BUT I DON’T WANNA SHOOT ANOTHER DNEWS EPISODE!
Unsurprisingly, emotions are difficult to pin down.
Even the definition is a little nebulous, "a natural instinctive state of mind deriving
from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others."
Circumstances OR mood OR relationships that's pretty much everything we ever do.
Emotions are a visceral state of mind that hits hard and fast; and is something philosophers
and scientists have struggled with explaining for millennia.
Emotions start in the brain, so if we want emotional maturity, what about brain maturity?
According to neuroscience, the brain reaches full maturity around 25 -- though it varies
from person to person.
The last to mature is the prefrontal cortex, the area associated with executive functions:
i.e. risk assessment, forward thinking, goal-setting, evaluations, and emotional regulation!
Ideally, by 25 we understand our place and ourselves, which explains why teenage emotions
seem to run so much hotter than adult's.
Emotional development comes in two groups, basic emotion and higher emotion.
The basics are inborn, universal and were defined by anthropologist Paul Eckman in the
1970s: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust.
Babies, adults, everyone experiences these emotions
If I do this… you know I’m disgusted, right?
It’s the same thing for everybody.
Higher emotions like jealousy, envy, guilt, shame, pride and embarrassment come later,
once the brain learns self-awareness and self-consciousness; but the problem is, emotions aren't easy to
quantify!
Just because we don't understand them doesn't mean we don't experience them, right?
And that was shown in a hilariously cute study done by Brigham Young this month.
They looked at children six and under competing in a block-building contest.
The winners and losers were rigged, so they could test their emotional responses!
Losers shrugged it off and moved on right away, but winners stood, hands on their hips,
chest out, and had "obvious swagger!"
The brain of a two year old is not self-aware, or self-conscious, so they shouldn't understand
pride, but there they were, swagging it up.
When asked about their feelings later, younger kids who were shown pictures of people expressing
pride would identify it in others if they were four or older; but not in themselves.
Five-year-olds could see it in themselves and others; indicating we develop our emotions
as we age.
So, if someone slaps you in the face violently and unexpectedly, you turn red, feel angry
and have an indescribable urge to lash out; but if you're younger, that emotion can override
your rational decision-making and cause you to do something you might later regret, right?
Not always.
Studies from the University of California Santa Barbara found inducing anger in participants
helped them be more analytical!
Their findings unexpectedly found that even usually irrational thinkers became careful
thinkers when angry; suggesting that anger isn't only a physical fight-or-flight response,
but can also focus the mind for decisionmaking.
This is the problem we have when studying our emotions.
They're so fleeting and deep-seated they're difficult to measure.
But, according to an essay from the University of California, Berkeley, emotions help organize
our thoughts and keep our perceptions on track and motivate social interaction.
So the more emotional maturity we have, the better we can learn from our emotional responses.
A scientist from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine describes disgust as
affecting, "who we’re going to kiss, who we’re going to mate with, who we’re going
to sit next to… who we're going to shun," but disgust is one of the least understood
emotions, because it's not as flashy as the other basics: sadness, anger, or fear.
Which brings us to another problem with understanding emotions: there are definitely not just six!
Since the definition of the basic emotions, scientists have argued there are WAY more
or WAY less; and some have objected to categorizing emotion altogether!
There's a lot of strong feelings on the study of emotion, unsurprisingly.
Sociologists, psychologists, neurologists, biologists, all have a great need to understand
these physio-psychological reactions that hold sway over our lives; but sadly, they
suck at it.
It's a massive blind spot in science.
We can watch blood flow in your brain with an fMRI, we can scan brainwaves with EEGs,
measure hormones, blood pressure, skin response, facial expressions, and many other physical
reactions to the emotion, but we can't objectively measure the emotion itself.
Evolutionary psychologists theorize emotions, particularly the outward expressions of them,
were a way for ancient man to signal to our social group.
Disgust, joy and anger all have universal nonverbal cues which tell other social members
what's up with us, which may explain why they've evolved!
Emotions can save lives and facilitate social bonding, but even still, there's a lot more
work to do, and we didn't even touch love.
Nope.
Too much for just one DNews.
Want to know more?
Ask some questions in the comments and maybe we'll make another emotional DNews.