Biologically, I don't know if, in the fight-or-flight mechanism, one is secondary to the other. But psychologically, I would agree. I'm inclined to agree with this as well...
More to the point: Death Terror.
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to emphasize how complex a question like this is, let me give an example.
Piet Mondrian is an artist who made vibrant paintings of large square blocks of colour. I personally find them incredibly beautiful, though this is unimportant.
There are experimental tasks that researchers can do in order to occupy a person's attention. This is actually not all that hard. Say you have a display of red C's and green Os, like 10 of each. Then, there is a target, a red O (the idea being that you must attend to both the colour and the shape of the object in order to find the target, and it occupies your visual system, because it can't find the target by only looking for red things or O shaped things, it has to mix the info together).
So, here is the task. Subjects look through the search display of Os and Cs for the red O target. as they do this, a Mondrian-esque picture is displayed below the search display.
After finding the target in a number of searches, subjects are shown various mondrian-esque pictures, which they have to give a subjective evaluation of. By selecting abstract colour based pictures, it reduces the chance that a subject will remember an exact piece shown during the display (obviously display pictures were randomized, lest one thinks only the less beautiful ones were presented, and yes, there is a chance that, for each observer, the pictures displayed would have been subjectively less beautiful, though with statistical analysis [and considering the paper was published in peer review] the probability of this is far less than of the conclusions I'm discussing).
Subjects would rank the pictures that had been present during the search as less beautiful and inspiring than those that had not been. This shows that an emotional response to stimuli is based largely on the context that stimuli was presented in.
So, with relation to this thread, defining what constitutes and emotion or emotional power is going to be a difficult hurdle to begin with. Adding the fact that attentional prioritization and immediate context have an affect on emotional processing gives yet another layer of complexity to the issue.
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Last edited by tsilamini on Sep 8th, 2008 at 05:39 PM
People kill over a bag of skittles and a pair of tennis shoe's too. People kill for all types of reasons.
does anyone actually kill in the name of love? I've never thought someone can kill another with love in their heart. Maybe, it's a conflict of emotions taking place but i don't think people actually kill entirely out of love.
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Is fear really an emotion? When cockroaches run when you hit the lights, is that fear? Because most people would say that insects are incapable of emotion, but they run for the hills when a predator is after them.
one would assume, yes, a cricket can be content. As in, they have all their immediate needs satiated and any predictive ability (a property of all nervous systems, to at least a small degree) they have shows no threat.
If that doesn't satisfy your definition of happiness, I totally understand. However, a similar description would accompany a cockroach's experience of fear.
A cockroach likely doesn't have much subjective experience of these things, so it wouldn't experience the "emotion" of fear, if you want to describe it like that.
My argument might be something like, all human emotions are based off of similar neural circuits, only interpreted by way more frontal lobe, but I know next to nothing about emotions.
This is potentially the case in humans as well. Fight or flight reactions and anxiety have unique cortical representations, and affect the body differently than other emotions.
There is also the idea that emotions are more representative of our narrative description for a state of arousal, or even just our physical posture. Studies have concluded that people who force the muscles in their face to form a smile report more positive feeling.
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Last edited by tsilamini on Sep 9th, 2008 at 04:18 PM
There may be some truth to this. As is often said, eg, the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. Put more bluntly: the opposite of any emotional state (ie, its physiological correlates) is its absence. However, in terms of human subjective experience, most people I think tend to polarize one emotion against another, rather than pair an emotion with its absence.
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Sep 8th, 2008 04:06 AM
