Emotions

Somebody accuses you of doing something you did not do. You feel the anger rise up inside you. You are livid. You stand there fuming for a moment, and almost start to shout, but just as you are about to start shouting, you remember that the person is your boss. You restrain yourself, and quietly explain that you did not do it.

This is an example of how powerful your emotions are, how they spring up before your rationalization, emotions work faster than reason. There are advantages to this, it can save you from danger, but it can also cause problems, as they are only intuitions, and are not based on what the most sensible thing to do is.

There are such things are “universal” emotions, known as primary emotions. 

These emotions are universal and felt by people all over the world. Then there are such emotions like jealousy, embarrassment, sympathy, pity, guilt that are known as social emotions. These are emotions evoked by your surroundings, culture and the situation. People will express these emotions in different ways, and different kinds of situations will provoke these emotions.

Emotional intelligence is a concept that has recently evolved. It involves awareness of your own emotions, and those of others, being able to keep your emotions in check, being able to encourage yourself into doing something and in general being able to be with other people. From this the idea of different kinds of intelligences has emerged, other than the logical reasoning, mathematical intelligence conventionally valued in Western culture, and tested through for example IQ tests. People have linguistic, visual, kinaesthetic, and auditory intelligence. In addition, there is an interpersonal communication, which is being able to deduce another person’s feelings through body language for instance. On the other side of this is, the intrapersonal communication, which can be considered as self-awareness. There are claims about a naturalist intelligence, which is essentially being connected to nature, however there is not really any proof for this. Still, this only comes to show how important emotions are, and how important it is to be able to read tour own and others emotions. People who do this generally can control their lives.

Being able to detect other people’s emotions is useful, and few people can do it correct all the time. Some people with a high emotional intelligence can detect for instance a fake smile, or perhaps even a lie. Lie detectors have been developed, which measure things like heart rate, amount of sweating, and muscle movements. However, these are not totally reliable, as a nervous person could show these signs, and someone who was a good liar could pass.

However, as a Way of Knowing, emotions are discredited, as emotions are spurred on by instinct and intuition, no conscious, rational thinking goes into it. It is often considered as unreliable. However, some of our intuitions are valuable. For instance, there was a statue, that all the tests showed was authentic ancient Greek, but which many experts felt, had a “hunch” was not authentic. This resulted in more tests, and it turned out that the stature was not authentic at all. There are three different kinds, core intuitions, subject specific intuitions and social intuitions. Core intuitions are the basic sense that we are alive, of right and wrong. Subject specific intuitions are intuitions formed on the basis of knowledge. Social intuitions are what we feel about other people, which is not always trustworthy.

Overall, I found it interesting to fid out about how emotions work, and how in actual fact our intuitions can sometimes be correct, even though they disprove solid evidence (the example of the supposedly ancient Greek statue, where evidence points to it being authentic, but experts saying that they had an intuition that it was fake, which turned out true, after further studies were made). Also, it’s interesting that emotions play a big part in decision making, alongside logic, as the Captain Kirk principle says.

It is useful in real life to know about for instance emotional intelligence, because it gives a person a better idea of their own abilities, and makes them better able to communicate with other people. This is important in social situations, being able to deduce how your friend is feeling, and also at work or school when you have to work with people. It is also important to remember that emotions come on with no reasoning, and sometimes it is better to wait for reason to catch up, so that you are able to make a better decision.

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