Interest is a feeling or emotion

Emotion

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

 that causes attention

Attention

Attention is the cognitive process of paying attention to one aspect of the environment while ignoring others. Attention is one of the most intensely studied topics within psychology and cognitive neuroscience....

 to focus on an object or an event or a process. In contemporary psychology of interest, the term is used as a general concept that may encompass other more specific psychological terms, such as curiosity

Curiosity

Curiosity is an emotion related to natural inquisitive behavior such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species. The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity...

 and to a much lesser degree surprise

Surprise (emotion)

Surprise is a brief emotional state experienced as the result of an unexpected event. Surprise can have any valence; that is, it can be neutral/moderate, pleasant, or unpleasant. If a person experiences a very powerful or long lasting surprise, it may be considered shock.-Reality...

.

The emotion of interest does have its own facial expression, of which the most prominent component is having dilated pupils.

See also

• Carroll Izard
  Carroll Izard
  Carroll Ellis Izard is an American psychologist known for his contributions to Differential Emotions Theory , and the Maximally Discriminative Affect Coding System...
  
  
• Surprise
  Surprise (emotion)
  Surprise is a brief emotional state experienced as the result of an unexpected event. Surprise can have any valence; that is, it can be neutral/moderate, pleasant, or unpleasant. If a person experiences a very powerful or long lasting surprise, it may be considered shock.-Reality...
  
  
• Curiosity
  Curiosity
  Curiosity is an emotion related to natural inquisitive behavior such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation in human and many animal species. The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity...
  
  
• Ecstasy (emotion)
  Ecstasy (emotion)
  Ecstasy is a subjective experience of total involvement of the subject, with an object of his or her awareness. Because total involvement with an object of our interest is not our ordinary experience since we are ordinarily aware also of other objects, the ecstasy is an example of altered state of...
  
  

External links

• http://metainterest.googlepages.com/tenet_1 A theory of different stages of interest (from noticing something, wondering about it, being curious, to being fascinated, astonished, and, in ecstasy)