Measuring Emotion: Behavior, Feeling, and Physiology

Abstract What are emotions? What are feelings? How can they be both central events of our experience as human beings and ephemera that seem to occur unbidden by the mind and beyond our control? Do feelings prompt behavior, or is a feeling merely the shadow of an action? Why is the expectation of pain often worse than the pain itself? Philosophers have searched for answers to such questions over centuries of thought and study. All of us wonder why emotion is sometimes so destructive, and so often the focus of mental disorder. Is a wholly rational consciousness the true ideal? Are emotions of any use?