Psychology defines emotion as "a special reflection of objective reality and an experience of people's attitude towards whether objective things meet people's needs". From this definition, we can know that emotion is a subjective experience, attitude or reflection, which belongs to the category of subjective consciousness, but not to the category of objective existence. Dialectical materialism holds that any subjective consciousness is a reflection of objective existence, and emotion is a special subjective consciousness, which inevitably corresponds to some special objective existence. The key to the problem is whether we can find this special objective existence.

It is not difficult to find that "whether people meet people's needs for objective things" is actually a typical value judgment problem. "Meeting people's needs" is the value feature of things and an objective existence. "Attitude" and "experience" are both ways people know or reflect the value characteristics of things. In this way, the definition of emotion in psychology can be expressed as: "Emotion is a subjective reflection of people's value characteristics of things". The objective existence corresponding to emotion should be the value characteristic of things. From this, you can get

Philosophical definition of emotion: emotion is the subjective reflection of the value relationship between human subject and objective things.

When understanding the philosophical definition of emotion, we should pay attention to the following points:

1. Human subjects can be individuals, collectives or the whole society, forming individual emotions, collective emotions and social emotions respectively.

2. The value relationship of things does not refer to the value (or use value) of things. The intensity of emotions is not directly proportional to the value of things, but has a specific functional relationship with the value of things (which will be explained later).

3. The value of things is not only related to the quality characteristics of objective things, but also related to the quality characteristics of subject and environment. Therefore, people's emotional intensity is not only related to the quality characteristics of objective things, but also related to the quality characteristics of the subject and the environment.