Abstract

Traditionally, philosophers have defined emotions to be interruptions to otherwise logical states of being (Smith & Kirby, 2000). The recent resurgence of research in the emotional realm in both psychology and cognitive science agrees with the view developed by the late Charles Darwin who, in the late 1800s, conceived that emotions play an important part in our cognition and serve to provide us with the mechanisms for adaptive behaviour in a dynamically complex world (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985).