• Question: how do emotions work

    Asked by 852utec44 to Alison, Hannah, Jonny, MarthaNari, Paul on 15 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Paul Brack

      Paul Brack answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      Here’s a very detailed article on emotions: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/what-are-emotions.htm
      Some scientists think that we have a set of basic emotions that are common to all humans, and that these are due to evolution. An example of one of these is anger – if you punch someone in the face anywhere in the world, they will feel the emotion of anger.
      There are two conflicting views on how emotion works – one is that we see or feel something, and then decide to feel an emotion towards it. The other is that our body first reacts physically to something, and that makes us feel the emotions.
      It’s a fascinating topic, I’d encourage you to read the article, it’s really interesting.

    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 15 Jun 2015:

      This is a very hard question and I’m not sure I fully know the answer to this one . From what I’ve read, it seems that no one really knows but there are some suggestions:
      1) Some people think emotions come from us judging a current situation – If we feel disgust then it probably s judging how we feel when we see vomit.

      2) Others think it’s us responding to our bodies changing – Using the same example, we experience disgust because our bodies start feeling queasiness and increased skin temperature at the sight of vomit.

      When we talk about emotions, we tend to talk about emotions which cause our bodies to change somehow, i.e. when we’re embarrassed, we start to go red in the face. This is because the brain sends signals that says that the body “feels” a certain way so it should release the chemical (most likely proteins) that cause your body to change.

      I don’t know if that completely answers your question. Perhaps some of the other scientists can help….

    • Photo: Martha Havenith

      Martha Havenith answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      That’s a really big question and we’ve only started understanding what the brain does when we feel emotions. The best guess right now is that in many ways emotions are not that separate or different from thoughts, but they do interact more with our physical sensations than ‘pure thinking’ does.
      Most emotions happen in an interplay of direct physical sensations (‘a person just half-crushed my ribs hugging me, so I have some adrenaline in my blood’), judging the context of those physical sensations (‘this is a cultural expression of friendship’) and choosing a reaction (‘I feel slightly shaken but pleased.’). The question whether the judgement or the physical sensation comes first has been fought over endlessly, and it probably varies for different situations and emotions.
      One fun example I remember from my studies is this: When you make people drink lots of coffee and then go on a date with a random person, they report more often that they felt attracted to the other person and would go on a second date. The reason seems to be that you register your physical reaction (‘my heart is beating fast’) and your thoughts interpret it (‘the person I’m talking to is exciting’ rather than ‘I drank loads of coffee’), making you feel an emotion (‘ I must be falling in love’).
      This weird interplay between thoughts and physical feelings can also lead to surprising ways for emotions to go wrong. For example, you would think that people who are chronically aggressive have trouble with some kind of ’emotion center’ in their brain. Sometimes that’s the case, but a lot of the time, the thing they really struggle with is perception – they can’t distinguish friendly or neutral faces from threatening ones, so the world just seems like a very threatening place to them.

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