Emotions Revealed

"...this critic presumed that emotions are words, which, of course, they are not. Words are representations of emotions, not the emotions themselves. Emotion is a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of physiological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation. Words are one way to deal with our emotions, and we do use words when emotional, but we cannot reduce emotion to words."

-Ekman