A Theory of Emotion

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People respond negatively to pain or any negative emotion. Pain might also hinder development of emotions because it isn’t encouraging. The right factors need to be applied to someone in order to get them to experience the fullest potential of their emotions. This could simply mean having the right people around you who are supportive of you and your emotions. In fact, the words “thrive” and “support” are really key for emotion generation. That being said, it cannot be ignored that emotional events which feel painful in the short term may be beneficial in the long term, and even cause a person to thrive and experience good emotions.

It needs to be clarified what is significant about emotions, or how are they meaningful. There can be an individual emotional event, but this event might impact everything else that occurs in someone’s life. In that way everything is tied in. Even words, or therapy, might change how someone views the world and greatly influence how they experience emotion. For instance, understanding that a loved one likes you – or loves you – consciously would cause your emotions as a whole to change. So not just your understanding of that thing in specific would change, but also your experience with that person. A cliché saying that explains this would be “once you let love in, the world becomes a beautiful and sunny place”.

That expression explains the importantance of positive encouragement, the impact of one event or person on someone’s overall emotions all the time, and the importance therapy can have. That one statement might make someone realize they love someone else and what this love does for their life. [I apologize if this article is starting to sound cheesy, but it is important to realize that all emotions are tied into each other, and that small events or even your cognition (which could be influenced by therapy or words (as in the cliché example)) can greatly influence your life.] Conversely, if something very bad happens to someone, they might not care about their life anymore and start to experience all their other emotions less.

In fact, everything that happens to someone probably influences everything else that happens to that person. You could also just look at life as individual events that only have minor impacts on each other over the long term. I suppose I am asking the question, “what is everything, how does everything feel, and how does everything relate”. Is there a way to describe all emotion other than, “you’re feeling something”? Certain activities bring up certain emotions, individual circumstances and their emotional parts can be described as action-reaction relationships. If all of life is described in that way, does that explain everything? If you describe how everything feels individually then that would describe everything if you take into your account of each situation how all the other things that happened influenced how you feel for that one thing. So that means how you feel most of the time, the general emotions you have that are mostly independent of what is happening – and also how you feel for each thing that happens.

Analyzing anything, however, has many levels of complication. A kid playing a video game generates the emotion fun. That could be the first level of analysis of an event, stating the obvious emotions involved. The next level would be asking, “what are all the emotions involved”. To do that you would have to understand that all emotions are mixed, that the emotion “fun” the boy has could be mixed in with the feeling anger or frustration if he lost a fight or something. Also, how a specific negative event playing the game (say losing a battle) influenced his feelings of fun after that event. Also, his cognition might play a role, did he say something to himself after he lost to make himself feel better? Did his therapy session talking about how to deal with defeat alleviate his pain at the loss? To have a complete understanding of everything, you could analyze the degrees of fun the boy has during the game, when it elevates and when it decreases. Is all of life like this video game, with variations of fun and anger and cognitive influences? If viewed simply, then yes, however there are many many things that happen in life that can be analyzed and the emotional components explained. It would be useful if I could describe a few principals that would apply to all of these events:

That’s pretty much all I can think of, I suppose I could say that my theory has two parts, the pleasure instinct and the pain instinct, and that all emotions stem from these two instincts. Everything is going to generate some amount of pleasure and some amount of pain, causing reward and punishment, it is almost Pavlovian. However it is more complicated than that, while my theory works on the small individual direct event level (thing A causes you to be motivated to do thing B) it also works in small ways on everything, like one event might motivate you for something else entirely. Freud believed in a death instinct and a sex instinct, which, if you think about it, is similar to my theory.

The pleasure and pain instincts apply when any emotion happens. Every emotion is going to be a certain amount painful, and a certain amount pleasurable. Furthermore, the meaningful aspect of the emotion is going to be how pleasurable or painful it was. Learning emotionally could be viewed as long term pleasure. So if an event is meaningful instead of just fun or pleasurable it would still be placed under the category of pleasure because this meaningful activity adds to your life overall, thus causing long-term pleasure. It is almost like intelligence is fun, only in a different more long term way. Also, an even that is fun is also going to contribute to long term intellectual emotional development as well, because a fun event is going itself to contain information, and be motivating and inspiring. That also explains why negative and painful events can be beneficial over the long run for both fun and emotional intellectual development. They can be because the event itself might communicate information to the person, or help them understand something. Almost like learning a lesson the hard way. The point is that pain or pleasure is the stimulus behind all fun, learning, and long-term fun and learning. In other words, the pain and pleasure you get from events helps you out all the time, not just for those specific events. Pleasure is inspiring and encouraging, while pain is more of a learning experience. So every emotion is going to inspire in some ways if it is pleasurable, and you might learn from painful emotions.

Pleasure and pain function in the mind in many ways. The influence emotions, thoughts and the long term conscious and unconscious im-pact on thoughts and emotions. There are different types of emotion and thought that are influenced by different types of pain and pleasure:

In review, by exploring the importance of pleasure and pain on emotion in general we gained insight into emotions, and that gave us insight into how they can be manipulated with thoughts, or your thoughts be manipulated by your emotions. So pain and pleasure function with individual thoughts as well as with emotions, that is obvious if you remember how tied in emotions are with thought -and I already explained the importance of pain on emotion. Also, thoughts can be emotional, when you think something it can bring up pain. That pain could just be an enlarged version of the pain caused by the thoughts the rest of the time (the time you’re not thinking consciously of them) unconsciously. You highlight the pain by thinking about what is causing it. That might help you to change the thought, however, and therefore the unconcsious thoughts and emotions making you feel at other times.

While my pain and pleasure instincts can be applied to almost every emotional situation, there are other principals which can be applied in many situations that are almost as important as those. For instance, the social aspect of the human experience is probably one of the most important generators of emotion. You could classify everything someone does as either social or non-social, and how important and emotional can be interacting with inanimate objects? The important aspect of the social aspect, however, is personality. That is so because no matter what someone says or does, their personality is going to have a large impact on the people around them because there is an unconscious emotional interaction going on between different personalities. Of course, what someone says and does is going to be reflective of their personality, but just by describing personality types it can be inferred what that type of person would do differently. Though it is important to note that basic interactions are almost all the same, the only thing that varies is how the people have different and individual personalities and this changes the emotional interchange.

There are several things that determine what someones personality is go ing to be. There are important factors and non-important ones. For the principals to be general and far-reaching, I am only going to talk about the important factors. Personality could be described and the things listed be important to what that person does, and what type of intellect they have, however this would not be looking at the important aspects of personality. The important aspects of someone’s personality are the ones that going to affect how much emotion they experience, and those aspects are going to be ones that influence their social emotional interchanges. However, non-important personality traits may be related to important ones. For instance, although "Organized and hard working" is not an important factor, (how hard someone works is not going to play a large role in the emotional interchange when this person interacts) how serious that person is, which might be shown in how hard working they are, might play a role in a social interaction. For instance, there might be a violent clash between the personality of a serious person and a laid back person, generating a lot of emotion. So although two people might be equally hard working, maybe only one reflects this trait emotionally when they interact (or "radiates" it). There are only a few basic factors that generate large amounts of emotion when any two people interact: