0.9 Emotion vs. logic {cp}  (Page 11/2)

What is the difference between logic and emotion? When someone says that they are “emotional” which emotions do they mean? I guess they mean that they experience all emotions more. They could specify further, however, and say which emotions they experience more, which emotions they are more prone to.

If someone is emotional does that mean that they enjoy life more? What if someone was emotional, but only experienced positive emotions more than most people, and didn’t experience negative emotions. Then that person would be happier I guess. Unless they separated out the emotions joy and sadness and just talked about those. Can you be an emotional person and just have excess amounts of the emotion happy? So anyone just “happy” is therefore being emotional. You’d probably be a lot more emotional if you were happy and sad at the same time however (the mix of the two would drive someone mad most likely, however).

Happy and sad seem to be the two strongest emotions. They are stronger than fear, anger, surprise, disgust, acceptance, and curiosity. That would make anyone bipolar (experiencing swings from happy to sad) very emotional. Does the swing mean that someone is more emotional than just experiencing one at a time? The emotional change is hard I think and that is more of an experience than just being very happy all the time, so the change from happy to sad is what adds the emotion in. Or because someone was so sad before, it is harder to be very happy because of the dramatic contrast, and this causes tension. That is, your body goes through changes as it experiences major emotional changes.

There are two degrees of change in emotion however; one is a major change from depression to mania (which is what bipolar is). Another is just your ordinary change from sad to happy, which can occur many times in a day. So if someone is manic or depressed are they being more emotional than someone who is just happy or just sad?

Symptoms of mania ("The highs"):

• Excessive happiness, hopefulness, and excitement
• Sudden changes from being joyful to being irritable, angry, and hostile
• Restlessness
• Rapid speech and poor concentration
• Increased energy and less need for sleep
• High sex drive
• Tendency to make grand and unattainable plans
• Tendency to show poor judgment, such as deciding to quit a job
• Drug and alcohol abuse
• Increased impulsivity

The symptoms of bipolar depression are the same as those of major depression and include:

• Sadness
• Loss of energy
• Feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness
• Loss of enjoyment from things that were once pleasurable
• Difficulty concentrating
• Uncontrollable crying
• Difficulty making decisions
• Irritability
• Increased need for sleep
• Insomnia or excessive sleep
• A change in appetite causing weight loss or gain
• Thoughts of death or suicide
• Attempting suicide

I don’t think that people with the two extremes of mania and depression are any more emotional than people who are just happy or sad. That is because being too happy or too sad shuts off the other emotions people would experience like anger, fear, disgust, surprise, acceptance, and curiosity. Why does it? Because with all the other symptoms of mania and depression, there isn’t really any room left for emotions other than happy and sad, a person’s system can only handle so much emotion. If you are crying all the time (like you would if you were severely depressed) there isn’t any more room for you to experience other emotions (this is obvious if you remember that emotion uses your attention and memory capacity). Or if you are as happy as you can be, you’re probably too out of it (in your happy land) to think about anything else.