Emotion's facilitation of action is fundamentally adaptive. Emotions lead one to focus on one particular set of needs or stimuli, out of all the possible stimuli to which one could conceivably attend. One takes action to meet the need identified by the emotion. Pinker (1997) makes this point by noting that “Most artificial intelligence researchers believe that freely behaving robots . . . will have to be programmed with something like emotions merely for them to know at every moment what to do next” (p. 374).
