What is an emotion

By defining emotions, or pathê, as "all those feelings which change man by leading him to modify his judgment and which are accompanied by suffering or pleasure" (Rhetoric, book II, chap. 1, 1378a), Aristotle formulates what is considered to be one of the earliest definitions of emotions. Since then, a large number of definitions have been proposed and have been classified into ten categories:

- affective (emphasis on the perception of physiological activation and (or) hedonic value);

- cognitive (emphasis on cognitive assessment and (or) labeling processes);

- situational (emphasis on situations likely to trigger emotion);

- physiological (emphasis on the internal physical mechanisms of emotion);

- behavioral (emphasis on emotional responses observable from the outside);

- focused on disruptive effects (emphasis on dysfunctional effects of emotion);

- adaptive (emphasis on the organizational or functional effects of emotion);

- multicomponential (emphasis on the various interconnected components of emotion);

- restrictive (differentiating emotion from other psychological processes);

- motivational (emphasis on the relationship between emotion and motivation).

There is no consensus on a comprehensive taxonomy of emotion, but certain categories are nevertheless widely used in the scientific literature. These taxonomies are based on various criteria, and the categories often overlap, because a given emotion (eg fear) falls into more than one category at the same time. Thus, emotions are often categorized according to their valence: an emotion is said to be positive if “the feeling is pleasant” or negative if “the feeling is unpleasant”.