An emotion is a term for a mental and physiological state associated with a wide variety of feelings, thoughts, and behavior. Emotions are subjective experiences, or experienced from a individual point of view. Emotion is often associated with mood, temperament, personality, and disposition. The English word 'emotion' is derived from the French word émouvoir. This is based on the Latin emovere, where e- (variant of ex-) means 'out' and movere means 'move'. The related term "motivation" is also derived from movere.
Emotions can be divided between 'cognitive' theories of emotions and 'non-cognitive' theories of emotions; or instinctual emotions (from the amygdala), and cognitive emotions (from the prefrontal cortex). Some psychologists divide emotions into basic and complex categories, where base emotions lead to more complex ones. Emotions can be categorized by their duration. Some emotions occur over a period of seconds (e.g. surprise) where others can last years (e.g. love). No definitive taxonomy exists.
A related distinction is between the emotion and the results of the emotion, principally behaviours and emotional expressions. People often behave in certain ways as a direct result of their emotional state, such as crying, fighting or fleeing. Yet again, if one can have the emotion without the corresponding behaviour then we may consider the behaviour not to be essential to the emotion. The James-Lange theory posits that emotional experience is largely due to the experience of bodily changes. The functionalist approach to emotions (e.g.,Nico Frijda) holds that emotions have evolved for a particular function, such as to keep the subject safe.
