In day-to-day language, emotion has a broad menaing encomasing all of the ways we assess and feel about the world and peope and thinsg in it: love, fear, joy, surprise. In psychology emotion refers to physiological effects such heart rate, whereas feeling refers to the interpretation of this in higher-order ways such as 'fear' or 'excitement'. In addition, mood refers to the longer term orientation, for example, if you are feeling particularly down, or particularly positive about things. Crucially in many situations the physiological effect (emotion) preceeds the interpretation (feeling), and the latter depends on your mood. For example, if someone burst a balloon your heart will instantly race, but whether this leads to a sense of fun, fear or anger depends on your mood and the situation. In day-to-day speech both emotion and feeling are often called 'emotion'. The distinction is important, however, when creating intelligent user interfaces that seek to interpret or predict human emotional responses. It can also be useful when considering artificial emotion, with different ways to emulate the physiological side and the interpretation of this.
Often emotion and intelligence are regarded as being in opposition, think of the famously emotionless Dr Spock who relies entirely on logic. However, for humans the two are intimately interrelated. On the one hand emotion acts as a fast route to action for times when there is not time to think; we have various mechanisms that tune this, including regret which uses complex counter-factual reasoning to create an emotional response that trains our lower level stimulus–response learning behaviour. In addition, boredom can help you avoud getting stuck trying the same things during problem solving, effectively encouraging you to alternate between depth first and breadth first strategies. Artificial intelligence can potentially emulate some of these qualities of human emotion.
Defined on pages 543, 548
Used on Chap. 6: page 126; Chap. 8: page 153; Chap. 22: pages 533, 543, 544, 546, 548, 549; Chap. 23: pages 554, 563
Also known as human emotion