top of page
The basic process we call “emotion” is actually an aspect of this self-organizing emergent property reflecting changes in states of integration.
The basic process we call “emotion” is actually an aspect of this self-organizing emergent property reflecting changes in states of integration.
Emotion serves as a central organizing process within the brain. In this way, an individual’s abilities to organize emotions—a product, in part, of earlier attachment relationships—directly shapes the ability of the mind to integrate experience and to adapt to future stressors.
- Daniel Siegel
The Developing Mind
The immediate causes of feelings include (a) the background flow of life processes in our organisms, which are experienced as spontaneous or homeostatic feelings; (b) the emotive responses triggered by processing myriad sensory stimuli such as tastes, smells, tactile, auditory, and visual stimuli, the experience of which is one of the sources of qualia; and (c) the emotive responses resulting from engaging drives (such as hunger or thirst) or motivations (such as lust and play) or emotions, in the more conventional sense of the term, which are action programs activated by confrontation with numerous and sometimes complex situations.
Affect is thus a wide tent under which I place not only all possible feelings but also the situations and mechanisms responsible for producing them, responsible, that is, for producing the actions whose experiences become feelings.
Feelings accompany the unfolding of life in our organisms, whatever one perceives, learns, remembers, imagines, reasons, judges, decides, plans, or mentally creates. Regarding feelings as occasional visitors to the mind or as caused only by the typical emotions does not do justice to the ubiquity and functional importance of the phenomenon.
Most every image in the main procession we call mind, from the moment the item enters a mental spotlight of attention until it leaves, has a feeling by its side. Images are so desperate for affective company that even the images that constitute a prominent feeling can be accompanied by other feelings...
There is no being, in the proper sense of the term, without a spontaneous mental experience of life, a feeling of existence. The ground zero of being corresponds to a deceptively continuous and endless feeling state.
The conventional contrast between affect and reason comes from a narrow conception of emotions and feelings as largely negative and capable of undermining facts and reasoning. In reality, emotions and feelings come in multiple flavors, and only a few are disruptive. Most emotions and feelings are essential to power the intellectual and creative process.
Their (feelings) content always refers to the body of the organism in which they emerge. Feelings portray the organism’s interior—the state of internal organs and of internal operations.
Feelings are experiences of certain aspects of the state of life within an organism. Those experiences are not mere decoration.
They accomplish something extraordinary: a moment-to-moment report on the state of life in the interior of an organism. It is tempting to translate the notion of a report into pages of an online file that can be swiped, one at a time, telling us about one part or another of the body. But digitized pages, neat, lifeless, and indifferent, are not acceptable metaphors for feelings, given the valence component we just discussed. Feelings provide important information about the state of life, but feelings are not mere “information” in the strict computational sense. Basic feelings are not abstractions. They are experiences of life based on multidimensional representations of configurations of the life process.
- Antonio Damasio
The Strange Order of Things
Our emotional feelings reflect our ability to subjectively experience certain states of the nervous system.
Both animals and humans do have similar affective feelings that are important contributors to their future behavioral tendencies.
It is finally possible to credibly infer the natural order of the "inner causes" of behavior, including the emotional processes that activate many of the coherent psychobehavioral tendencies animals and humans exhibit spontaneously without much prior learning. These natural brain processes help create the deeply felt value structures that govern much of our behavior, whether learned or unlearned.
It is correct to assume that primary-process affective feelings in humans (i.e., "raw feels") arise from distinct patterns of neural activity that we share with other animals.
The subjective nature of redness can only be explained by neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological studies done in conjunction with appropriate behavioral and psychological observations. Emotional feelings must ultimately be understood in similar ways.
A central, and no doubt controversial, tenet of affective neuroscience is that emotional processes, including subjectively experienced feelings, do, in fact, play a key role in the causal chain of events that control the actions of both humans and animals.
They provide various types of natural internal values upon which many complex behavioral choices in humans are based. However, such internal feelings are not simply mental events; rather, they arise from neurobiological events.
In other words, emotional states arise from material events (at the neural level) that mediate and modulate the deep instinctual nature of many human and animal action tendencies, especially those that, through simple learning mechanisms such as classical conditioning, come so readily to be directed at future challenges.
Basic emotional states provide efficient ways to mediate categorical types of learned behavioral changes. In other words, emotional feelings not only sustain certain unconditioned behavioral tendencies but also help guide new behaviors by providing simple value-coding mechanisms that provide self-referential salience, thereby allowing organisms to categorize world events efficiently so as to control future behaviors.
The core function of emotional systems is to coordinate many types of behavioral and physiological processes in the brain and body. In addition, arousals of these brain systems are accompanied by subjectively experienced feeling states that may provide efficient ways to guide and sustain behavior patterns, as well as to mediate certain types of learning.
These systems help create a substantial portion of what is traditionally considered universal "human nature."
Although other animals will not have thoughts comparable to ours, there are good reasons to believe that our deep feeling of dread emerges to a substantial extent from the same brain systems that create fearful states for other animals.
Emotional systems can surely be strengthened by use and weakened by disuse.
- Jaak Panksepp
Affective Neuroscience
Another misconception concerns the idea that emotions are irrational disruptions of consciously directed behavior. However, emotions are not necessarily contrary to reason. They are best seen as older forms of reason, assembled by biological evolution and not by conscious deliberation.
The range of emotions is wide but finite. In humans it includes the programs of fear, disgust, sadness, joy, anger, and surprise, as well as a group of simpler programs such as enthusiasm or discouragement, known as background emotions. It also includes a group of very complex programs, usually known as social emotions, such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, contempt, compassion, and admiration.
Throughout evolution emotions have been instruments of life regulation, that is homeostasis.
Feelings of emotions are the perceptions of the action program that constitutes an emotion as it unfolds together with the salient representation of the causative object and with thoughts related to the situation.
Organisms with simple brains need not perceive the unfolding of an emotional program for the emotional behavior to be effective. In organisms with complex brains, however, and with elaborate consciousness and memory, aspects of the feeling process are recorded and can be used for future planning and for optimized decision-making. In other words, feelings play a practical role in adaptive behavior and extend the advantages of emotions to the realm of conscious behavior. Feelings are not a useless reflection of the emotion process.
Over the course of biological evolution, emotions have allowed organisms to cope with threats originating within the body or in the environment and to take advantage of opportunities related to nutrition or mating. Emotional action programs increase survival by delivering an advantageous standard response to particular circumstances in the absence of thinking and deliberation.
For species with limited cognitive abilities this is a spectacular advantage. For humans the advantages vary with the circumstances. A rapid and comprehensive response can be beneficial, although on numerous occasions suppressing emotions and substituting a deliberated response constitutes the best response.
_ Antonio Damasio
Neural Basis of Emotions
bottom of page