What is an emotion?

Each of the previous chapters has provided us with reasons for approaching emotions from a teleonomic perspective and for analysing the control of emotions by biological methods. As I stated at the beginning of this book, I think the data show that biology provides a useful basis for the study of emotion. It enables us to ask the right sort of questions about emotion. I also stated at the outset that the book would not provide a new theory of the emotions. There are two reasons, in this case, why asking the right sort of question does not lead immediately to what could be thought of as the right sort of answer. First, a biological approach should be seen as providing only the foundation for the construction of theories of emotion. (The virtue of biology is that the foundation it provides is a stable one.) There are many aspects of emotion, particularly in humans, which require social/cultural analysis, in addition to biological analysis, for their elucidation.