1. Emotion is the acute disturbance of the organism as a whole, psychological in origin involving behaviour, conscious experiences and visceral functions.

2. Emotional behaviour involves both physiological and psychological activities. It gives motion to the organism either to move towards the goal or move away from the goal.

3. Emotion is behaviour-arousal. Emotion prepares the individual to active for a longer period of time and to become insensitive to pain during extreme emotional arousal. It activates the individual to use his maxim potential at the time of life-threatening dangers.

4. The nature of emotion is expressed through destructive response approach responses, retreat or flight responses and stopping responses.

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5. Emotion comes with both overt and covert bodily changes, include electrical activities of the skin, respiratory activities, blood pressure, pirate, sweat gland functioning, reactions of endocrine glands and changes in the chemical activities of the blood, skin temperature, pupill response, pilomotor response, gastro-intestinal activities, muscle tension, tremor and eye blinking etc.

6. The visceral system of the peripheral nervous system, which is ca the Autonomic Nervous system, plays a major role in emotion. It two divisions: sympathetic division and parasympathetic division, sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system acts during excitement, fear, anger and delight, during violent exercises, and during extreme cold. The parasympathetic division is involved with maintenance of life. It stores up bodily energies for future use by the sympathetic division during emotion and emergency. Only one division of ANS acts at a time, and the other division takes rest.

7. Prolonged sympathetic over activity due to emotion may lead to psychosomatic diseases such as peptic ulcers, backache, headache asthma, tuberculosis, migraine etc. The hypothalamus and the limbic system also play vital roles in regulating emotional behavior.

8. Emotional development begins from infancy. The newborns she generalized undifferentiated excitement. When the infant is 2 to 4 weeks old, it shows interest, spontaneous, pleasant, and unpleasant emotions without any specific cause. Gradually many other complex emotions develop as the child grows up.

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9. Fear, anger, and love are considered to be innate emotions. But emotion can be learned through the conditioning process. Learning play important role in emotion. Escape and avoidance behaviours are learned, as are the irrational fears and expression of aggression.

10. The common emotional pattern as per Robert Piutehik’s classification is of four types, i.e., (i) emotions are either positive or negative, (ii) they are primary or mixed, (iii) emotions are quite opposite, and (iv) they vary in intensity. Many emotions are the products of combined primary emotions.

11. Love is a basic positive emotion, which involves attachment, warmth, and a kind affectionate state between persons. Harlow’s experiment on attachment indicated that irrespective of the surrogate mother’s feeding conditions, the baby monkeys were attached to the one who was soft- bodied, warm, and comfortable.

12. Fear is an emotional state anticipating a dangerous stimulus. Loud sound, strangers, unknown objects, new places, dark shadow, loneliness, and loss of body support are the common fear-provoking stimuli for children. This emotion is both innate and learned. Watson conditioned Albert a child to fear white fury objects. There are a number of irrational fears called phobia. These irrational fears are for innocent stimuli like height, open space, cats, flowers, people, water etc.

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13. Anger or rage is an intense emotion. Restriction to goal directed behaviour or against the desirous motives leads to anger. The role of learning plays also an important role in anger. Modeling and observation and imitation also lead to anger. Anger is both inborn and learned. “Sham rage” can be produced by stimulation of a part of the hypothalamus, and other areas of the brain.

14. Jealousy is a form of emotional anxiety emerging due to lack of sense of security in relation to the loved ones. It has components of both fear and anger. Jealousy arises apprehending the loss of affection. Freud has tried to analyze jealousy in children in terms Oedipus complex and Electra complex.

15. The James-Lange theory suggests that the subjective state of emotion is experienced because of physiological changes occurring in response to the emotion-provoking stimuli. On the other hand, the Cannon-Bard theory contends that the emotion-provoking stimuli simultaneously elicit physiological arousal and the subjective cognitive state of emotion. In other words, the bodily changes do not cause the felt emotion; the bodily changes and the feeling of emotion occur at the same time.