What actually are emotions?
Flexible and varied mixtures of feeling and thought that are a response to the current situation and that help to guide our behaviour.
Notes
Emotions are always a combination of feeling and thought and are aimed at producing directed behaviour to achieve specific survival benefits.
We may be more aware of either the thoughts or feelings associated with particular emotions unless we are experienced at recognising and exploring our cognitions.
Emotional feelings can be very varied in strength and quality, although there is enough common experience of emotion for us to be able to communicate a description of our feeling in ways that mostly can be recognised by other people.
Emotions are very strongly associated with conscious and semi-conscious thoughts and imaginings, so much so that simply thinking certain thoughts may immediately produce feelings.
In the HI Mind Model, behaviours are mainly a mix of primary behaviours to engage beneficially with something, to pull away from a situation, or to engage destructively. These primary behaviours are typically named love, fear, and anger. An additional dimension of emotion could include contentment, although that can also be treated as a passive form of love.
Emotions tend to constantly vary and can be difficult to precisely define, which can lead to some examples of confusion about what is and what is not actually an emotion. For example, guilt is technically not an emotion, it is a judgement (shame is the emotion that commonly goes with a guilty self-judgement).
Another example is pain, where the feelings can be strong and there will probably be many thoughts. Pain is a subconscious compulsion.
Similarly, generalised body feelings can be mistaken for emotion. When I have eaten a large meal I may feel discomfort that feels very similar to fear or anxiety and indeed some feelings may lead to actual fear or anxiety because I misinterpret a physical feeling for a mind-generated motivation.
Another potential, though problematic, example is pure ecstasy where there is almost overpowering feeling but active consciousness and thinking are likely to be absent. Ecstasy may be an extreme form of exhilaration or desire (both emotions primarily expressing a form of love and directed at a specific experience). In the case of ecstasy though the experience not only is difficult to associate with behaviour and thought but may be more about transcendence or some other altered state of consciousness.
I bring the example of ecstasy up as it shows the problem of trying to be too pedantic about definitions of experiences in the mind. In practicable terms the simple definition of emotion given above should cover most day-to-day experiences.