Emotions are subcategories of nervous system states that dictate feelings, drive behavior, and influence interpretation of experiences.

“Dr. Anderson's research focuses on emotions and states of mind and body, and indeed he emphasizes how emotions, like happiness, sadness, anger and so on, are actually subcategories of what are generally governed by states, that is, things that are occurring in the nervous system in our brain and in the connections between brain and body that dictate whether or not we feel good about how we are feeling, and that drive our behaviors, that is, bias us to be in action or inaction and strongly influence the way we interpret our experience and our surroundings.”