Emotion explores the emotions, emotional feelings, affect and mood within a spectrum of overlapping conditions grouped as ‘emotion’. The four concepts are introduced here and defined with their historical antecedents, and related terms including empathy are explained. Drama communicates social ideas of the emotions through language and draws on a long history within which particular emotions remain recognizable. As performers present nonverbal facial and bodily indicators of emotional feelings together with spoken language, they illustrate how emotional feeling is understood, observed and perceived – but its evocation is enhanced in theatrical performance by the overall staging and aesthetic features such as the music and lighting. To correspond with recent affect theory, affect in Emotion refers to the body’s sensations (pulses, tingles, auras, inner shifts, movements) and bodily sensitivity to and within the surroundings, and affect includes the sensation accompanying thought. Mood refers to the overall impact of a theatrical performance in which an audience member becomes caught up in a joyous or melancholic or disturbing effect, and an aesthetic mood might capture a social mood.
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