[Neurons] 2024 Neurons #5 WHAT ARE EMOTIONS --- Part II

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2024 Neurons #5

January, 22, 2024

Emotional Intelligence Series #4

                                           

WHAT ARE EMOTIONS ANYWAY?

Part II

 

In the last Neurons (#3), I identified emotions in six ways thereby
revealing a bit of the complexity about emotions. 

1) Emotion as movement.

2) Emotions as inhibiting and exciting nerve impulses.

3) Emotions as distinct from feelings. 

4) Emotions as cognitively based.  

5) Emotions as relative to map and territory.

6) Emotions as interpretations.  But wait-there's more!  I'm not done with
defining an emotion.

 

7) Emotions as reflexive layers.  When it comes to bodily emotions there are
basically a dozen or more basic or primary emotions.  Various authors have
detailed these over the years, and depending on the author, there are
anywhere from 8 to 20 core emotions.  And like when you mix up the primary
colors and apply perhaps brown and yellow together, you get secondary
colors, and if you continue mixing colors, triary colors.  So with emotions.
We have primary emotions, secondary, and triary emotions.  Robert Plutchik's
book, Emotion: A Psycho-Evolutionary Synthesis (1980) posited 8 primary
emotions: fear, surprise, sad, disgust, anger, anticipation, joy, and
acceptance (receptivity).  12 primary emotions were later coded using six
continua:

Joy (delight, pleasure) - Sad (grief, pain, dislike)

              Fear (away from, anxiety, worry)- Anger

 
(aggressing, 

 
going at)

              Calm (relaxed)                   -           Tension 

 
(distress, stress)

              Fatigue (tired)                    -           Energetic 

 
(vitality)

              Distracted                          -           Focused 

 
Love (liking, attraction)     -           Hate (aversion,

 
indiffence, apathy  

 

These levels of emotions arise from your reflexive consciousness.  Just as
you can think about your thinking, you can emote about your emotion.  It is
an exceedingly simply process.  Simply answer, "What do you feel about
anger?"  Or, "What do you feel about fear, jealousy, stress, sadness, joy,
excitement, etc.?"   Further, if you are human, you cannot not reflect on
your emotions.  And since thinking-emoting is a single process that we can
only pull apart linguistically, when you think-emote you create a state-a
state of mind-body-emotion.  And when you bring one state to another state,
you build up the second, third, fourth, etc. levels of
emotions-about-emotions.

 

This means that we have emotions all the way up the meta-levels.  And that's
one reason why emotions can become considerably stronger as they go up the
levels.  So just as joyful learning is much more emotional than just
"learning," so passionately joyful learning, and ferociously passionate,
joyful learning, etc. endows the foundational emotion with more and more
emotionality.  This puts the lie to the overly simplistic idea that the
founders of NLP presented.  They said that to "go meta" is to dissociate, to
be less emotional, to be emotionless.  Yet that is just not so.  Going meta
can, and often does, generates stronger experiences of emotion.
Dissociation is only one of 16 interfaces that can occur when you go meta.
It is one that probably only occurs about 1% of the time. (The interfaces
are detailed in Meta-States, 2012).

 

To go meta and layer another emotion onto your previous thinking-and-emoting
is to generate layers of emotions about the original subject.  This
explains, in part, why it is sometimes difficult to say what you feel.  You
feel a lot of things!  About a challenge, you may simultaneously feel
excited, scared, fearful, stress, anticipating, curious, etc.  And about
excitement, you may feel enthused, playful, curious or ecstatic.  And about
fear you may feel some self-doubt, apprehension, etc.  Emotions as reflexive
layers reveal that emotions can be quite complex.  They can also set us up
to feel contradictory emotions at the same time, which again, makes it
difficult to say exactly what you feel-as if it is normal to feel only one
things at a time. 

 

Now true enough, many secondary and triary emotions, as they go up the
levels do tend to become more like moods (a pervasive emotional state) or
even as attitudes (a disposition of body, mind, and emotion).  This changes
the quality of the emotion, even thought it is still an emotion.  For
example, fear becomes a generalized fearfulness, a timidity, a shyness, an
avoiding.  Anger becomes rage, then sarcasm, then hatredm aggressiveness,
disrespect, etc.

 

The bottom-line about emotions is that they are a kind of thinking.  Anger
thinking creates anger feelings; fear thinking creates fear feelings.
Jealous thinking creates jealousy feelings.  Because thinking-feeling is a
single process, theirs is no real distinction between them.  Your nervous
systems operate holistically so that thinking-feeling blend together as an
energy source in your body.

 

 

                                                                        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

(970) 523-7877

meta at acsol.net

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20240121/1111aa2f/attachment-0001.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.emz
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 1081608 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20240121/1111aa2f/attachment-0001.obj>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image002.png
Type: image/png
Size: 67855 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://pairlist8.pair.net/pipermail/neurons/attachments/20240121/1111aa2f/attachment-0001.png>