What Are the Major Conceptual Difficulties in Defining an Emotion?

There are a few processes involved in attempting to define anything. To begin, we must recognise all of the varieties of that thing. Next, we must determine what those categories have in common, and ultimately, we must determine what distinguishes them from others. We see that when we define emotions in general, or even one specific emotion, we run into the criterion problem — since it is extremely difficult to locate something common across all the kinds, and without knowing the definition, it becomes progressively difficult to even know the types. There are many other issues to consider while defining an emotion.

The first obstacle we run against is the fact that emotions are subjective. It is hard to separate an emotional experience from one's own prejudices. There is a shift in one's subjective appraisal of the other's subjective attitude, according to Ben-Ze'ev. According to Damasio, emotions may be impacted by memory, and no two people's memories are the same. There is also a distinction between emotions and emotions in context. For example, if a student misses class for a week, the teacher may become irritated. If the teacher learns that the student missed classes because they were hospitalised, the teacher will be concerned and pitying; however, if the teacher learns that the student was hospitalised for a week due to a recreational drug overdose, the teacher will be enraged and may take serious action against the student.

Damasio defines homeostasis in his book Feeling and Knowing, but we observe that it is an exclusively physiological description with no mention of the emotional side, which makes us wonder if any definition of emotional homeostasis is possible at all. The notion of homeostasis makes it simpler to identify changes and arousals, as well as to define such changes. Because we don't know what the 'normal' condition of emotions is, we can only assess physiological homeostasis.

The valence-arousal model plots emotions on two axes — arousal (from low to high) and valence (from negative to positive) — placing states like excited in the high-arousal, positive-valence quadrant; alarmed and afraid in the high-arousal, negative-valence quadrant; calm and serene in the low-arousal, positive-valence quadrant; and depressed and bored in the low-arousal, negative-valence quadrant. The point of emotional equilibrium or homeostasis would theoretically be the origin of this graph, but a quick self-check will reveal that at any given time we feel any of these emotions or something similar — making it difficult to define emotions around a stable baseline.

If we accept the James-Lange-Dewey theory, which is supported by Ekman's studies, that physiological changes are the foundation of emotions, then the same emotion will be experienced differently by everyone since the physiological basis is different. Homeostasis changes throughout time, both before and after an event. Furthermore, there is a significant possibility that there are deviations from homeostasis at any given time. Then there's the issue of positive and negative deviation, and to what extent, which makes defining an emotion exceedingly difficult.

Although this is about feelings rather than expression, emotion cannot be quantified in its pure form on the inside. It is always measured by the other — therefore there is a loss of information in mapping from emotion to expression, just as there is in mapping in a function with distinct input and output. Just that we don't know what the function is in this situation. There is a separation between emotion and emotion-related information. Physiological changes provide information about the emotion, but they are not the emotion in itself. Because physiological changes are the only quantifiable qualities, we never know the emotion in its purest form — and how can we define something that we have never directly studied?

One may argue that even if the emotion is not discernible by the other, the self knows what emotion they are experiencing — but then we wouldn't have anything in common to describe the emotion. Furthermore, because certain emotions are sensed subconsciously, the person may be ignorant of the emotion they are experiencing. Emotions exist at the intersection of consciousness and sub-consciousness; neither domain alone captures them fully.

One might even be duped by oneself. Feeling less sorrowful may be mistaken for happiness — a state (A) that sits just above the threshold of neutral on the valence scale is read as belonging to the positive register (B), because we have no reliable internal instrument for the distance between them. Furthermore, emotions are frequently mistaken with moods and dispositions, adding to the complication.

Ekman introduced us to the notion of emotion categories and dimensions, where each dimension may be applied to a category but the dimensions cannot be precisely defined. There is also some uncertainty in the categories since, as Ben Ze'ev suggests, each of these categories can be subdivided into other emotions.

The most we can do is organise emotions into prototypical groups in which membership is decided by the degree of closeness of an item to the best example in each category — similar to the categories outlined by Ekman, although even this has ambiguity. If the reader is still not convinced of the difficulties in describing an emotion, they might consider whether they are disgusted, disappointed, or delighted after reading this essay.

References

• Ben-Ze'ev, Aaron. The Subtlety of Emotions. MIT Press, 2001.
• Damasio, Antonio. Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious. Pantheon, 2021.
• Ekman, Paul, Wallace V. Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth. Emotion in the Human Face: Guidelines for Research and an Integration of Findings. Vol. 11. Elsevier, 2013.