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Emotions And Emotional Theory Of Emotions

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Emotions are often taken into two different directions in terms of properties and function. In one camp emotions are generally instant responses that happen without any thought involved. This non-cognitive route to explaining emotions relies heavily on physiological evidence to prove their claims. Particularly that emotions are reactions to bodily changes. While the other camp takes the position that emotions play a role in cognition in that they are either the antecedent or the consequence of thought. In the non-cognitive emotional theory the physiological changes that occur as a result of environmental stimuli instigate the response from the brain that gives us emotion. For example, a person sees a snake(stimuli) this activates a physiological change in the body, then receives this information and reacts producing fear(James-Lange 1885). It 's perfectly obvious that there is no thought in between the initial sight of the stimulus and the emotion experienced. Neuroscience supports these claims with fMRI scans of the brain while experiencing an emotion shows distinct neuronal activity with each individual emotion. Another case for this theory comes in the form of simple thought experiment involving mental subtraction. If we took an emotion like fear for example and imagined feeling it very vividly and took away each part of that feeling that is the result of a physical process, are we still afraid? Quite obviously not since there would be nothing we would be feeling that

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