An emotion (or feeling) is a psychosomatic experience reflecting an automatic subconscious evaluation of some aspect of reality. The dual nature of emotions is reflected in the distinguishing characteristic "psychosomatic," from the roots "psycho" (mind) and "somat" (body). Because emotions are experienced physically, somewhat like the data provided us by our senses, some people tend to misread them as oracular signals from external reality. They originate, however, not in outer reality but in a mental process of evaluation. (The function of evaluation will be analyzed in detail in Section 2.)

Emotional evaluations are almost instantaneous and typically summarize a long chain of past thoughts and value judgments. Over a period of time, a person's thoughts and evaluations of his or her experiences are assimilated into the subconscious, enabling super-rapid, quasi-automatic responses to similar later experiences. The major objective of hypnosis and several other psychotherapeutic techniques is to alter this subconscious "programming," through the mediating influence of the conscious mind. (In an apparent exception to the usual pattern, a few primitive emotions seem to arise directly from the sensory and perceptual levels in infants ().)     

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