"I feel tired"
"I feel that I'm in a forced marriage"
"I feel like I know everything"
These are all "statements of emotions" that we hear in class when we work on 'Character". The problem is that these are all statements of situation or psychological states. Sure, you described something about who you are, maybe, but we still don't know how that makes you FEEL (Btw, "Fuzzy" is not an emotion, it's an ironic first name for a bear).
So, why is it so hard for us to describe or show our feelings? I am positing that we've been transformed as a generation whose entertainment, news and creative content is almost completely visual. We are increasingly being chased away, as a cultural mass, from the written word (check out the best apps on an iPad). In fact, the last time I recall reading about a character's emotion is in my Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels that I, now, proudly display.
In video, we understand someone is upset by an actor showing us that she's upset, whereas before cable TV, we used to read books and learn about a character's emotions through words that described them. We've lost the language needed to communicate what inherently makes us human; an entire sub-generation suffering from Alexithymia.
The nice thing about improv class is that we can challenge a player to actively define emotions and sit in them and really feel them. What does it mean to feel an emotion? What grounds it? What are logical reasons why I feel this way?
A lot of times this is scary, especially for newcomers. But something remarkable happens when we follow that fear, commit and discover. We're lucky as improvisers because we can start from an singular emotion and by grounding them in our scene with our partner, we create a character. How does that make you feel?
"What you do and How you do it is Who you are" - Joe Bill, Bassprov
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