Emotion (glossary entry)

Within my systems of awareness and reality, emotion is the level above physical and below mental.

Acting

Actors have a special ability to summon any emotional state, together with its physiological manifestations, effortlessly and at a moment's notice.

In their training actors notice that there are some states normally thought of as "emotional", which cannot be summoned as easily. The "actable" emotions were called "open" and "instinctive" by Darwin; the others were described by Freud as "hidden" or "repressed"¹.

The five major "actable" emotions are:

mad : anger, rage, etc.

sad : grief

glad : joy, happy lightness, euphoria

afraid

ashamed

In addition to these are several less common states that are also able to be summoned using the same techniques (e.g. those of Stanislavski):

physiological sexual arousal (most notably the emotional state of orgasm)

calmness (turning other emotions off at will even those that did not originate voluntarily, also called using the observer mind)

contempt or "attitude" (commonly exhibited by models on the runway in a fashion show)

1 : Oliver Sacks, Face-Blind: Why are some of us terrible at recognizing faces?, New Yorker magazine, 2010 August 30.

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