“When you smile, the world smiles with you”, a very intriguing concept, which is the title of the second chapter of Connected (2009) by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, that highlights their research of human emotions and how they spread through social networks. Emotions can spread from person to person, and network to network, they are essentially contagious; this includes fear, anxiety, loneliness, and happiness. Christakis and Fowler state that emotions themselves contain several elements. Emotions contain a conscious element, meaning people are aware of what they’re feeling. They have a physical aspect; emotions are tied to an individuals’ health. They also have a neurological affect; altering activity and blood flow levels in the brain. Finally, emotions contain a visual aspect; they can be expressed in facial expressions and body language. Christakis and Fowler suggest that emotions most likely began in early human evolutionary stages to promote the bonding of mother and child; later expanding to other family members, then non family members. The ability to read moods and pass them onto each other could have aided early humans in their everyday activities, due to the lack of fully developed verbal communication. It is also stated, emotions travel faster than words. It is faster to read an individual’s face to understand their emotions than it is to wait for the verbal communication that comes along with it; which leads into what the authors call Emotional
Emotions are things that we feel. We can feel a certain way and our choice on our emotions and the actions we make in order to feel this way and the words we say in order to feel better are on
Emotions have many factors. One of the factors is internal physiological changes, such as increased heart rate, dilated pupils, and increase in adrenaline secretion. Another emotional factor is nonverbal reactions. Nonverbal reactions are external physical changes, such as, blushing, posture, and facial expressions. Cognitive interpretations is used to define our emotions, and Verbal expressions are used to express our emotions through words.
Our emotions in many cases affect our perception of events as well as the actions that we take ourselves by permeating our way of thinking, and therefore affecting each thing that we do in that moment. In particular, emotions about the perception of ourselves have been shown to have both the ability to positively and negatively affect our actions and performances in life. This is what can be
In chapter 8 of Handbook of Emotions, The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables, Tooby & Cosmides (2008) thoroughly discuss the theories of how emotions came to be. The overall conclusion is that emotions did not inadvertently occur, but instead were specifically designed and evolved to solve distinct issues that would affect the probability of fitness. Emotions evolved to utilize physical responses based on environmental cues in order to promote the individual’s overall success.
The book discusses on the topic of the “Flat-Brain Theory of Emotions” and through this it helps us have a better understanding of our body/brain and to know what we are feeling and thinking. Our brain affects all parts of our body and this theory helps us better understand that topic. Another topic that is discussed within the book is the two different levels of communication. The first level of communication “Gives and receives information and discusses points of view” (Petersen, 2007,
The perception of emotions is an important topic to study because the ability to discern emotions plays a critical role in an individual 's cognitive growth, their reasoning, behavior idiosyncrasies and the essential key of survival. Perception is the a central element to emotions, meaning that countless emotions that an individual faces occur directly upon the perception of intensely expressive to a certain stimuli. We are aware that our mood affects how we perceive the emotions of those in our surroundings and the environments we are in, but also age has a big impact as well.
Emotions are feelings (Alder 140). Emotions involve a variety of components. These components include physiological factors, nonverbal reactions, cognitive interpretations, and verbal expressions. Physiological factors influence a person when they experience strong emotions (Alder 141). For example, if you experience fear, your heart rate will begin to increase, stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system. This results in your blood pressure to increase and an abundant amount of adrenaline to be released. To Saman, emotions are an assortment of different
Infants communicate important aspects of their lives, such as joy, fear, sadness and interest through emotions. In reference to behavioral organization, emotions help regulate social responses and adaptive behavior. Also, infants have negative and positive emotions. Infants’ emotions are influenced by both biological foundations and a person’s experiences. Chapter four provides that in a recent study of 18-24 month olds found that parents’ elicitation of talk about emotions was associated with toddler’s sharing and helping behaviors. Emotional interchanges also help the infant create attachment. Guilt, pride, despair, shame, empathy, and jealousy are all emotions that could potentially appear in the second year, if not before. By age two, infants can use language to define their feelings, such as the phrase “puppy scary”. Emotions are very developmentally important in the second
In contrast,emotion is a strong feeling which is shown and connects to other factors such as a person’s circumstances, mood or relationships with others. However, individuals who interact with people and things as part of their daily lives, play a part in anybody’s emotional state, making them feel positively or negatively about that experience.
The last analysis is facial expression. In most cases it is easy to see what kind of emotion someone is feeling by the look on their face. Eyes are very good way to see how someone is feeling, because you can see happiness, sadness and anger in their eyes. Each of the basic emotions is clearly defined just by looking at someone. There are many different emotions that are expressed just by looking at someone. The basic emotions are obvious, but there are other emotions like guilt, pride, worry and excitement that are seen as well. It is amazing how easy it is sometimes to read peoples emotions. (2010
Emotion plays a huge role in our human behavior. Emotions have arisen to many of us, from many different reasons. Like fighting, when people fight with one another we tend to show different types of emotions, to whatever the argument maybe. Our anger shows a lot when people are fighting. Fear would be another one, we show fear when we don’t really know what’s going on, so we tend to panic. When we panic, were scrambling trying to figure out what to do, or what is best in a situation of fear. We also show different emotions when we fall in love with a person, sometimes when we
Emotions are interesting because everyone feels them, most people do not know how emotions take their curse and arguably no one really knows how emotions function. There are many theories aimed precisely at defining emotions and how they work but there is a lot of work to be done. An article posted in the New York Time’s website about a week ago explains a wonderful aspect about emotions and how people can utilize emotions to benefit their lives.
Chapter 3 explores the concept of universally shared basic emotions, an idea that was first advanced as a theory by Charles Darwin. Paul Ekman and Jakk Panksepp studied the concept of
Emotional contagion is the transfer of various emotions and moods between individuals. The evidence to support this idea is based around communication that centers around computer-mediated communication. This context takes place online because it centers around the idea that it occurs only when there is no direct contact.
When talking about emotion it seems a fairly simple topic and immediately "feeling" words come to mind; sad, happy, and confused. These are basic emotions and easy to understand. What isn't so simple about emotions is their process and how they form and work. Emotions are reactions to sensory information like sight, smell, taste, touch and sound (Tracing Emotion’s Pathways 94). However, it is not that simple; an emotional reaction or response is made aware of and understood by a part of the brain called the sensory cortex. These emotional responses or reactions to sensory stimuli are processed by a part of the brain called the amygdala (What’s An Emotion). The amygdala is a huge asset to the cognitive factors of emotions because in processing emotions you become able to understand, recognize, and control them. So then how do emotions evoke a physiological reaction such as tearing up when one feels sad, laughing with joy, and trembling with fear? These physiological reactions that one may experience come from the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is, “a collection of fibers that extend throughout