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The movements of expression in the face and body, whatever their origin may have been, are in themselves of much importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between the mother and her infant; she smiles approval, and this encourages her child on the right path, or frowns disapproval. The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken words. They reveal the thoughts and intentions of others more truly than do words, which may be falsified…. These results follow partly from the intimate relation which exists between almost all the emotions and their outward manifestation….
In clinical circles it is usual for affects, feelings, and emotions to be referred to as though they were causative of behaviour. That is one reason for discussing them at this point. Another is that every good clinician uses the language of feeling and emotion to communicate with his patients—as everyone does in his communication with others in everyday life. Both the clinician and other readers may therefore already be impatient to know the place that feeling and emotion are assigned in the theory of instinctive behaviour advanced.
Briefly, the view taken is that all, or at least most, of what are termed (rather indiscriminately) affects, feelings, and emotions are phases of an individual's intuitive appraisals either of his own organismic states and urges to act or of the succession of environmental situations in which he finds himself. These appraising processes have often, but not always, the very special property of being experienced as feelings, or, to use better terminology, as felt. Because an individual is often aware of these processes, they commonly provide him with a monitoring service regarding his own states, urges, and