Understanding Emotions — Our Evolutionary Legacy
Our emotions are our evolutionary legacy, a survival mechanism that we owe to our distant ancestors. They are wired into our brains, causing us to react automatically to stimuli. We can learn to appreciate and manage our emotions with intelligence.
Fear, anger, happiness, and sadness are often cited as the four primary or basic emotions. Some psychologists consider the list to be longer, adding surprise and disgust (most notably, Paul Eckman), or even interest and shame. All other emotions are considered a combination of these basic emotions.
Daniel Goleman defines emotions as “impulses to act.” Our emotions are our evolutionary legacy for dealing with danger and unpredictability which once threatened the physical survival of our distant ancestors. We often act automatically to external triggers, since those reactions are deeply imprinted (wired) into our nervous system.
Etymologically, the word “emotion” comes from the Latin term “motere” (to move). Emotions occur in the subcortical brain region (including the amygdala) and the neocortex, causing biochemical reactions in the body and psychological changes in the mind, affecting one’s thoughts and behavior. According to the American Psychological Association, “emotion is a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and psychological elements, by which an individual attempts to deal with a personally significant matter or event.”
Emotions are therefore considered as neurological reactions to a stimulus. For example, the emotion of anger causes the heart rate to increase and triggers an adrenaline rush, which provides access to the energy necessary to physically fight an enemy. In contrast, the emotion of fear causes the blood to rush toward the lower limbs, making it easier to flee. The facial gestures corresponding to disgust indicate that our body is trying to close the mouth and the nostrils to protect itself from rotten or poisonous food. In a surprise, the lifted eyebrow enables us to take a better look at the situation and assess the need to act. By causing physical withdrawal, sadness as an emotion keeps us sheltered and safe during a vulnerable period, until we regain energy and recuperate.
Our behavior is often determined by these “biological templates for emotional life.” As a result, our emotions are often a stronger driver than our intellect or reason. However, in our modern life, we are no longer exposed to the same risks and dangers as our ancestors. Therefore, many of those automatic responses to external triggers or stimuli — which Goleman calls “biological designs for the basic neural circuitry of emotion” — no longer fit. At worst, they can have tragic consequences, such as in the case of hair-trigger anger incidents.
This is eloquently summed up in the following quote by Goleman:
“Our appraisal of every personal encounter and our responses to it are shaped not just by our rational judgments or our personal history, but also by our distant ancestral past. This leaves us with sometimes tragic propensities … we too often confront postmodern dilemmas with an emotional repertoire tailored to the urgencies of the Pleistocene.”
This problem was observed as early as the Ancient Greek period. The famous philosopher Aristotle recognized the need to manage our emotions with intelligence. Aristotle did not discard the importance of emotions — he acknowledged that they are key to our survival and that they when exercised properly, they contain wisdom. However, the emotions need to be guarded and properly expressed, so that they do not go awry. We often witness what happens when emotions go out of control —media is full of reports of individual and collective anger or rage, which often escalates into mental, verbal, and physical aggression, violence, conflict, wars, and subsequent long-term traumas.
On the other hand, the rich emotional repertoire of the modern human fortunately contains some wonderful elevated emotions, such as love, empathy, gratitude, and self-sacrifice.
Numerous examples of altruistic love throughout history—of sacrificing one’s own life to save another—suggest that human emotions are extraordinarily powerful and valuable. From a rational, intellectual point of view, such events often appear irrational, but when seen from the perspective of the heart, argues Goleman, they are “the only choice to make.” The wide range of human emotions has evolutionarily been imprinted in our nervous system, resulting in certain “automatic tendencies of the human heart.” Therefore, emphasizing the importance of one’s intellectual capacity for analysis, problem-solving, and decision-making, at the expense of the due recognition of the important role that emotions play in our lives, is shortsighted, distorted, and essentially wrong.
Source
Based on the book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman, Bantam Books. 1995.