ABSTRACT
This chapter explores emotions as lived in everyday life. It also explores ideas about emotions, that is, explicit theories and teachings. In the West, philosophy and, more recently, science have been major sources of ideas about the emotions; this is not as true in China. It is reasonable to assume, however, that over time a dialectical relation exists between ideas and realities of emotion, such that each helps shape the other. The emotions are “located” in the sensitive faculty, common to humans and infrahuman animals. Aristotle’s most general definition of emotion was simply “feelings accompanied by pleasure or pain”. Histories of ideas are important, if for no other reason than to satisfy one of the most fundamental of human emotions: curiosity.
