Emotions

In this post I’d just like to start to look at emotions. I really didn’t know where to start as this is such a big subject. So I’m going to try to break it down into small manageable bite size pieces. First I will look at the functions of emotions and why we have them.

 Emotions seem to be what gives life that sparkle; they’re what make things important. My cat can’t understand the emotion involved in watching a game of football, so emotions tend to be a qualitatively human experience, without them a football game would be very tedious. My wife could probably confirm that for you.

There appear to be three functions to having emotions. 1: Taking care of threats and protecting ourselves 2: Increasing motivation and action and 3: Soothing ourselves.

As in with most things in life, when there is an imbalance of emotions then this can begin to cause us problems. One of the most common psychological problems in modern western society is the over activation of the taking care and protecting system, where we see or feel threatened, or the over activation of the motivation and action system, where we feel obliged to continually “rise to the challenge”, or over achieve.  

 Both these systems have an evolutionary basis and have served us well for thousands of years. Being a high achiever as a hunter, was probably an advantage in finding a mate so you could pass on our genes. Taking care of threats and protecting ourselves has served us well and emotions such as anxiety have protected us from potential threats. Of course we all have fears and these can be different, such as dogs, heights or public speaking, which shows that although our emotions have a genetic evolutionary basis they are also learnt through a process of classic conditioning of behavioural situations with emotional memory.

 When I was about 14 years old, I went to a party and drank a bottle of sweet martini. As you can imagine I was very ill and even to this day even if I just smell martini I have strong emotions of disgust and emotional memories of being very ill come flooding back. Because of the high emotional content involved there was a classical conditioning where martini has become emotionally associated with being ill. This of course serves the purpose of protecting me from martini in the future, but it could have easily been, red berries, rotten meat or the wrong mushroom. Disgust comes inbuilt, have you ever seen a child spit out bitter tasting food?

 Anger is also an emotion that enables us to get what we want when something is between us and our goal. Useful in certain situations, but it can also lead us to force situations and try “brute force” as we become increasingly frustrated. Anger and a feeling of unfairness can also help us to protect what we have, if someone tries to take something away from us. This sort of retaliatory anger is great for protecting the prize that we just hunted from thieving hyenas and getting people to do what we want, but may be unhelpful when we receive criticism from our boss and anger wells up inside as we feel threatened.

 We can see that emotions are of great importance, they motivate us, they protect us and they help us achieve goals, but due to modern city living lifestyles, our emotions can also be maladaptive and be the source of, at times great emotional distress. Understanding what our emotions are for empowers us and helps us to begin to realise that they serve an evolutionary function and nothing more. Our emotions are simply that, emotions. They do not reflect us as persons, at most they reflect what we have learnt or been shown. It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine somebody who has been told from a very young age that expressing anger is bad. An overwhelming feeling of guilt every time that person feels angry could lead to trying to suppress anger, which of course will lead to all sorts of psychological and behavioural problems.