1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 20/74)

Why would emotions be balanced, why not just have only positive emotions? Because if you are curious, your curiosity is going to backfire when there is a failure (you’d be curious in a failure). Or if you are overly surprised, you would be just as surprised at a bad thing happening as you would as a good thing happening, leading to being happy and sad. Or if you got angry at something, you are then likely to become pleased by the opposite thing happening, so the emotions tend to balance out.

So is it really that the positive and negative emotions balance out? It is probably too hard for your mind to wait to become emotional at things that are only going to lead it to become happy. That is, you would have to consciously say to each thing, ah that is a positive emotion, I can have that emotion now. It seems more natural that when something bad happens, you get more upset, and when something good happens, you get happier. So you don’t have to calculate and spend time to assess if you should “feel” in those instances. [Someone might be emotional and respond better to happy emotions, but then they would get more upset when something bad happened.]

That is a good way to size people up, assess how happy they get from what things, and how sad they get from other things. Why is it that happy and sad are the two strongest emotions (or at least the most important)? It seems that way because all the other emotions follow suit with them. When someone is happier they are likely to be more curious, or more accepting. When someone is sad it also makes him or her less reactive to things (the surprise emotion).

The other emotions don’t occur as much as well. You can easily be happy or sad all the time, no matter what you are doing, but the other emotions need to fit into what you are doing. Like the emotion curiosity needs something to be curious in, and the emotion disgust needs something to be disgusted by. When you are doing nothing the emotion you are going to feel most of the time is just plain happy or sad, thus those two emotions are also our “idling” emotions (when we are idle we have them). [So every object even might have its own emotion that you can't really label as one of the general emotions. Even those emotions, every emotion, is going to make you feel happy, sad, or neither. It is like being happy is a conscious conclusion based on thought that the object is good, or that things are going well for you. It isn't like people are excessively happy all the time, they are probably experiencing other emotions most of the time, and since these are emotions good "think" they are happy.]

If the other emotions don’t occur as much, then why would someone be happy or sad in the first place? Are the emotions happy and sad simply the result of other emotions in your body? If that is the case, how is it possible for someone to become manic or depressed? Mania and depression are such extremes of happy and sad that other emotions can’t be experienced as well. What then is the source of that extreme happiness or sadness? [Like I said before, it seems as if they are over-inflating the emotion (probably with thought, since thought is more under their control than emotion alone).]