The Nature of Emotions

Emotion appears to be a key component in the behavior of conscious beings. To some extent, consciousness "is" emotion. There is probably no recollection, no thinking and no planning that occurs without feeling emotions. We are either happy or sad or afraid or something else all the time. There is rarely a moment in our day when we are not feeling an emotion. William James conceived mental life as a "stream of consciousness", each state of consciousness possessing both a cognitive aspect and a feeling aspect.

Whether all of consciousness is just emotion or whether emotion is a parallel, complementary facility of the mind, is debatable. But it can be argued that we would not consider conscious a being who cannot feel emotions, no matter how intelligent it is and no matter how much its body resembles ours.

On the other hand, we ascribe emotions to beings that we don't consider as "conscious": dogs, birds, even fish and tarantulas. Are the intensities of their emotions (of fear, for example) as strong as ours, regardless of whether their level of self-awareness is comparable to ours? Is emotion a more primitive form of consciousness, that in humans developed into full-fledged self-awareness? Is emotion an organ, just like feet and tails, that a species may or may not have, but which has no relevance to consciousness?

When turning to emotions, the first problem facing us is that most studies on them are from a psychological perspective. Little research has been done from a more scientific, biological perspective.

Emotions have been traditionally neglected by scientists researching the mind, as if they were a secondary aspect (or simply a malfunction) of the brain activity. The fact is surprising because emotions have so much to do with our being "aware", with differentiating intelligent life from dead matter and non-intelligent life. While the relationship between "feeling" and "thinking" is still unclear, it is generally agreed that all beings who think also feel. That makes feelings central to an understanding of thinking.

That emotions may not be so peripheral a notion as the scant literature on them would imply is a fact suspected since ancient times, but only recently science has focused on their function, their evolution and their behavior. In other words: how did the ability to feel emotions originate, why did it originate and how does it influence our mind's overall functioning?

The answers can be summarized, once again, as: emotions are a product of evolution, they exist because they favor our species in natural selection. What emotions seem to do is help us make fast decisions in crucial situations. If I am afraid of a situation, it means that it is dangerous: the emotion of fear has already helped me make up my mind about how to approach that situation. If I were not capable of fear, my brain would have to analyze the situation, infer logically what is good and what is bad in it for me, and finally draw a conclusion. By that time, it may be too late. Fear helps act faster than if we used our logical faculties.

George Mandler had a powerful intuition. Let's assume that, of all the information available in the environment, the mind is mainly interested in environmental regularities. Then most of its processing can be reduced to: there is a goal (e.g.: "eat"), there is a need (e.g.: "food") and there is a situation (e.g.: "a plantation of bananas"). Based on known regularities of the environment, the mind can determine what it needs to achieve its goal in the current situation. The emotion (e.g.: "desire bananas") simplifies this process. The function of emotions is to provide the individual with the most general view of the world that is consistent with current needs, goals and situations.

Besides, emotions are also the fastest way that we can communicate with members of our group. The American psychiatrist Allan Hobson thinks that emotions are signals between animals of the same species that communicate one's brain state to another.