Emotions And The Human Race

Emotions are used in our everyday lives help us understand and comprehend a situation. The way we feel can affect the way we think through a situation and the situation that we make. Our emotions are expressed when we play sports, when a loved one dies, or when we see our newly born baby for the first time. Emotions are a state of consciousness like joy, sorrow, fear, hate, and love. Whenever we are presented with a situation, our brain responds in feelings, and our feeling determine what will happen next.

Charles Darwin was the first scientist to ever study animals in a systematic way (Bekoff “The Emotional Lives” 6). In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin discussed the

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 a necessary part of our whole humanity. They may be more than we have learned to be comfortable with, but they are not too much.

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.

Emotions are an important part of the human being life. When humans express their emotions, they are displaying everyone else how they really feel about the current situation. Emotions are a big stitching to the quilt of shared humanity. When humans share their emotions, they find other humans who are also having these same emotions. Emotions allow humans to show how they are feeling about an event or situation and allow others to understand how they are feeling as well.

The next analysis is the evolution theory. The evolution theory describes the emotional experiences that increase the need for survival. For example if the basic emotion is sadness, other emotions that come up may include sorrow or griefs, which are, expressed when we lose someone or something we love. If fear is the basic emotion rage or hostility can be present as well. Emotions can be very powerful and are necessary for basic survival, it is not always easy thought to read or understand other peoples emotions, over the years people have become very good and hiding their emotions if they feel they need to. (2010 Motivation: Biological, Psychological, and Environmental)

This helps to allocate their thought process of how they think and feel. This then guides the way it makes them feel also the thought process behind it. Emotion leads to behavior; which influences how we think and feel.

However, instead of using vital survival arguments to explain how emotions are elicited, it uses a expansive notion of possible benefits or harms. Only limited by the central role given to cognition in the process of emotion, analysts in this field find it more difficult to distinguish emotions from non-emotions, (e.g. ideas, attitudes or

This study was preformed to discuss the relationship between emotions and humans, specifically if emotions and their physiological counterparts have evolved in everyone to show a generalized response under similar situations of stress and to show how negative emotions are more apparent to people then positive and that women detect emotions better than men. The study was performed on 14 Brain and Behavior students at Brock University through a test involving listening to scenarios of relationships and then recording how you would emotionally feel and physically feel, as well as a test involving describing the emotion the person is conveying with just their eyes. The results were that the tests described humans to be more

Amygdala, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and hypothalamus are the main four brain regions involved in how we experience emotions (Feist et al., 2015). One way to explain emotions is to describe them as adaptations to the problems that our ancestors experienced. This model explains emotions as evolutionary adaptations (Feist et al., 2015). In this model, emotions affect physiological systems in ways to help us “deal efficiently with critical situations” (Feist et al., 2015). For example, when we sense danger, our circulatory system, respiratory system, and muscles work harder to help us escape from the danger. In this case, a set of adaptations is associated with a certain emotion (i.e. fear) and thus, emotions can be explained as evolutionary adaptations, allowing us to cope with the

Emotions involve doing that which suits your carnal mind or that which pleases others, Abraham did that and the consequence was Ishmael. It can also do that which makes you feel good or to make you to be accepted. Cain allowed his selfish emotions to make him kill his brother Abel (Gen 4). To a large extent our emotions runs our behavior so it must be under control.

Emotions play a very important role in decision making. When making any decision, my first question to myself is, "what would make me feel good or lead to my happiness?" If I don't use that thought process, and for example act out of anger or vengeance, my decisions are never ideal.

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

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