EMOTIONS

We think of emotions as these signals and pieces of information you get from the environment that provide clues as to what's important and what motivates our behavior to go in certain directions. To be more concrete, an emotion is thought to be an evolutionary, hardwired response to our environment. It has many components. When you feel fear, for example, you have a subjective experience—a qualia—of what it's like to feel fear. You have a behavioral display; it may be your nonverbal posture or an expression in your face. There's also a physiological correlate; it may be that your heart rate is increasing. It may be that we see, at the neuroendocrine level, cortisol levels rising. Emotions are thought to be these critical to our survival responses to the environment that have a feeling state, a behavioral state, and a physiological level.