The Difference between Emotion and Attitude

For many decades social psychologists (1; 2, chap. 1) have viewed attitudes as the central concept that explains motivation. Where do emotions fit in?
 
The two are similar, yet different.
 
Emotions are automatic, psychosomatic responses to evaluations about objects, persons, or events that we judge, based on past knowledge and values, to be beneficial or harmful (Independent Judgment, p. 63).
 
“The firing of a gun can hurt me,” I might be thinking, “and the bang outside sounded like a gun. That makes me afraid and my heart race and my breath shorten.”
 
Four components to this experience are the fact judgment, “the bang was a gun”; the evaluative judgment, “the gun can hurt me”; the emotion, “I am afraid and need to hide”; and the physiological reactions of a racing heart and shortened breathing. Note that the emotion of fear generated a tendency, need, or urge to act and that the fact and value judgments each can be either true or false; the bang may in fact have been the backfire of an automobile.
 
Although the judgments about guns were learned earlier in our lives, they are not something we even think about on this occasion. The emotional reaction happens in a split second. The source and cause of this experience is subconscious.
 
Attitudes are settled, enduring composites of beliefs, evaluations, and action tendencies about some object, person, or event. Beliefs are fact judgments about what we believe to be true. Evaluations are positive or negative judgments about what we think is beneficial or harmful. And the action tendency is what it sounds like: a tendency, need, or urge to act.
 
Note that both emotions and attitudes are responses to something or someone and that we can feel emotions and hold attitudes about all kinds of things and people, including ourselves.*
 
Note also that emotions are integral parts of our attitudes—the beginning moment, actually, of what may become a new or developing attitude—that express our positive and negative reactions to what we have the attitude about.
 
In years past, to continue the above example, we may have formed an attitude toward guns through experiences of shooting them or from reading what many have said about them.
 
Both emotions and attitudes are in our minds and are not behavior, but they do explain and motivate behavior. We must choose to act on the felt tendency, need, or urge before action can take place.
 
Both concepts are what Ayn Rand would call (chap. 4) concepts of consciousness, not concepts of the external, material world, as the concept “gun” is.
 
Concepts of consciousness, such as thought, reminiscence, imagination—as well as emotion and attitude—are identified by the actions of consciousness, the contrasting psychological processes, that distinguish one from the other.
 
Thought, using Rand’s words (pp. 32), is a “purposefully directed process of cognition” and emotion is “an automatic response proceeding from an evaluation of an existent.” Reminiscence (my words) is the power to preserve and recall a thought, emotion, or experience and imagination is the ability to create and project in our minds how something or someone might be different.
 
The mental process of forming an attitude is the accumulation over time of emotional experiences, observations, and thoughts about something or someone such that the experiences and beliefs become established and lasting, often in conscious awareness.
 
We have attitudes but experience emotions is a familiar way of differentiating the two mental processes.
 
My attitude toward guns is that I love them, especially since I had positive experiences of shooting them as a kid. I have that favorable attitude toward guns and have held it for a long time. I am quite aware of the attitude.
 
The bang outside my house, however, might confuse or scare me, depending on how I evaluate it in the present. I know that cars can backfire, that firecrackers can make bangs like guns, and that I do not like criminals staging shootouts in my neighborhood. All of this might go through my mind in the split second that the bang has occurred.
 
The difference between emotion and attitude is that the emotion has a trigger, time-bound, that we perceive and react to immediately. The attitude is a lingeringly favorable or unfavorable expression, built up over time, and is something that we can even have a leisurely discussion about, such as should we be pro-gun or anti-gun?
 
The emotion calls for and sometimes produces action without our stopping to think about it. The attitude does not necessarily call for action, though it may.
 
Ayn Rand’s point about concepts of consciousness is that they are formed the same way concepts of the existential world are formed, except that we focus on the mental or psychological actions that distinguish one process from another.
 
After observing (i.e., introspecting) many instances of similar mental processes, we isolate the one we are interested in and omit its content and intensity to arrive at its essential distinguishing characteristic.
 
Emotions are instant reactions, attitudes are lasting, though neither is changeless. Both contain a wide variety of content and can be either extremely intense or not so intense.
 
Both can and do explain and motivate behavior.
 
Social psychologists are right that attitudes are central motivators but they could spend more time examining emotions as a crucial component and source of our attitudes.
 
 
* “Feeling” often refers to our experiences of physical pleasure and pain (or even of warm or smooth), whereas “emotion” refers to our experiences of psychological joy or suffering. Many times, however, the words are used as synonyms, as I often use them, or as in this case as a verb, “to feel an emotion.”