Definition: Emotion

i was in the library late at night a couple days ago studying for a psychopathology exam, and i was really tired. i was sitting in a cubicle, with bad lighting - everything looked yellow - and although i could hear an occasional page turn from somewhere behind me, i felt i was the only person sitting there on the fourth floor. the library was slowly draining of life behind me. my eyes were blurring, i felt like the people in my book.
as i tried reading faster, i slowed down after the neurological relations part, when the chapter morphs into mood and affect. the definition of emotion provided in this book really ground my process to a halt, as much as i wanted to get out of the library.
basically, the book explained emotion as an "action tendency"
then gave the longer definition as "a pattern of action elicited by an external event and a feeling state, accompanied by a characteristic physiological response."
blah blah ignore the second part unless you're a student of psychology then maybe it'll come in handy, i just thought that might clarify the action part of an emotion for you because i really had to think about it. or maybe i was really jaded and dumb from sitting in a cubicle. voluntarily. but an emotion as an "action tendency" really caught me, and now i can't stop thinking about it in any other way.