FEATURE ARTICLE
The Nature of Emotions
Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice
Robert Plutchik
What is an emotion? More than 90 definitions have been offered over the past century, and there are almost as many theories of emotion—not to mention a complex array of overlapping words in our languages to describe them. Plutchik offers an integrative theory based on evolutionary principles. Emotions are adaptive—in fact, they have a complexity born of a long evolutionary history—and although we conceive of emotions as feeling states, Robert Plutchik says the feeling state is part of a process involving both cognition and behavior and containing several feedback loops.
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