Psychology of Emotions

Cognitive and biological approaches to psychology have often been used in understanding how we experience emotions, and how they affect our behavior. In this area, we've put together articles that help to convey some of these theories.

Do Animals Experience Emotions?

Do Animals Emote?

Do animals experience emotions such as stress and joy? Do Animals Experience Emotions? ›

Most Read in Psychology of Emotions:

1. The Psychology of Color

2. Hate Emotion

3. Unconscious Ideas and Emotions

4. Emotion: Feelings

5. Love Emotion

6. Anxiety Emotion

7. Do Emoticons Help Us To Better Communicate Emotions?

8. Psychology of Happiness

9. Model of Emotions

10. The Name-Letter Effect: Why People Prefer Partners with Similar Names

Do Emoticons Help Us To Better Communicate Emotions?

Emoting with Emoticons

Are you feeling :-D? Or is your work making you :-(? Perhaps this post’s overzealous peppering of emoticons is starting to make you a little :@? The rise of the internet gave birth to the method of communication we now recognize as emoticons. Text-based representations of feelings, such as :-) to express satisfaction, help to make email and instant...

Psychology of Color

Does color affect your mood? Psychologists have said "Absolutely!" to that question for a very long time. The psychological effects of color have such an underpinning in research that the findings of chromology, the psychology of color, are used in designing everything from hotel rooms to cereal packages. In one case that made headlines...

The Name-Letter Effect: Why People Prefer Partners with Similar Names

Brittany and Bob: Name Letter Effect

Does the name given to you at birth influence who you will choose to partner with as an adult? According to the name-letter effect, people are more likely to be attracted to someone who shares their first initials. A man named Robert, for example, may be more attracted to women by the name of Rachel or Roberta, whilst a woman named Amy might be more likely...

Psychology of Happiness

Just how happy are you? Do you ever wish for a life that brought more moments to be joyful? Happiness is often an elusive experience - people will go to great lengths for a fleeting moment of happiness. Even the U.S. Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, asserts the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. But what...

Emotions and Memory

The question of how our how our brains memorize daily experiences has intrigued cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists for decades. Amongst a range of theories attempting to explain how we encode and later recall information, a curious influence over memory encoding has been observed: our emotional state at the time of an event...

Emotional Attraction

We all know how it feels to be attracted to someone - the old argument still lives on as to whether a person's looks or personality influence us more, but let's looks at what does attract people to each other. This factor is one of the most researched elements of attraction between couples. Good looking people, charismatic or dull, have a...

Love and Emotion: How Love Happens

Of all the ideas and concepts we come across in life, perhaps one of the most difficult to describe in any reliable wording is that of 'love'. The Ancient Greeks classified love into the types we feel between sexual lovers, friends and divinity, but first we must distinguish between a liking for someone (for example, a work...

Hate Emotion

What is emotional hatred, why do people experience it and where does it come from?

Emotion Guide

The analysis of emotions has been ineffectual up till now since they are very difficult to identify, except for a few such as fear and anger. Many years ago I began an intense psycho-analysis (which I did on my own). It took me five years of constant awareness to finally identify the range of emotions that I usually experience. The...

Emotion: Feelings

One area of confusion is that feelings are often loosely equated with emotions. This is all right for colloquial use. I can ask a friend how he is feeling today ; it would be awkward to ask him how emotional he is being today. Some people might take offence if they were thought to be emotional, whereas it is acceptable for them to show ...

Model of Emotions

Emotions are partly derived from feelings. To explain how this derivation occurs I use a model of consciousness that is a traditional one: consciousness has three modes, those of will, mind, and feeling. Past variations on this model substituted action for will, and emotion or sensibility for feelings. In this model I distinguish between...

Emotion: Unconscious Ideas

The mental concept that is associated with an emotion actually creates the boundaries of that emotion. If the mental concept changes, the emotion does not change ; instead, it fades away and a different emotion arises, one that fits the current mental concept. The mental concepts of emotions are not normally a part of our awareness. Emotions...

Unconscious Ideas and Emotions

No feeling is permanent. There is a constant oscillation between the positive and negative feelings. Emotions are constantly changing, in part because feelings change, and in part due to the constant stream of ideas that flow in the unconscious mind. At the conscious and subconscious levels of mind we can focus on an unconscious idea and use...

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