1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 21/74)

Either it seems like life has enough in it to justify being manic or depressed or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t then the mania and depression would arise from people just being unstable and fragile creatures, easily upset and disturbed. If it does then by a logic process one should be able to figure out the cause of their mania or depression is and solve it.

How This Chapter shows how Intelligence is intertwined with Emotion:

• It could be viewed that emotion is entirely driven by intellect, that everything that you feel you feel because you are who you are, and who you are is determined by your thoughts and your own intelligence. Or it could be rephrased the opposite way, that intelligence is entirely driven by emotion for the same reasons, those viewpoints are obvious when you take emotional highs where it seems like you are acting out of control - because then you realize why it is you are having those emotions, and you are having them because of something you did (which was driven by your intellect) or something you were feeling (which is driven by your emotions). Your intellect determined how you felt the emotion, because you are your intellect, and that (you) would then determine how you feel about something that happens. Someone’s emotional template (who they are, how they respond to the world) could be viewed as being an intellectual template because intellect is understanding real things, and your emotions determine what it is that you process and how you process them.

Laws of emotion

There is a uniform way in which emotions behave, whereby in similar instances they always respond in a similar fashion. For instance, people respond negatively to pain. “Respond negatively” means that pain makes them feel bad. It could be that someone enjoys pain, but if they do, the enjoyment would only come after the pain itself (and the bad feeling the pain generates) so they are still responding negatively to pain because the pain made them feel bad, they are just enjoying it later on. This “enjoyment” of the pain must come from thoughts, not emotions, since it occurs after the real stimulus, which was some type of physical occurrence that generated pain. By “thoughts” I don’t mean you have to think something verbal, I just mean that something about the pain meant something to you in a good way, which made you feel good. Thoughts generate emotions which are more removed from real stimulus because real stimulation is more tangible, and therefore usually generates a lot more emotion. For instance, if someone gets in a verbal fight, although the fight is verbal, they are still seeing someone else’s expression, which is probably going to be drastic, and it would be accompanied by loud sounds. It isn’t really possible to get that riled up in a debate with yourself.

Seeing the real world and any of the physical sensations is going to generate tangible emotion. If you just think about the real world that would generate less emotion then actually doing that thought in the world. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t feeling most of the time if they aren’t doing intense activity, because even just sitting around you are still taking in lots of sensory data about the real world.