- published: 24 Feb 2015
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Desire is a sense of longing for a person or object or hoping for an outcome. Desire is the fire that sets action aflame. The same sense is expressed by emotions such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the thought of the item or person, and they want to take actions to obtain their goal. The motivational aspect of desire has long been noted by philosophers; Hobbes (1588–1679) asserted that human desire is the fundamental motivation of all human action.
In Buddhism, for an individual to effect his or her liberation, the flow of sense-desire must be cut completely; however, while training, he or she must work with motivational processes based on skilfully applied desire. The Buddha stated, according to the early Buddhist scriptures, that monks should "generate desire" for the sake of fostering skillful qualities and abandoning unskillful ones.
While desires are often classified as emotions by laypersons, psychologists often describe desires as different from emotions; psychologists tend to argue that desires arise from bodily structures, such as the stomach's need for food, whereas emotions arise from a person's mental state. Marketing and advertising companies have used psychological research on how desire is stimulated to find more effective ways to induce consumers to buy a given product or service. While some advertising attempts to give buyers a sense of lack or wanting, other types of advertising create desire associating the product with desirable attributes, either by showing a celebrity or model with the product.
Desire may refer to:
Emotions are the various bodily feelings associated with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation and also with hormones such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin. Motivations direct and energize behavior, while emotions provide[clarification needed] the affective component to motivation, positive or negative. Emotions are defined as feeling states with physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components (Carlson & Hatfield, 1992). Strong emotions arouse the autonomic nervous system (Gomez et al, 2005). The greater the arousal the more intense the emotion. It also appears that the type of arousal affects the emotion being experienced. Although the work emotion might seem to be about feeling and not about thinking, cognitions-particularly interpretations of the meanings of events--are important aspects of emotions. Fear, which usually occurs in response to a threat, involves cognitions that one is in danger as well as arousal of the sympathetic nervous system (e.g. rapid heartbeat and breathing, sweating, muscle tension). Emotions also involve behavioral tendencies. No definitive emotion classification system exists, though numerous taxonomies have been proposed. Some categorizations include:[citation needed]