0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 48/89)

A review

Further thoughts

There seems to be a large unconscious factor that is too complicated to be understood. The unconscious is so complicated, as it has many factors that are interacting with each other all of the time. When those factors mentioned in the previous paragraph are brought up (mental images, monitoring, cognitive strategies), along with the natural unconscious emotion and motivation that occurs always with humans, it becomes obvious that there is no telling what could be influencing your thinking and feeling (on a detailed, moment to moment basis and even just considering the obvious factors).

How are arousal and stimulation processed in emotional processing?

If you think about it, emotion is going to be related to everything in life. Things that inspire us generate emotion, things that arouse us generate emotion, and ordinary stimuli generates emotion as well.

But what is arousal? What is inspiration? If everything in life has some combination of arousal and stimulation, and this combination generates an 'emotional response', then are there other factors present that are also significant?

Arousal is a physiological and psychological state of being awake or reactive to stimuli. Arousal is important in regulating consciousness, attention, and information processing. It is crucial for motivating certain behaviours, such as mobility, the pursuit of nutrition, the fight-or-flight response and sexual activity. So in order to understand what arousal is, it helps to recall what sexual arousal is, since the two are related. Arousal is basically being stimulated, when someone is stimulated in a powerful way, they are aroused. This doesn't need to be sexual arousal, although sexual arousal is one type of arousal. You could say that there is 'intellectual' arousal or arousal from other types of stimulation.

When a person is aroused, he or she may find a wider range of events appealing Ariely, D; Loewenstein, G. (2006). "The heat of the moment: The effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making.". Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 19 (2): 87–98. The state of arousal might lead a person to view a decision more positively than he or she would have in a less aroused state. So therefore arousal relates to inspiration, if one is inspired then they might also be more aroused.