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Emotions comprise a vast area of inquiry. It is beset with verbal pitfalls, since so much about emotions is unverbalizable; it is logically treacherous, since they span so many differing frames of reference.
Two groups of questions can be distinguished: those at the level of phenomenological description, which are essentially psychological, and those at the level of motivational mechanism, which are more psychoanalytical, ultimately perhaps neuropsychological.
At the phenomenological level, some deceptively simple questions have to do with definition. What are the key factors which characterize experiences and behaviors we call emotional? Some of these features are (1) a kind of vividness and immediacy; (2) a connection to bodily, especially visceral, processes; (3) an urgency or imperiousness; (4) a quantitative range, from faint traces to massive and intense reactions; (5) a tendency to persist, to flow and ebb relatively slowly; (6) the appearance of parallel and simultaneous aspects rather than only exclusive and single ones; (7) relatively stereotyped expressive patterns, many of which are shared with other animals.
At the phenomenological level we also face problems of classification. Numerous schemes have attempted to identify basic emotions and to trace their modes of combination into more complex