accompany the fulfillment or
the approach to the fulfillment of a native disposition; and
those are unpleasantly toned which accompany their frustration
or conflict. The depth and intensity of the emotional
disturbance seem to depend on the degree and extent to which
strong instinctive or habitual impulses have become involved.
For as habits of action may be acquired, so also may emotions
become associated habitually with them. The emotional
disturbances connected with the fulfillment, frustration, and
conflict of habits may be just as intense as those connected
with similar phenomena in the case of instincts.

In one sense these emotional disturbances impede action,
certainly action on the reflective level. It is the capacity
and function of reflection to solve and adjust precisely those
conflicts of competing impulses during which emotional disturbances
occur. But the reflective process is confused and
distorted in conflicts of native or habitual desires by these
emotional disturbances which accompany them. It is proverbially
difficult to think straight when angry; the surgeon
in performing an operation must not be moved by pity or fear;
and love is notoriously blind. The facts with which reflection
must deal are presented in distorted and exaggerated form
under the stress of competing impulses. Stimuli become
loaded with emotional associations. They are glaring and
conspicuous on the basis of their emotional urgency rather
than on the ground of their logical significance. The paralysis
or complete disorganization of action which occurs in
extreme cases of hysteria takes place to some extent in all less
extreme instances of emotional disturbances.

Emotions, on the other hand, serve to sustain, and, in their
less violent form, to facilitate action. It has already been
noted that the organic disturbances which are so conspicuous
a feature of emotion are extremely important in preparing the
body for the overt actions in which these emotions always
tend to issue. And it is unquestionable that emotions,
though in more or less obscure ways, call up reserves of energy
in the service of the activity in connection with which the
emotion has been aroused. While very violent emotions, as
in the case of extreme anger or fear or pity, confuse,
disorganize, and even paralyze action, in more moderate form
they rather serve to stimulate and reinforce it. Emotions
are, in many cases, merely the inner or subjective awareness
o