1. What Are Emotions?

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about the nature of emotions and how we experience them, focusing in particular on: (i) a definition of the term ‘emotion’ as the positive or negative feelings we experience in relation to different contexts; (ii) the research of Paul Ekman who proposed the existence of six universally recognisable basic emotions as happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust; (iii) what happens when we experience an emotion, examining our psychological, physiological and behavioural responses.

Course

In this course, Professor Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham) explores anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. In the first lecture, we think about the general nature of emotions and how we experience them. In the second lecture, we think about anxiety and anxiety disorders more specifically. In the third lecture, we think about phobias, including specific phobia, social phobia and agoraphobia. Next, we think about obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and its relation to anxiety. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about stress-related conditions such as acute stress disorder (ASD), adjustment disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Lecturer

Professor Oyebode is an expert in descriptive and clinical psychopathology. He is an authority on the cognitive neuropsychiatry of delusional misidentification syndromes and on other rare and unusual psychiatric syndromes. He is the author of Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: textbook of descriptive psychopathology. This is the leading English language text on psychopathology and has been translated into Estonian, Italian, Korean and Portuguese He is also a recognised expert in medical humanities writing about the value of literature to medicine.