ABSTRACT
‘Emotion’ has been an elusive subject for psychology. It epitomizes those behavioural categories which anecdotally and intuitively are known to figure prominently in human life and experience, but which slip through the psychologist’s fingers like so many soap ducks. What work the physiological psychologist does tends to be constrained by the need for observable emotional responses – this allows him to study emotions in animals with a minimum of anthropomorphizing, but ignores the subjective experience (‘feeling’) crucial to human emotional states. Many emotions have no dramatic behavioural correlate; we can, with some ease, identify euphoria, anger, rage, and fear in others, but happiness, envy, distrust, disappointment, may have no outward sign.
