Neurobiologists have distinguished emotions from feelings, though I am afraid our language has for so long used the two terms as equivalent currency that it is a hopeless task to expect any listener to hear one word and not think of the other. Emotions are hardwired, biological functions of the nervous system such as fear, terror, sexual attraction, and hunger-impelled action (also called “feeding behaviors”). They are each purely physical reactions over which one has no control, and they are common to all animals with a central nervous system.

No control over hard-wired emotions?

In Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (1998), Jaak Panksepp writes, "Emotive circuits have reciprocal interactions with the brain mechanisms that elaborate higher decision-making processes and consciousness."

Arousal of these emotions is automatic. But expression is a matter of choice.

Fear may very well arouse a fight or flee response, but we choose between these options and the varied possibilities presented by each.

In many churches passages from the book of Job are being assigned as this season's daily reading. Included in today's reading: "When I say, 'My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,' then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would choose strangling and death rather than this body." But while he says this, Job does not make this choice.