The Neuroscience of Emotions

A talk on the following topics a must watch not for neuroscience ;-) but to know yourself better.

Darwin and Emotions

• Animals need emotions to survive
• They need fear as a trigger to escape predators and aggression to defend their territory , young and food.
• Emotions are maintained from our animal past.
• We rely on emotions to make quick, often complex, decisions.
• Moral Development
• Adaptive or dis-regulated.

Reasoning and Emotion

• Emotions are an important source of information and feedback that help to direct our behaviour and social interactions - "Gut instinct", "intution"
• Frontal lobe lesions can result in impaired emotional awareness, social reasoning, and decision-making.

Why do we have emotions?

• Directs Attention
• Enhances Memory
• Organizes Behavior
• Drives social approach and avoidance.

Classes of Emotion

• 6 Primary: Happiness, Surprise, Fear, Sadness, Disgust, Anger
• Background: wellbeing/malaise, calm/tense, pain/pleasure

Markus Aurelius (Meditations) 167 A.C.E
If you are distressed by anything external [or internal] the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have power to revoke at any moment.

Emotional Intelligence

• -The ability to monitor one's own and others feelings and emotions,
• -to discriminate among them and
• -to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions

Peter Salovey and John D .Mayer (1990)

Multiple Intellegences
1983, Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind:

The Theory of Multiple Intellegences:
Interpersonal intellegence

• The capacity to understand intentions, motivations and desires of other people.

Intrapersonal intelligence

• The capacity to understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivation.

Empathy

• Identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives
• State of being 'in tune with' another person, particularly by feeling what their situation is like from inside.
• Empathy may or may not precede sympathy.

Understanding Others
Cognitive prespective taking
Ability to understand intentions, desires beliefs of another person, resulting from (cognitively) reasoning about others's state.


Empathy

• Affective state, caused by sharing of emotions or sensory states of another person
• Compassion: Defenitions
• Deep awareness of suffering of another couples with the wish to relieve it.
• Tender Feeling
• Sympathetic, sad concern for someone in misfortune.
• Pity for others with a desire to help.
• Empathy + Cognitive Perspective taking + action

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance- Pablo Casals

Love and compassion are necessities not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.- His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Don't be evil

-Google

At least do not harm

Hope this brings some benefit to others.