Upper Primary School English Quiz - Vocabulary 29 - Words that Express Emotions (Questions)

Emotions and feelings are a part of daily life and we have a range of emotions that we display. We have read about them in books and we experience them in real life, whether at school, at home or among friends. We are also influenced by seeing movies, watching theatre, watching TV, reading newspapers and listening to radio. All these things shape our emotions and we begin to express them.

We sometimes want to be like our mothers, our fathers, our teachers or our heroes. We may want to follow past heroes, like Gandhi, Churchill or anyone else we admire. Admiration is an emotion.

[readmore]From our experiences we can recognise emotions as separate ones, such as happiness, fear, anger and hurt. We are able to put emotions into categories of positive and negative.

Since emotions are not strictly compartmentalised to either this or that category we can have a graded range of emotions. I can feel strongly, moderately or lightly. Often it is difficult to distinguish between emotions and feelings. One way to distinguish is to remember that feelings are triggered by external stimuli and can include physical sensations in addition to thoughts that occur as a result of the state of our mind. However, emotions are sensations triggered by a state of mind and generally occur from internal thoughts. Another distinguishing factor is the fact that feelings can last as long as the stimuli lasts whereas emotions tend to stay much longer as they stem from the mind. Love, hate, joy, sorrow and fear are emotions that stay for longer times.

English has many words that describe feelings and emotions and it is good to put these words into our vocabulary bank. Take the quiz that follows and understand how feelings and emotions can be expressed with different words.