Tuesday, October 12, 2010

What is an Emotion?

What is human emotion? For decades, the most common way to study emotion was through the study of psychology. In order to do so, psychologists would place a human subject in an experimental situation to study how the human subject might react to their given situation. The psychologists would then use the human subjects behavior as a way to find out questions such as “How does he/she react when put in this kind of situation?”

Recently, new instruments have been developed known as brain imaging machines. These machines can scan your brain and provide certain results. These results often indicate a level of activity in different regions of the brain. Through various types of brain imaging techniques, scientists were able to find what is considered the emotional center of the brain. Scientists call this region of the brain the amygdala. Though the amygdala is often referred to as the brains emotional center, emotions still cause brain activity in all parts of the brain!

Cognitive Science is a relatively new science that doesn’t limit one to studying just the psychology of the human or the neurology of the brain, but incorporates a wide field of scientific perspective, including biology, psychology, linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence and philosophy, attempting to uncover some of the most complex mysteries of the brain, such as how emotion is represented in the brain. 

In the next blog, we will take a look at some different theories of emotion. 


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