Me and My Emotions

What Are Our Emotions?

Source: Eric Ward/Unsplash

Emotions are at the center stage of contemporary neuroscientific research. Multiple views are currently the subject of a healthy debate about what they really are. When I started emotion research, the first edition of The Nature of Emotion (1994) by Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson had just been published.

Ekman, one of the central researchers on emotion, who has spent now more than six decades observing emotions in himself and around the world, states in the second edition of The Nature of Emotion (2018, p. xxvii) that nearly everyone who does research on emotions today agrees with what he describes:

“Emotions are reactions to matters that seem to be very important to our welfare, and emotions often begin so quickly that we are not aware of the processes in our mind that set them on.”

After many decades of observation, another highly influential emotion researcher, Joseph LeDoux, claims, in his latest publication, The Deep History of Ourselves (2020, p. 351):

“The idea of unconscious emotion is an oxymoron. If you do not feel it, it is not a feeling, not an emotion. Nevertheless, nonconscious factors contribute.”

Two of our most important neuroscientists on emotion confront us here with a difficulty in describing what an emotion really is. They represent a central problem existing since the beginning of emotion research. When, in 1884, William James stated, in his article What is an emotion?:

“… our feeling of the same changes as they occur, IS the emotion.” (the capitalization is his),

according to Antonio and Hanna Damasio,

“He created a confusion that has haunted the field to our day.”

Why Are Emotions Central to Our Lives?

This "confusion’" at the heart of human emotions has always deeply fascinated me. It triggered my curiosity to find out how the nonconscious and the conscious factors in emotions are related and interact in our lives. It brought the topic of consciousness to the center of my personal research. Since then, I cannot separate emotions from consciousness.

The first reason why emotions take such a main place in our life is because we feel them; they enter our consciousness. That is why emotions matter to us. Emotions are connected to adjustments made in the regulation of our life, attention, perception, memory, and motivation. We must feel the dynamics of the changes because we become those changes.

As Paul Ekman declares (2018, p. XXVII):

“Emotions evolved to prepare us to deal quickly with the most vital events in our lives.”

This brings us to the second reason why emotions are central to our lives: Emotions signify meaning and value, they are about the most vital events in our lives. Emotions are our life-connected states of meaning energizing all our choices and actions. Emotions are deeply interconnected with the detection of the meaning and value of everything that happens inside our bodies and around our skin.

The third reason for the central significance of our emotions is because they are always about us. They are connected to the self—the living state of our self. Emotions take place in a body that we experience as ours, in the space that embodies our different sensory organs that bring us a personal perspective on what we see, hear, and touch inside and outside our skin. We can never step outside this living embodiment. It is everything we are.

These three living connections grew deep into our lives. They became "us" during the history of our personal life. Nature installed three connections that matter to us: our feelings, our values, and our self. These three connections became inextricably intertwined. As the human beings we are, there is no escape possible from their entanglement. They embrace our life firmly. Emotions became the many variations of life-connected states of meaning that shape the way we feel, think, and become.

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The Psychological Power of Our Emotions

LeDoux offers us a solution to the confusion between the conscious experiences and the nonconscious responses involved in our emotions. He offers a model to reflect on emotions as "global organismic states" (2020, p. 346). He proposes them as a complex interaction unfolding between survival circuits, perceptual systems, cognitive systems, memory systems, motivational systems and arousal systems in the brain. These brain systems interact with the behavioral reactions, physiological changes and instrumental actions of the body they belong to.

From the phenomenological viewpoint of my own research, I see every possible global organismic emotional state as a specific "psychological power" able to fundamentally affect our life and consciousness.

The future of human life on this planet is dependent of the way we care about our emotions and how they unfold as healthy or disordered states. In talking about the possible ways human life will evolve, we will have to deal with the quality of the rich variety of psychological powers embodied by our emotions.

The intelligence with which we deal with the complex phenomenon of our emotional experiences will determine how human life on our planet flourishes. The emotional intelligence we find in our families, in our classrooms, in the decisions taken for us by powerful businesspeople and politicians will make a dramatic difference. It will have an enormous impact on how we care for the safety, health, peace, and fairness of the environments in which our emotions emerge.

I believe that "the education of mental training" through meditation can play a fundamental role in the quality of the psychological power we express in the world.