emotionaladj.n.

1821 Edinb. Mag. & Literary Misc. Mar. 205/2 The emotional part of our nature.

1857 E. C. Gaskell Life C. Brontë I. ii. 12 The West Riding men..are not emotional.

1884 A. Hind in Athenæum 19 Apr. 497/1 Soul..ceases to operate qua emotional and appetitive soul.

1909 G. K. Chesterton Thackeray 31 He was a sublime emotional Englishman, who lived by atmosphere.

1932 ‘B. Ross’ Trag. of Y i. ii. 61 Dr. Leo Schilling, Chief Medical Examiner of New York County, was hardly an emotional man.

1972 P. Buck China Past & Present 96 We Americans are an emotional people, however. We are guided by feelings of sudden anger, by unreasoning prejudices.

1993 S. L. Delany et al. Having our Say i. i. 8 She was sensitive and emotional. She was quick to anger, and very outspoken.

1831 Edinb. Lit. Jrnl. 30 July 66/1 The physical and emotional character of the ancient Greeks.

1860 J. A. Froude Hist. Eng. (ed. 2) VI. 6 Uncoloured..with the emotional weaknesses of humanity.

1875 F. A. G. Ouseley Treat. Harmony (ed. 2) Pref. 7 Others..treat Music as..only an emotional art.

1921 T. S. Eliot Let. 6 Nov. in Waste Land Drafts (1971) p. xxii My ‘nerves’ are a very mild affair, due..to an..emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction.

1956 A. H. Compton Atomic Quest 242 One of the young men..came to my office in a state of emotional stress.

1993 J. Gray Men are from Mars viii. 132 Men and women generally are unaware that they have different emotional needs.

1851 H. Mayhew London Labour I. 110/2 Her story was affecting—made more so, perhaps, by the emotional manner in which she related it.

1893 Harper's Mag. Feb. 360/1 Why should he go home? Why should he go there, have an emotional scene, the prospect of which made him frown even now?

1911 Decatur (Illinois) Rev. 23 Nov. 8/4 She was at her best in the big emotional climaxes because she never ‘over-emoted’.

1949 Los Angeles Times 1 Dec. ii. 6/3 The reunion with Mrs. Cohen was so highly emotional that Mrs. Cohen fainted.

1981 Mother Jones Feb. 31/1 In an emotional speech..Michaels switched his vote to yes and then broke down in tears.

2003 N.Y. Times (National ed.) 14 Dec. ii. 15/3 It's the final picture and the sum-up of all the movies and the stories, so I think it's been emotional for everyone involved.

1838 tr. J. W. von Goethe in Foreign Q. Rev. July 275 This same preponderance of the emotional in his character.

1879 J. McCarthy Hist. our Own Times II. 384 She [sc. Elizabeth Barrett Browning] speaks especially to the emotional in woman.

1914 I. Dooman Missionary's Life in Land of Gods vii. 241 The emotional is apt to consume itself quickly and disappear in the flying cinders of an incohesive and inchoate sentimentalism.

1978 Yoga Jrnl. Sept. 56/3 Many workers with body energy have eschewed the emotional.

1999 J. M. Perkins & N. Blyler Narr. & Professional Communication 15 This devaluing of the feminine, the subjective, and the emotional has..shaped the way narrative is viewed.

1936 Folk-lore 47 98 The man who broods and glowers in a mood of hostile isolation, and will not say what is in his mind, is committing emotional blackmail.

1969 Woman 19 Apr. 20/1 That old moan: ‘You'll be sorry when I've gone’ is a very common one. It's an emotional blackmail to keep loved ones on their toes.

2008 New Statesman 12 May 20/1 Those who support a woman's right to choose whether to give birth are appalled by new state laws that apply emotional blackmail to women who are often already in a confused or conflicted mental state.

1870 Trans. St. Andrews Med. Graduates Assoc. 1869 250 I look at the diagram of the organic nervous system and see there depicted the emotional brain.

1922 J. Huneker Variations 178 Consider the intellectual and emotional brain—for the seat of the emotions is in the head, not the heart—of this composer.

1994 New Scientist 13 Aug. 35/1 (caption) A controversial theory says that senses fuse in the limbic system, or ‘emotional’ brain, after having been processed separately in the cortex, seat of rational thinking.

2006 G. Buzsáki Rhythms of Brain xi. 281 The pivotal role of some amygdaloid nuclei in emotions led to the still oft-used term ‘emotional brain’.

1875 Lancet 6 Feb. 197/1 The only indication of mental impairment that was observed, beyond the drowsiness..was emotional incontinence.

1922 Atlantic Monthly Oct. 580 The style..is of such emotional incontinence that some of the later chapters fairly bristle with exclamation points.

1968 Brit. Jrnl. Psychiatry 114 810/1 8 of the patients had had sharply defined episodes of cerebral dysfunction or other clinical features (e.g. epileptic fits, emotional incontinence, etc.).

2005 K. Harrison Starter Marriage 160 Emotional incontinence would, for him, probably be more humiliating than the kind below the waist.

1864 E. W. B. Farnham Woman & her Era I. 59 What an experience to the developed woman, whose intellectual and emotional memory sweeps back over the wide, and infinitely diversified kingdom.

1914 H. Münsterberg Psychology xxx. 405 Emotional memories have the tendency to push themselves into the foreground and to influence the selection of associated ideas in a suspicious manner.

1989 Perception 18 391 This type of emotional memory was compared in the immediate and long-term recognition of olfactory stimuli.

2003 New Scientist 6 Sept. 32/1 It now appears that, in at least some people with anxiety disorders, emotional memory seems to dominate explicit memory more than in healthy people.

1934 Music Educators Jrnl. 21 62/3 It may be that our schools have overemphasized the intelligence quotient and underestimated the emotional quotient.

1985 Sat. Evening Post (Nexis) Apr. 36 I sensed the rising of Elizabeth's emotional quotient. She was looking at the hunter and wearing her mink smile.

1997 Sci. Amer. Apr. 26/1 It's not enough to be smart anymore. That's the sobering message from the folks behind the BarOn Emotional Quotient Inventory, which is being billed as the world's first commercially available test for measuring ‘emotional intelligence’.

2002 Business Week 22 Apr. 74 (table) Management style heavy on ‘EQ’—emotional quotient. ‘He gets what makes you tick and empathizes really well, as opposed to being driven by the numbers.’