emotion is one of the four ways of knowing, the others being language, reason and perception. an angry, frightened or infatuated person is not likely to be able to see clearly or reason well, and this is why we usually tell people to be reasonable, and not emotional. there are six basic emotions, also known as primary emotions, that are common everywhere. they are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.  when photographs of people showing these emotions are shown to people, they can identify without much thought the matching emotion, no matter where they are from. also, children who are born blind and deaf show these emotions, which means that people are born with them and not taught them. as well as primary emotions, we can experience social emotions like ambition, contempt, embarrassment, envy, gratitude and a lot more. because we have so much intelligence and imagination, we are able to anticipate and picture dangers far in the future. we worry about our final exams, or our basketball game a month from now, or our camping trip in the summer.

What I found most interesting about chapter 6 was the James-Lange theory. this theory says that emotions are pretty much physical in nature, and bodily changes come before, and cause, emotional changes. for examples, if you are feeling nervous for a baseball or basketball game, or an exam, your mouth will feel dry, you will have butterflies in your stomach, and your hands will be sweaty. if you remove all of these physical signs of being nervous, then you will not feel nervous anymore because there will be no physical sings that you are.