“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 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.
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.
Emotions play an extremely important role in human mental life. Unlike the chimpanzee, human emotions are easier to read because of their physical responses such as tears in their eyes or their lips changing shape. In the same way as chimpanzees, humans use gestures to communicate with each other, yet they use words instead of sounds.
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
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 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.
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 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.
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)
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
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.
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
Picture a world where humans could not understand each other’s feelings. It looks pretty bleak, right? Luckily, humans do have the ability to comprehend others’ facial and body expressions, emotions, and language. Since this is such a beneficial and amazing power that we hold, it has been labeled as a sort of intelligence- emotional intelligence. The ability to control and express our emotions, as well as understand, recognize, and response to others’ emotions is essential. Emotional intelligence acts as a primary key to survival for humans.