Whether or not our feelings of emotion depend on feed back either from the visceral organs as the James-Longe theory presumed or from the facial muscles is just one of the many problems that continue to make emotions a topic of speculation and debate.

But there is no doubt that emotions are accompanied by bodily changes of many kinds, ranging from pupil size to activity of the glands, digestive organs and heart muscles, even the chemical composition of the blood. Nor is there any doubt that the activity of the brain changes, a fact that many psychologist now believe is the real key to emotional behaviour.

Certainly, emotions must be numbered among our most intense conscious experiences. Strong emotions, of the kind that made Oedipus gouge out his eyes, Juliet renounce her family for Romeo and Hamlet killed his uncle the king, have been the chief subject of literature in all cultures throughout history.

In our own day-to-day lives, our emotions frequently command our attention. When they boil up, we cannot ignore them. Our pleasant emotions such as joy, love and so on have us “walking on air”. Our unpleasant emotions, anger, fear, shame, disgust and so on fill us with despair.

Emotions sometimes make it impossible for us to choose our words carefully, to concentrate on our work or even to read or listen to music. They may make us, for the moment, totally irrational.
A study of how people acted in emotional crises, such as being caught in a fire that threatened their life, found out that about 15 percent became so panicky that they were unable to take any appropriate action. Another 70 percent showed at least some signs of disorganization.

The brain’s activity according to the cannon-Bard theory was the basis of another famous theory of emotions. According to him, stimuli in the environment cause the hypothalamus to fire off patterns of nervous activity that have two simultaneous effects. One, the hypothalamus arouses the autonomic nervous system and thus triggers the various physiological changes associated with emotion. Two, at the sametime the hypothalamus sends messages to the cerebral cortex that result in our feelings of emotion.

Cannon-Bard theory considers the physiological changes to be a sort of side effect useful in preparing the body to take appropriate action but not essential to our conscious experience of emotion.

The cognitive view of emotion emphasizes the conscious experience of emotion, that is the mental processes that account for our feelings of joy, anger, fear and so on. Many factors contribute to this experience one is information about events in the environment, delivered to the cortex or highest part of the brain form the sense organs. Another is the brain’s store house of information about similar events in the past, which aids in appraising and interpreting the new stimuli.

Another is the patterns of nervous impulses in the hypottulanius and the rest of the brain’s limbic system which, acting through the autonomic nervous system and probably also directly on the pituitary gland, create the physiological changes, delivered to the cortex via sensory neurons from the visceral organs and the muscles of the body and face. All these factors interact to produce the emotions we experience and sometimes to initiate behaviour that expresses our emotions, intensifies the pleasant ones or helps us escape from the unpleasant ones.

Indeed, some psychologists think of emotional experiences as another of the altered states of consciousness. People who strike back with unaccustomed vigor in anger or panic in fear sometimes say afterward, “I wasn’t myself” or “I must have been out of my mind”. And certainly, emotions, like other altered states, affect perception. To a joyous person, the world appears bright and cheerful. To a person caught up in distress and disgust, the world is full of gloom and disaster.

Individual difference in emotion
If someone asked you how many different kinds of emotions a human being can experience, how would you answer? Our language contains hundreds of words that describe emotional feelings and your answer might depend on how many of these words you are familiar with, also, how many of them you use to appraise and label your own feelings. The range of possibilities and the intensity with which we experience all the various feelings, from mild to overwhelming is almost limitless

Bodily changes in emotion
The normal movements of the stomach and intestines, associated with the digestion and absorption of food, usually stop during anger and rage. In other emotional states, they may show changes resulting in Nausea or diarrhea, the body’s metabolic rate tends to go up. Food in the blood stream and the body tissues themselves are burned off at a faster state, creating additional energy. Breathing may change in rate, depth and ratio between time spent breathing in and time spent breathing out.

We may gasp or pant. The Salivary glands may stop working causing the feeling of dryness in the mouth often associated with fear and anger. The sweat glands, on the other hand, may become overactive, as shown by dropping forehead that may accompany embarrassment or the “cold sweat” that sometimes accomparies fear. The muscles of the base of the hairs may contract and raise goose flesh. Finally, the pupils of the eyes may enlarge; causing the wide eyed look that is characteristic of rate, excitement and pain.

All these changes represent bodily activities controlled by the autonomic nervous system and the endocrine glands. Over which we ordinarily have little if any conscious control. And it is worthy of note that we do not seem to have much control over our emotions. They often seem to boil up of their own accord and we feel them even if we manage to hide all outward signs. Even in situations where we have determined in advance to remain calm, we often find ourselves unaccountably angry, frightened or anxious.

In the case of fear and anger, two of the most powerful emotion, the adrenal glands seem to be unusually active. In one study, a chemical analysis was made of the urine of players on a professional hockey team to determine how their adrenal glands functioned before and after a game. The players who took an active part in the game, likely to win, showed about six times as much nor adrendalin after the game as before hand. But two injured players, who were unable to play and were worried about their future with the team, showed increased amounts of adrenalin. The coach sometimes showed more noradrenalin and sometimes more adrenalin, depending on how well his team had done.

Aside from detecting the presence of adrenalin in fear and noradrenalin in anger psychologist have found it very difficult to match any particular bodily state with any particular emotional experience. The same person, on two separate occasions when reporting feelings of joyousness, may show a different pattern of bodily change each time.

Among students anxious over an examination, for example, one may tend to perspire a great deal, another to show muscle tension, another to have a rapid pulse. Certainly bodily changes are an important element in emotion that affect blood pressure, blood pressure may arise sharply and blood is often diverted from the digestive organs to the muscles of movement and to the surface of the body, resulting in flushed cheeks and the sensation of warmth. The composition of blood changes. The number of red corpuscles, which carry oxygen, increases markedly.