Why Emotions are Necessary

There is a thread in which the question of value of emotions has arisen. For me the answer seems obvious. The emotions we feel are what make us human. Without emotions we’d be machines. But I thought to delve a bit deeper into this subject. I looked for references in some of my books to find a ‘logical’ reason that we humans are endowed with feelings and emotions.

I first took another look at the book, “Self Comes to Mind; Constructing the Conscious Brain” by Antonio Damasio. Damasio is a professor of neuroscience, psychology and neurology at the University of Southern California. His other writings include “Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain”; The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness”; “Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain.”

Damasio makes a distinction between emotions and feelings. From his description I learn that I have been wrong when I’ve stated that it is emotions that make us human. Emotion, he states, belong to many classes of organisms and that its purpose is nothing less than life regulation. Emotion involves reward and punishment, drives and motivation and feelings. I won’t go on about his explanation of what defines the differences between emotion and feelings because to be honest, it’s quite confusing to me and he includes a lot of brain science in his explanation. But I will quote some passages that may help explain the purpose of emotions and feelings.

Damasio has identified particular groups of emotions. One such group he labels “social emotions”. “Examples of main social emotions easily justify the label – compassion, embarrassment, shame, guilt, contempt, jealousy, envy, pride, admiration. These emotions are indeed triggered in social situations, and they certainly play prominent roles in the life of social groups…Social emotions incorporate a number of moral principles and form a natural grounding for ethical systems.”

So here is just one very clear reason why emotions are important. Without them we could not have ethics. Damasio goes on to explore the emotions of admiration and compassion. He writes, “Predicaments of every sort abound in daily life, and unless individuals behave compassionately toward those who face them, the prospects of a healthy society are greatly diminished..”

Sblue - just trying to understand - if he distinguishes between feelings and emotions, and those listed are "emotion" words, what does he say are "feeling" words?

Hmm... I thought emotions and feelings were the same thing.

Emotions put survival "value" on events. They tell how important to us something is. Without that, everything would appear to be of equal value, and that would lead us to quick extinction.

Anyway, my words of the day.

This is obviously a big issue that I'm working on with T right now. Here's what my T had to say re: feelings vs. emotions:

Fear (scared) would be the emotion that may include feelings described as anxiety, apprehension, panic, nervousness, tense, etc. We have five basic emotional states. We label feelings in these states based upon the intensity. The better we are at labeling and communicating about the feeling, typically, the better we are at coping with them. The generally agreed upon categories are: MAD, SAD, BAD (guilt, shame, embarrassed, etc), GLAD AND SCARED.

For those of us who have somehow built a coping mechanism where we tell ourselves that we don't have/need/desire feelings... feelings can be an incredibly perplexing and terrifying thing. It is much easier for me to tell myself I am self-sufficient and don't really give a crap about anything or anyone.

If you ask me I'll gladly tell you I would prefer to be a machine. However, my panic attacks indicate how well THAT little plan is working out for me ...

I think he's making the distinction because of how they are processed in the brain and a brain scientist has to be excruciatingly precise, right.

I'll quote another passage but for us I guess it really doesn't matter which word we use. I probably shouldn't have included his discussion of the difference between emotions and feelings because it's going to muddy the waters of our discussing the necessity of emotions/feelings for survival.

"The other important problem is the distinction between emotion and feeling. Emotion and feeling, albeit part of a tightly bound cycle, are distinguishable processes. It makes no difference what words we choose to refer to these distinct processes, provided we acknowledge that the essence of emotion and the essence of feeling are different.

"Of course there's nothing wrong with the words emotion and feeling to begin with but let us define those key terms in light of current neurobiology.

"Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are complemented by a cognitive program that includes certain ideas and modes of cognition, but the world of emotions is largely one of actions carried out in our bodies, from the facial expressions and postures to changes in viscera and internal milieu.

"Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves; the world of feelings is one of perceptions executed in brain maps.

"But there is a qualification to be made here: the perceptions we call feelings of emotion contain a special ingredient that corresponds to the primordial feelings discussed earlier. Those feelings are based on the unique relationship between body and brain that privileges interoception.

"There are other aspects of the body being represented in emotional feelings, of course, but interoception dominates the process and is responsible for what we designate as the felt aspect of these perceptions.

"The general distinction between emotions and feeling, then, is reasonably clear. While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time. In simple organisms capable of behavior but without a mind process, emotions can be alive and well, but states of emotional feeling may not necessarily follow."

Damasio explains interoception as the 'sensing of the organism's interior"

If anyone understands his explanation of the difference between emotion and feeling, I would love to be instructed. It goes over my head.

But, the most important thing from his writings I believe is the scientific explanation of why we have emotions/feelings. It is all about survival.

I think we feel an emotion; the feeling is the literal. . . feeling, the emotion is the word or description of the type of feeling.

I use my feelings as tools to let me know about myself and my interactions with myself, others, and the world around me. Just as I feel hot on a warm day or cold on a cool one, I feel sad when someone close to me dies or joy when I hold a grandchild for the first time.

I would say perplexing but not terrifying. To be terrified you'd have to feel emotion, and if you don't have emotions then you cannot feel what you do not have.
If you're suppressing emotions then that's different.

Emotions are how we are developed. They just are, just like our senses. It is like asking why sight is necessary.

Are there actually people who don't have emotions?

I'm a suppressor. Emotional stuff feels kinda gross to me.

Without emotion we would not need ethics.

Could say we don't need ethics, what we need is morals. And true, passions (emotions) necessitate morals. Very good point !!

