yep the neurologists say it's largely hormone dependent, hormones are long time scale 'mood' modifiers. Neurotransmitters can affect hormone secretion or inhibition, and neurotransmitters are released from the brain via feedback loops from the sensory organs and gut. Another analogy is to think of emotions as E-motion that is energy in motion. Emotion is the result of a chemical soup that encourages you to behave a certain way. It's like the start of a behavioral chain reaction. This is to distinguish it from sentimentality which is transient and illusory, what women largely refer to when they speak of emotions. You think this is just semantics, but it is an important distinction. To me, and some others, sentimentality is useless and basically fake emotion. It can create feedback loops, but often sentimentality overwhelms you and you accomplish nothing but hysteria. Sentimentality is easy to spot if you know what to look for, when you're watching a soppy movie and you start feeling sad at a heartwarming scene, that's sentimentality. When you see a cute kitty and start talking like an idiot, that's sentimentality, we fall for it often. Emotion is much more subtle, much more lingering. When you hear the phone ring, or you stub your toe, that sentimentality goes right out the window, when you're in a near death situation like a car crash, a bad breakup, the feeling, the emotion lingers.