Oh, wow, oh, oh, wow, oh, wow, oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

Oh, James. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast episode 135,

The Science of Emotions.

I'm your host, James Fodor.

In this episode, we're going to talk about the difficult and rather and rather, in some sense,

unscientific topic of emotions.

In particular, we're going to talk about what are emotions and the thorny

issue of defining what we mean by emotion. I'm then going to cover classifications of emotions,

and then we're going to talk about different psychological theories of emotions and the neurobiology

of emotion. Recommended pre-listening is the immediately previous episode 134 hormones and the endocrine

system which will provide a little bit of background help for understanding certain aspects of

what we talk about today. So let's jump straight in and begin by talking about defining emotions.

Everyone knows in some sense what emotions are, but if someone asks you to define what is an emotion,

it turns out to be rather more difficult than you might have thought. Of course, we can give examples

of emotions. Happiness, sadness, anger, fear are some of the most common examples, but

it's hard to say exactly what all these things have in common, and it's hard also to distinguish

emotions from other related phenomena, such as pain or discomfort or hunger, or moods, and so forth.

So we'll talk about some of that in these initial remarks here. I think one of the first things

that I want to discuss is the idea that can we even study emotions scientifically? Many people think of emotions as ultimately subjective and therefore not amenable to scientific inquiry.

And I think that this is mistaken. Depending on your point of view, emotions are just part of the physical world,

just like other phenomena that we study in science, like chemicals and the nervous system and digestion and the

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