Page:Outlines of Psychology (Wundt) 1907.djvu/220

 1 00 //. Psychical Compounds. . The names of different emotions, like those of feelings, do not indicate single processes, but classes in which a large number of single affective processes are grouped because of certain common characteristics. Emotions such as joy, hope, anxiety, care, and anger, are accompanied in every case by new ideational contents; their affective elements also, and even the way in which the emotions themselves occur, may vary greatly. The more composite a psychical process, the more variable will be its single concrete manifestations; a particular emotion will, therefore, be less apt to occur in exactly the same form than wUl a particular feeling. Every general name for emotions indicates, accordingly, certain typical forms in which related, affective processes occur. . Not every interconnected series of affective processes is called an emotion or is to be classed as such under one of the typical forms discriminated by language. An emotion is a unitary whole which is distinguished from a composite feeling through two characteristics. First, an emotion has a definite temporal course and second, it exercises a more intense present and subsequent effect on the interconnection of psychical processes. The first characteristic arises from the fact that an emotion is a process of a higher order as compared with a single feeling, for it always includes a succession of several feelings. The second characteristic depends on the intensification of the effect produced by the summation of the feelings. As a result of these characteristics, emotions have in the midst of all their variations in form a regularity in the manner of their occurrence. They always begin with a more or less intense inceptive feeling which in its quality and direction is immediately characteristic of the nature of the emotions. This inceptive feeling is due either to an idea produced by an external impression (outer emotional stimu- lation) or to a psychical process arising from associative or