9781422287637

11

A truck has pulled out in front of you, and now your mother is struggling to control the car as she swerves to keep from running into the back of the truck. The car ends up on the side of the road in the ditch. Luckily, no one is hurt. Your heart is pounding and you realize you are shaking all over. In the space of an hour, you’ve felt three emotions: happiness, anger, and fear. Before the day is over, you may feel a whole spectrum of other emotions, from sadness to embarrassment, sur- prise to disappointment. INSIDE FEELINGS AND OUTSIDE REALITY Our emotions are the feelings inside our minds that come and go. We’ve been experiencing them our entire life, ever since we were babies. Sometimes we feel happy, and sometimes we feel sad; sometime we feel angry, sometimes we’re scared, and sometimes we are bored. All these feelings come and go inside us. We may feel as though we have little control over them. We may also feel as though our inside feelings are telling us about outside reality. So when we feel sad, for example, we may believe that the world really is a gloomy place where bad things happen. We believe our sadness tells us something about the Make Connections • Experts say that people feel only 6 main emotions— happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, and an- ger—and that all the other emotions we experience are some sort of combination or variation of these. • There are more than 600 words in the English language used to describe emotions. • We use 42 muscles in our faces to express emotions.

What Are Emot ions?