Oh man, can you envision a world where humans didn't have emotions? Gives me the chills... Actually, I can't even imagine what that world would look like. Maybe Stopdog can help me out here.

I don't know why you say we would not need ethics or morals; just because I don't feel hurt, angry, or afraid when you steal from me does not mean you should steal from me. Ethics and morals are not about feeling and emotions but about providing traffic signals so we interact more smoothly.

Everyone can't fit in the same space at the same time and it's that knowledge that it is unethical to try to butt in front of someone in line, to run over someone to get in the store to get your Nike, "Air Jordans" that is the reason we teach our children our morals or, in school, business ethics, not that you might hurt someone's feelings?

I am here for you.
I think we cannot imagine a world without them that would universally hold true because they exist and although they can be suppressed, they cannot be eradicated. Any attempt to describe such a situation has some emotion behind it. The reason i said without emotion we would not need ethics is because without emotion there would be no greed, envy, shame etc to incite us to act unethically. The trade off is the absence of the fun emotions. For some, that seems awful and for others an unfortunate but reasonable exchange, and for still others a great relief.

I can see this, but on the other hand, people who are sociopaths and who abuse others supposedly do so (according to psychologists) because they have no emotions-- especially no ability to feel empathy. The logic goes (although I'm not entirely sure I believe it) that if you have no ability to feel empathy for others*, you'll do unspeakable things to them.

Anne

*I believe you must also have the desire to hurt people; there are sociopaths who do not hurt others.

Why would ethics matter if there were no emotions? When there was a murder or genocide, no one would feel hurt, so it wouldn't matter.

Sociopaths do have some emotions, or at least shallow emotions. They don't have the full spectrum of emotions. Schizoids don't either from what I've read of the personality.

People with Aspergers syndrome supposedly lack empathy. But they can have sympathy for others. If someone's sadistic and lacks empathy then they're a potential threat to other people.

I think he is saying that feelings are the conscious perceptions we have of emotions. Emotions are bodily/mental processes which attach "significance" to events.

It has always astounded me how society teaches us that emotions are important because they mean x,y and z. But at the same time society also teaches us that emotions are NOT important and we should all just be strong and ignore them and do what's right in every situation, because they mean nothing. Society gives us all these tools to use, in order to shrug off the emotions and ignore them, so that we can be the most effective and efficient in life. But then when people use these tools effectively (as they were taught for the first 18+ years of their life), suddenly they are wrong again because "emotions ARE important and its bad to suppress or avoid them".

So society needs to make a decision - are feelings important, or are they not? or only slighly important? and if they are of any importance at all, society needs to STOP raising children to be able to get rid of emotions in the first place. Its like society is raising kids these days to have emotional problems, in order to fix them later on. Seems a bit redundant to me. And a HUGE waste of government money. Instead of propagating a problem and then having to go and fix that problem for decades... it would be a lot cheaper to just NOT raise kids to have a problem in the first place.

Its a bit like raising kids to eat lots of fatty food every day and then complaining about having to pay medical bills for all their heart surgery they need later on. Like duh!

So is the distinction that emotions are actions, whereas feelings are thoughts? So I can feel anger but I am not having the emotion of anger unless I express the anger, for example, by yelling at someone? I think I have progressed a lot in therapy at being able to detect my feelings, but I still am not always good at expressing them, which would be the "emotion" part of it, I guess. So I may have feelings, but not emotions? (at least in some cases). In other cases I can do both the feeling and the emotion. Like, I may feel sad and I may express that by crying, which is the emotion.

If that is the distinction, I think my T is really good at detecting feelings, without having me express them as emotions. Sometimes his recognition of my feelings without my having to tell him I am having that feeling, helps me be able to express the emotion to him.

E-motions -- things that cause actions! Or are related to taking action.

Watch it, sunny! We are not supposed to claim that anyone can know what another person is thinking! That would be mind-reading, and WE KNOW that no one can do that.

I guess I'm still confused then. I thought what was being said was that feeling was not the action but can lead to the action. But you are saying emotion leads to the action. If that is the case, then how are emotions and feelings different? arrgh

No it's feelings, not thoughts, I'm talking about. Like my T can sense I'm sad without my saying anything. So he's not reading my thoughts, but my feeling? He's pretty good about not attempting to read my thoughts so he seems to have learned the "no mind reading" lesson.

I'm getting confused! I tend to use the word "feeling" and not "emotion." Like in therapy I will sometimes say, "I feel sad," or "I feel happy," or "I feel shy", but never "I am having the emotion of sadness right now." That would be weird to say that.

So I'm getting from this that emotion is the automatic response: If you slap my face I will become angry. I also have the capacity to have the thought than I know that I'm feeling angry. But I might instead only register the thought that I want to beat you up.

So then feelings distinguish us from animals in a similar way; because, since I have the capacity to think about being angry and perceive my anger as my heart pounds and my breathing changes. Rather than just react, I have the capacity to choose my response, to redirect my response from beating you up to other behaviors.

I think. I thought I was clear when I started typing, anyway.

My perception of the difference is that emotions are our physiological responses to stimuli - changes in muscle tension, heart rate, stress hormones etc... and that our feelings are our perceptions and interpretations of those physiological responses. We are able to consider and reflect upon our feelings, and consciously choose whether to act upon them or not.

I think animals experience emotions much like we do in that they have a physiological fear and aggression response, but they are unable to make the step to consider or reflect upon those physiological changes, and only act upon them instinctively.