Originally posted by Mindship
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.
People like clear opposites, and love/hate is one that is huge in our culture.
I personally am swaying more this way, the strength of an emotion has nothing to do with the emotion itself, but the context in which the emotional systems activate. Our later interpretation of this context will tell us what emotion it was we were experiencing, but that will be unrelated or at the very least, subsequent to the subjective experience of arousal.
Maybe what I'm saying is that emotions don't have strength, our reaction to stimuli does. It is more likely that the strength of that reaction determines our interpretation of the emotion than the other way around.
Love in its truest form is all encompassing. not romantic, oedipal, puppy, platonic or all these other trashy names we have for it but love in its purest sense.
all other emotions are just a reaction to love IMO. sorrow, joy, hate are emotions that are relative to love. joy is abundance of love, sorrow is deficit and hatred is absense of love.
Originally posted by Bicnarok
Depends on your personality and how extreme a given situation is.Fear is quite strong of you are confronted by a demon like entity.