level, emotions are defined as the stimulus of all action.

According to Izard [10] - emotion is a concept encompassing neurophysiological, neuromuscular and phenomenological aspects. At the neurophysiological level, emotion is defined primarily as the electrochemical activity of the o.u.n., particularly the hypothalamus, the limbic system, and the facial and trigeminal nerves. Cutaneous facial nerve endings and proprioreceptors in facial muscles are also involved in emotional regulation at the neurophysiological level. The neuromuscular level of emotion is revealed as facial expressions and non-verbal body expressions, i.e. gestures, poses, visceral response.

Watson [22] defined emotion as an inherited pattern of responses, particularly in the visceral and endocrine glands of the

English physiologist Cannon [4] was critical of Watson's conception. He challenged the model of emotion based on the concept of visceral changes and popularised the then novel model of emotion as processes occurring in the thalamic nuclei. Cannon was the first to recognise emotion as a manifestation of complex brain activities (nevertheless belonging to the domain of physiology), demonstrating experimentally the close relationship between emotional states and the functioning of internal organs.
Papez [16] assumed that emotional states are the result of a peripheral factor (impulses from the extero- and inter-receptors, ultimately reaching the thalamic nuclei and the cingulate sphere) and a mental factor located in the cerebral cortex. The link between the cortex and the hypothalamus is the cingulate nucleus, seen by Papez as the centre for experiencing emotions.

Skinner (cited in [10]) defined emotion as a kind of hypothetical state of power or weakness, expressed in one or more responses to different stimulation. Plutchik [17, 18] viewed emotions in terms of basic biological adaptive processes common to all living organisms. Arnold [1], on the other hand, put forward the hypothesis that the phenomenology of emotions should be conducted in the direction of searching for their 'cortical' substrate. She described two neuronal systems involved in the regulation of emotional mechanisms.

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The examples of definitions of emotions provided show a great inconsistency in the taxonomy. Some authors describe them by referring to physiological changes, while others describe them as subjective feelings experienced in situations that trigger them. The difficulty of defining emotional processes stems from the fact that emotions are mostly integrally connected to other experiences and rarely occur independently.

Features of emotions

Knowledge of the individual characteristics of emotions facilitates their description. Emotions for the experiencing subject are positive or negative. They therefore differ in sign [2]. In the case of positive emotions, e.g. joy, the individual is usually inclined to maintain the emotional state. In contrast, negative emotions, e.g. anxiety, generally arouse the need to discontinue their continuation. Emotions are characterised by varying strength, or intensity.

According to Reykowski [19], the strength of an emotional process can be defined as the intensity of the tendency to perform a response corresponding to a given emotion. The strength is greater the greater the internal or external obstacles that have to appear to stop the occurrence of the emotional reaction. Emotions of high strength selectively impair perception, as well as impairing other cognitive processes, e.g. impairing free and logical thinking. The duration of the emotion, i.e. its persistence, varies.

photo: panthermedia

Based on the basic characteristics of emotions, such as intensity and persistence, a distinction is made:

• moods - emotional states of slight intensity and long duration;
• emotions - emotional states characterised by sudden onset and short duration;
• affects - strong emotions, physiological states characterised by sudden onset, considerable intensity, pronounced vegetative symptoms, short duration and fatigue after the affect subsides [2].

Differences in motivational strength are expressed by a trait called depth of emotion. Deep emotions induce long-term action in a specific direction. A typical example of these is the emotion associated with hypervalued ideas [2].

Features of emotion also include the expression and object of emotion. The expression of emotion (encoding) is the outward expression of the emotional state and manifests itself in facial expressions, gestures and physiological manifestations. Given that emotion expresses an attitude towards someone or something, identifying the object of emotion is usually not a difficult task.