Leonid, You ask questions that seem interesting to me because I find it difficult to form an opinion for them. Which probably just means I need to learn more than I know. (Isn't that always true? ;-) But, in my experience, emotions are physiological changes in the body in response to our internal or external environment. Emotions have evolved in this way so that we can respond to threats or rewards as we encounter them and in that way our emotions are the first step after perception to induce behavior. The problem is that emotions are almost always non-conscious events. And even most of our behavior is not noticed consciously.

It is somewhat useful to categorize emotions so that we can discuss these things - but when we do we are trying to create categories that our conscious mind can recognize. These may not be very good representations of what is really going on inside our brain and body. For example, if we see something frightening, like a snake on the trail, we might recall later that we felt fear. But we did not notice the increased blood flow to parts of our body and brain, the changes in respiration and skin conductance (sweaty palms) etc. But these were also part of a symphony of emotional reactions we experienced at that moment. So, we need to be careful about making general assumptions based on our conscious representations of emotional events when most of what goes on emotionally is not usually available to our conscious minds.

Antonio Damasio (In his book the Feeling of What Happens) has developed a useful distinction in this regard. Occasionally we focus our mind on our body state and we consciously notice the effects of our emotions - Damasio calls these "feelings" - conscious images of our emotional state. But these are always second-hand to the real thing, I believe.

So, I hope you can see why I find questions about "kinds of emotions" so difficult and interesting. I like difficult questions. Keep them coming.

PS - I read your interesting paper on Mozart. Now I'm rethinking everything I thought I knew about CD.

Thank you Ray. I agree interesting is what is fundamental for science and unknown. Damasio knows a lot, but I am not sure he is right about what is fundamental and what is secondary. Physiological feelings of emotions are certainly secondary. The fundamental about emotions is that these are motivational processes in the brain directing us toward satisfaction of instinctual needs.

I do not think you carefully selected the word conscious. Emotions are often conscious, quite conscious. Possibly you meant "uncontrollable."

There are few well studied basic emotions associated with bodily instincts - these unify us with animals. And there are near infinity of emotions related to knowledge - these are uniquely human. I suspect they are related to CD, and you are right, I try to connect them to music. It is a huge area and I would like to see more people involved in this research

Leonid, Thinking about CD still, I wonder if there is a classic experiment (paper) you could cite for me that is generally accepted as illustrating CD and its effect on human behavior as you are using the term in your posts..