Emotions lie at the very core of Man’s existence and dictate how to travel through ups and downs or even bargain for the needs of others in life. Emotions literally pierce through the very core of everyday life—from guiding our judgment to painting our perception with color. Indeed, a rather classical attempt at even classifying the set of feelings that human beings have is conducted by psychologists, and that indeed does turn out to be really complex tapestry, far removed from simple binaries.
A psychologist by the name of Paul Eckman initially distinguished emotional expressions into six different main emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger that he felt would be universally recognized and experienced across cultures. Since then, the list has grown to include other emotion categories such as pride, shame, and excitement.
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This gives the apparent meaning that Eckman’s scheme can be represented just like the color wheel; the reason being that these core emotions, much like colors, can blend into one another and mature into other more complex emotional states, and in this sense represent the multitude and potential complexity of human emotions.
The landscape of emotion is very nuanced. A 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences described 27 different categories of emotion on gradient continuums, rather than independent nodes. The gradient suggests that emotions are intertwined and can modulate one another in subtle and deep ways.
Happiness In most cases, people associate happiness with an ultimate emotional state, characterized by a feeling of satisfaction, general pleasure, and welfare.
No doubt, the culture, a priori given, shows the expression of different positive psychology features for happiness. These are strictly subjective and/or individual events and interpersonal relations or personal success instead of material achievements.
On the other side, sadness is an emotion that normally becomes momentary and consists of dejection, sorrow, and inactivity. It may be a natural response to loss or feeling of setback; however, if it prolongs, then it mutates into clinical depression, carrying serious and dangerous consequences for the mental and physical state of a person. It shall be the knowledge regarding the roots of sadness and the control measures that will help people tame its implications.
Fear is one of the major reactions that set the human body into fight or flight mode against any sort of threat. The body basically prepares itself for an action through extreme sensitization of responses, increase in heartbeats, and hyper-alertness.
Other lesser direct ways it may come be through anxiety disorders where threats perceived by a person may present him with similar physiological responses. One of the manners people use to cope and reduce their degree of response to fear is through exposure.
The revulsion is an evolved response designed to keep people out of harm’s way from various dangers, a result of distaste for disgusting tastes, smells, or behaviors. Hence, the feeling of revulsion transcends into moral judgment and then becomes part of the norms and values of a society.
In great part, understanding of what is disgusting explains a lot about where this particular emotion originated and why it would be different from culture to culture.
This, in relation, may trigger one to serve developments which give way to change or, in particular, justice-seeking in a relationship from the perspective of hostility and gross irritation.
Controls of anger, on the other hand, are not only held to mental sanity and health of the body itself from dangers since it leads one to cardiovascular disease and substance abuse. Temper management in a healthy manner calls for recognition of the triggering factor and healthy reaction.
Surprise is a short duration emotion occurring in response to incongruent or unexpected stimulation and is either positively, or negatively, valenced. The physiologic response to the surprising stimulus—startle response– is clearly in the service of the organismic organization of such rapid, decision-making, changes in ongoing behavior.
This physiological role is joined by the important effect on memory and cognitive organization of the excellent memorability of the surprising events.
Beyond these basic categories, recent research documents countless emotional experiences that give definition to human interaction and psychological well-being. Universal emotional experiences in the way Eckman articulated them have found refinement with new insights into the systems theory of emotions.
Other theories still provide hierarchical models of emotions in which primary emotions elicit secondary and tertiary emotional states. For instance, love accommodates different forms of feelings that range from affection to longing, wherein both the secondary as well as tertiary affectionate feelings give rise to primary and secondary elaboration mechanisms of emotional experience within the brain toward the emotional content for a person.
This is further supported by several recent functional brain imaging studies that suggest highly complex emotional networks in the brain, and importantly, that the emotional experience correlates highly with brain activity.
After all, it is the emotions that hold the human experience together. One who understands the emotions ultimately connects directly or indirectly to almost everything from personal relations to social functioning. Through the study of emotions, one works at deepening their understanding of emotional intelligence with respect to its correlation with mental health and well-being.
An appreciation of the complexity of the emotions underlies deeper ways that enable profundity in our emotional lives and hence greater resilience and empathy in our interaction with others.
Thus, understanding one’s feelings and responding to them are no longer private issues but very important in building healthy relationships and communities. Knowing the extent or degree of the emotional experience makes a person emotionally hardy with life.
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