Our emotional defenses snap into action when it comes to a divorce or a disease but not for lesser problems.

On Monday the President offered an emotional defense of his wife.

To some, the furor was not just an emotional defense of neighborhood schools.

In all the world there had never been a man armed as he was with mental, physical, emotional, neural and molecular defenses.

His analysis, which spanned data from the men's college years to their 60's, examined the emotional defenses each man favored at different points of life.

It was an almost impenetrable emotional defense she had developed in the course of her years as an institutionalized orphan.

The force of the man's present frustration must be battering against her emotional defenses.

He made no objection, but she could sense him building up the emotional defense.

He hung up and thought of the nurse's scientific jargon, recognizing that it was an emotional defense.

Muskie made an emotional defense of his wife in a speech outside the newspaper's offices during a snowstorm.