What exactly are emotions?

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I vaguely remember from Psychology 101 that you have a primary emotional reaction, anger, fear, elation , that lasts only a few seconds, that is pure emotion. Then, your cognitive evaluation of the stimulus or the situation, your thoughts become inter-mingled with the emotional reaction to whatever it is. But, both emotion and cognition happen in the brain. They are both to do with chemical reactions in your brain and the anatomy of your brain. (e.g your emotion center is the amygdala, cognition would result from a complex interaction within your cerebral cortex? I would think anyways)

Emotions are labels that we learn to apply to physiological states/sensations, or mixtures of thoughts and physiological states/sensations. They are social constructs.

There is no such thing as happiness for example; it is a word people use to describe all kinds of reactions/states, that they have learned to think of as "happiness". Different people might label the same sensation "love", "excitement", "hypomania", "first cigarette and coffee of the day buzz", or a food opioid high. "Emotions" are value judgements. For instance, some of us have learned to apply the word depression to various states/sensations; it is a label which tends to provoke fear, and as as someone said, thoughts can trigger certain physiological reactions/states, so that is one value judgement which will almost inevitably make things worse.

PS. ManErg, I loved your description of the city made up of various "moods". About wondering how managed to leave a rundown area, I think that if don't get too attached to the "label"/value that have given to a reaction it often tends to go away of its own accord, unless it is a chronic physiological state caused by diet or ill health that is.

As daydreamer said, it seems that there are some primary physiological reactions, which you'd think would be obvious to us, but very often aren't, and get variously deformed, overlaid, mixed up with the next physical reaction, and/or our thoughts about that physiological sensation, and which "mixture"/brew we then apply a "value judgement" to, ( a label ), saying that we felt "resentment", or "bitterness", or "disappointed", or "suspicious" or "ashamed" or something, which value judgement we might then act on, if we haven't already acted on the very first physiological reaction already, and even then we might act on the judgement later, after mulling it over for a few minutes, hours, or even days if we are AS

In most cases we will probably never realise that what we experienced was one second of fear, ... or "simply" the blood sugar/food opioid crash/hangover/comedown from a chocolate bar/pizza, because one of the factors often overlooked is that our body's underlying, ( or not so underlying ), physiological state provokes physical sensations/states which our thoughts ( and even our body ), interpret as signs of danger, reasons for fear, for retreat/withdrawal, for avoiding social contact, or for getting involved in something, for liking someone, smiling, etc in exactly the same way as physical reactions to our environment or thoughts do.
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yesno, I mean ouinon: Emotions are social constructs in the same way all knowledge is a social construct, society being the manner in which the current state of the herd prefers to self-regulate and communication of social constructs is the mechanism by which the herd establishes that which is the domain of the social commons and enacts the governance of the herd. They are not value judgments. They are descriptors of states of being in a modal sense, they are the physiological condition of a human form in reaction to stimuli to act us a meta level of influence over action to couch our responses in a specific context.

By saying they are value judgments you are making a value judgment that is not built into the model of human emotion. You seem to be implying that happiness is good and depression is bad, they are not good or bad they are modes of being on a temporally localized level. They are useful to the individual experiencing them in that they are a method by which a more primitive executive function system exerts influence upon the hierarchy chain of human action impulses. Certain physiological abilities that selective pressures lead to us developing, are only typically put into action in certain modes of being.

It is like a safety mechanism in some cases, your body is capable of doing certain really aggressive things to itself physiologically that are useful to be able to do, but should only be done in dire circumstances. Your body doesn't do a full blown endorphine release unless it is in the emotional modality that comes about as a reaction to specific types of stimuli, which endorphines have specific utility combating. If you can release endogenous opioid polypeptides into your bloodstream at will, you are at risk of overproducing them and slowly turning off your CNS. You will certainly feel quite euphoric as it happens, right up until you just stop breathing and die. I don't think I would personally judge euphoria, which in my modality model would be like a Happiness-11 on a 1-10 scale, as a Good Thing in this context. Your body goes Spinal Tap and sinks itself with a homemade love torpedo.

Yes, if one stops being exposed to the stimuli that provoke a specific emotional state, they will tend to be stimulated into another state. Conversely if something happens and you respond in a manner and then keep dwelling on what something that happened, thereby reinforcing the original stimuli, you will tend to remain in the state that stimuli provokes. Either situation could be judged good or bad based on the specific context involved.

In most cases people never make a sincere attempt to actually establish what they experienced. People tend to be too busy experiencing the next thing and reacting to that. Humanity in general does not tend to be very self aware. They just go try to get theirs without experiencing too much trauma. Emotional modality has been established by selective pressures as an effective method of navigating human societies while avoiding enough trauma to procreate and pass on your genes.

Emotions are the status of the system, thoughts are the mechanism by which action is carried out within the context of the status by the system.

Emotions are things like crying, anger, sadness, happy, stress, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions

It is possible Maggiedoll, I was 18 when diagnosed. It is hard to find people with knowledge of autism spectrum things, and harder still to find people to look seriously at females and/or adults, but they are out there.

Other than the physical, electro-chemical nature of emotions, I think of them as an obstacle most of the time, as a filter to my perceptions. It's like I'm looking through a lens at the world, and emotions are filter paper that slightly alter to totally obscure my ability to see things objectively. It can be very frustrating.