Emotion

Define the term Emotion. What are the four common features of all emotions? Dental anxiety is evident in clinical practice, what method could you employ to overcome this?
“An emotion is a positive or negative feeling (or affective state) consisting of a pattern of cognitive, physiological and behavioural reactions to events that have relevance to important goals or motives”. Categorization of emotion is based on duration. Some emotions occur over a period of seconds, for example ‘surprise’ where others can last years like ‘love’. A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviors and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting or fleeing.
There are many common features of emotions.
Responses to Eliciting Stimuli be it external or internal. “An eliciting stimulus is a change in the environment that is highly correlated with the occurrence of a later response. An eliciting stimulus is an essential component of Pavlovian conditioning.” For example, if a piece of chocolate, unconditioned stimulus, is placed into your mouth, then you will probably salivate copiously, unconditioned response. Placing the piece of chocolate into the mouth is said to elicit salivation.Then we have, Cognitive appraisal of the Stimuli. In the absence of physiological arousal, we decide what to feel after interpreting or explaining what has just happened. Two things are important in this: whether we interpret the event as good or bad for us, and what we believe is the cause of the event. This challenges the two-factor separation of arousal and emotion, supporting the Cannon and Bard theory albeit with the addition of the thinking step. In primary appraisal, we consider how the situation affects our personal well-being. In secondary appraisal we consider how we might cope with the situation. This is sometimes also called Lazarus Theory. For example, when a...