ABSTRACT
Emotions are intense feelings, usually as a response to environmental events and social interactions that are often associated with autonomic arousal. Basic emotions have been described as anger, fear, disgust, surprise, sadness and happiness. The James–Lange theory of emotion proposed that emotions were the product of self-observed physical or bodily reactions to a stimulus. Emotional response in our daily lives is almost always preceded by some form of appraisal and this has been seen as a crucial component of emotional frameworks since the early work of Arnold Lazarus in the 1960s. A social interaction requires a number of cognitive activities that compete for attention. Pathological affect occurs as a result of lesions that often include subcortical areas. This involves easily triggered affect, which might be called emotional lability or, in the case of a response following stroke, emotionalism. A seeming stronghold of right hemisphere theorists is that the right hemisphere excels in the judgement of emotional faces.
