Emotions

[Madman]

I've been wondering about this for years now and I just wanted to share my thoughts with you: What is the meaning of emotions? Fear exists to keep us alive, while love comes (mostly) for an in-built need for reproduction, but what about anger, depression and more complicated feelings?

[danielsangeo]

Anger is a survival instinct, I believe. Like fear, it raises your adrenaline so that you can defend yourself and go after attackers.

 

Depression's an offshoot of sadness and, it appears, a malfunction of some sort in the brain where the sad feeling doesn't go away. Sadness, I gather, is there to help educate about a certain situation; sadness is not a nice feeling and you don't really want to do things that make you sad so it's there as another survival instinct.

 

There hasn't been enough research into emotions to really know for sure.

[WonSul]

There's been quite a lot of research on the subject. Instinctual emotions come from the Amygdala while cognitive emotions from the prefrontal cortex

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion

 

Maybe the key being that they're located in different lobes of the brain.

[Blue]

An important thing can be easily assessed about your person whenever you analyze when you're angry.

 

When you get angry, ask yourself the question "What am I defending?"

 

Some big person shoves your friend: you get angry! It's a perfectly justifiable response. Why? What are you defending? In that situation, You're defending, or at least have the emotional inclination to be defending the physical and emotional person of your friend.

 

You're late for meeting someone: you get angry. Is it justified? What are you defending? "Well, I'm late for work because I spent too long eating breakfast, and that's because my room mate took too long using the toaster oven." I don't think that would actually be the real cause of the defense: the real cause would be You're angry because you care about the perception the people you were going to meet, have of you, and when you're late, you might marr that perception, and the loss of that quality is the thing you're trying to defend in being angry.

 

Anger is an important emotion, but it can be easily lead to vanity, selfishness and ignorance. The immidate course of action following anger (which may or may not be justified) should be logic, not actions.

[Blue]

Depression's an offshoot of sadness and, it appears, a malfunction of some sort in the brain where the sad feeling doesn't go away. Sadness, I gather, is there to help educate about a certain situation; sadness is not a nice feeling and you don't really want to do things that make you sad so it's there as another survival instinct.

Depression, I will speculate, can be a modulation between sadness (Which is the proper response to a loss or a denial) and anxiety (Which is an unreasonable, extraneous or unnecessary fear of circumstances which are not within the realm of control of the individual). (There is an important distinction between Fear and Anxiety.)

[WonSul]

I think it's also reasonable to suggest that some of the more complicated emotions arose from human's becoming more and more social creatures over thousands of years.

[Blue]

I think it's also reasonable to suggest that some of the more complicated emotions arose from human's becoming more and more social creatures over thousands of years.

This is true.

 

The enlightenment has probably brought into greater prevalence then ever the ability to assess health in all dimensions that we've ever been able to comprehend up to now: Physical, Emotional and Spiritual.

[RueThePirate]

I think we've evolved to the point where we're not merely tools for whatever instincts we may have had millions of years ago; Rather, we're more... Complex.