What are emotions? There exists broad contention across disciplines as to what constitutes our emotions.

Physiological and cognitive psychologists view emotions as existing within the individual.  More interpersonally oriented social psychologists and cultural anthropologists view emotions as being created among people. Within the field of neuroscience there is also debate about the biochemical nature of emotions and location of emotions in the brain.

In Looking for Spinoza, Antonio Damasio's third book on the subject, he categorizes emotions as follows:

• Background emotions: influences of basic metabolic, reflex and regulatory processes
  
• Primary emotions: anger, fear, sadness, surprise, disgust, joy and happiness--shared by all human societies
  
• Social emotions: sympathy, embarassment, shame, guilt, pride, jealousy, envy, gratitude, admiration and contempt

Emotions influence our interpretations of events, giving a slant to our thinking, self-reflection and recollection.  In this respect, emotions play a primary role in our economic, political and social lives.

From an evolutionary perspective, emotions have been honed over millions of years by natural selection to be trigger-happy. In today's modern society we can see that emotions are far from perfectly designed systems.  For example, anger, sadness and depression are mostly counterproductive in a world that has over six billion humans.

Advancing neurotechnology will provide individuals with new tools to modulate, control and change their emotions at an ever-increasing level of accuracy and extent, having a profound influence on how society organizes itself. I will continue to pay special attention to the emotional implications of neurotechnology.