ABSTRACT
Consciousness serves as a sentient boundary between stimulation from the external physical or social worlds and the internal bodily world. Emotions are a part of consciousness and reflect the complex interaction of mind and body. Psychologists have always seemed to disagree about the nature of emotion, in other words, about how the mind and body interact. While a unified theory of emotion remains elusive, the main theories can be divided into complementary “action” and “experience” oriented groups. Three action oriented approaches to emotion, associated with centralism, behaviourism, and cognitivism, focus on the adaptive and purposive mind. In contrast, experience oriented theories related to peripheralism, psychodynamics, and phenomenology/existentialism, encompass bodily reactions to social meanings.
