5.29 A theory of emotion  (Page 4/4)

In review, by exploring the importance of pleasure and pain on emotion in general we gained insight into emotions, and that gave us insight into how they can be manipulated with thoughts, or your thoughts be manipulated by your emotions. So pain and pleasure function with individual thoughts as well as with emotions, that is obvious if you remember how tied in emotions are with thought - and I already explained the importance of pain on emotion. Also, thoughts can be emotional, when you think something it can bring up pain. That pain could just be an enlarged version of the pain caused by the thoughts the rest of the time (the time you're not thinking consciously of them) unconsciously. You highlight the pain by thinking about what is causing it. That might help you to change the thought, however, and therefore the unconcsious thoughts and emotions making you feel at other times.

While my pain and pleasure instincts can be applied to almost every emotional situation, there are other principals which can be applied in many situations that are almost as important as those. For instance, the social aspect of the human experience is probably one of the most important generators of emotion. You could classify everything someone does as either social or non-social, and how important and emotional can be interacting with inanimate objects? The important aspect of the social aspect, however, is personality. That is so because no matter what someone says or does, their personality is going to have a large impact on the people around them because there is an unconscious emotional interaction going on between different personalities. Of course, what someone says and does is going to be reflective of their personality, but just by describing personality types it can be inferred what that type of person would do differently. Though it is important to note that basic interactions are almost all the same, the only thing that varies is how the people have different and individual personalities and this changes the emotional interchange.

There are several things that determine what someones personality is going to be. There are important factors and non-important ones. For the principals to be general and far-reaching, I am only going to talk about the important factors. Personality could be described and the things listed be important to what that person does, and what type of intellect they have, however this would not be looking at the important aspects of personality. The important aspects of someone's personality are the ones that going to affect how much emotion they experience, and those aspects are going to be ones that influence their social emotional interchanges. However, non-important personality traits may be related to important ones. For instance, although "Organized and hard working" is not an important factor, (how hard someone works is not going to play a large role in the emotional interchange when this person interacts) how serious that person is, which might be shown in how hard working they are, might play a role in a social interaction. For instance, there might be a violent clash between the personality of a serious person and a laid back person, generating a lot of emotion. So although two people might be equally hard working, maybe only one reflects this trait emotionally when they interact (or "radiates" it). There are only a few basic factors that generate large amounts of emotion when any two people interact:

• How serious (or mature) somone is could clash with how lazy (or immature) someone else is, causing either tension or an interesting interaction
• How cool or not people are or are perceived to be could cause a status conflict
• How physically appealing someone is could generate sexual interest or, if not sexual interest unconscious sexual interest that would be shown by how much someone likes someone else even though they might not be aware their interest is sexual in nature (that shows how this can function unconsciously)
• How old someone is could cause either identification and relation, or the opposite of that which might cause either tension or an interesting interaction
• How intelligent or dumb someone is could cause tension or relation (this also might vary depending on what the sitation is, becuase in certain situations different types of intellect are more valued)
• What someone's profession is would matter when interacting with that person in the context of their job (that shows how the context of the interaction (or what the interaction is even) also matters)
• How friendly or shy someone is could generate openness or seclusion in interaction