An Increased Understanding of Neurobiology
It is a beautiful day outside, the person you care about just told you they feel the same way, you paid all your bills and still have money left over, and you finished all your work on time, yet you are still in a very crabby mood. Or, it is an awful day out, you just failed an exam, you have a ton of work to finish in too little time, and you were just dumped, still you have a feeling of well-being that you cannot change. We have all been there, our emotions seem to have a mind of their own and we do not know why we are feeling what we are feeling. Philosophers, psychologists, and science fiction writers have been debating the usefulness of emotions for centuries, still we continue to experience them and deal with them as part of our existence as human beings. Neurobiologists have preferred to take the tactic of looking at emotions as something we experience, thus something that should be studied. This tactic has led to some interesting evidence in terms of the usefulness of emotion in our everyday life. Some have found that experiencing the variety of feelings that we do might help in our ability to remember things and in learning about the world around us. If it is the case that emotional information does help us when we remember things and learn, then how do emotions work in the brain? There have been found to be some key structures, each playing a role in the way we experience emotions and what kind of moods are experienced. Still, with all of this information, we still have emotions that we cannot explain given our everyday experience. The increased understanding of neurobiology that we have can be used to explain why we feel what we do, even when the external world cannot.
It had long been thought that any research into emotion was a waste of good research efforts. There were many reasons for this, but primarily the idea was that emotions were not scientific enough for science. As time and methods have changed, so has that attitude and now emotions are looked at with slightly more respect and less apprehension about their not being rational. (1) This change in attitude has led to people finding that emotions might actually lead to somewhat useful things.
The emotional coping function is also known as the mammalian brain since it is common to all mammals whose babies are born live and completely dependent upon their mother for survival. Neuroscientists, refer to this small but essential brain function as the limbic system. As we will see, without our emotional brain mothers would not feel an instinctive need to nurture and feed their young. Nor would babies recognize and sense that their survival depends upon staying close to their mother for protection. This relatively small but important brain function serves a variety of coping and sensory purposes including our capacity for emotional attachment to others. When we talk about our "feelings" we are describing sensations and impulses arising from our emotional coping brain.
The human brain weighs only 3lbs. Though it is the most fragile organ in the human body is the most complex. It has complete control over a person 's physical and psychological homeostasis. The brain plays a large role when it comes to emotions. The amygdala is a structure in the brain that recognizes the first response to an emotional event. It is a tiny almond shaped structure located deep within the brain. This tiny structure triggers a series of reactions within the brain and sends signals throughout the body that account for body language, facial expression, breathing and awareness. These emotions are important in social interactions and forming social connections. The awareness of one’s emotion is crucial to everyday decision making,
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.1903. Print.
In Du Bois' "Forethought" to his essay collection, The Souls of Black Folk, he entreats the reader to receive his book in an attempt to understand the world of African Americans—in effect the "souls of black folk." Implicit in this appeal is the assumption that the author is capable of representing an entire "people." This presumption comes out of Du Bois' own dual nature as a black man who has lived in the South for a time, yet who is Harvard-educated and cultured in Europe. Du Bois illustrates the duality or "two-ness," which is the function of his central metaphor, the "veil" that hangs between white America and black; as an African American, he is by definition a participant in two worlds. The form of the text makes evident the author's duality: Du Bois shuttles between voices and media to express this quality of being divided, both for himself as an individual, and for his "people" as a whole. In relaying the story of African-American people, he relies on his own experience and voice and in so doing creates the narrative. Hence the work is as much the story of his soul as it is about the souls of all black folk. Du Bois epitomizes the inseparability of the personal and the political; through the text of The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois straddles two worlds and narrates his own experience.
It is mentioned in the journal, “The Demographic Factor in Ireland’s Movement towards Partition(1607-1921)” ...
Victors and Vanquished by Stuart Schwartz attempts to explore differing perspectives of the conquest of Mexico as the historical narratives are from both the outlook of the Spanish conquistadors as well as the Nahua peoples. In these primary sources, there was a fundamental focus on the encounters between the Spaniards and the Mexica. The first source is an excerpt from The True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a Spanish conquistador, who participated as a foot solider in the conquest of Mexico with Hernán Cortés. Although Díaz del Castillo was a witness of the conquest, he wrote his account of what he had witnessed decades after the Spanish victory, in 1521. In his account, Díaz del Castillo concentrated on the ways in which the Spanish viewed the Nahua peoples. The second source is taken from the Florentine Codex and is one which was collected twenty
LeDoux, J. (1998). The emotional brain. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (Chapter 4 will go on LN).
Hamilton, L.W. (2012). The Brain and Our Emotional Future: Foundations of Emotions [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from Soul Beliefs: Causes and Consequences Online Course site: rutgersonline.net.
Plutchik, Robert (1980), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion, 1, New York: Academic
Discuss the "cognition versus biology" debate in the study of emotion. Outline first the cognitive position and then the biological position. Discuss one possible, satisfying resolution to the cognition versus biology debate, using an original example to illustrate this
Rosen, L. D., Cheever, N. A., Cummings, C., & Felt, J. (2008). The impact of emotionality and
Foster, R.F.,ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. Oxford University Press: Oxford, New York, 1989.
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory
To conclude, researches propose a number of theories that experience human emotions. The James-Lange theory of emotion and the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion belong to one physiological category of theories. However, chosen theories differ greatly from each other. While the James-Lange theory affirms that different physiological states respond to various experiences of emotion, the Cannon-Bard theory claims that humans react to an inducement and experience that is related to the emotion at that time. Both theories have individuals that criticize them and it is up to the individual to decide which one to
One scientist, Damasio, provided an explanation how emotions can be felt in humans biologically. Damasio suggested, “Various brain structures map both the organism and external objects to create what he calls a second order representation. This mapping of the organism and the object most likely occurs in the thalamus and cingulate cortices. A sense of self in the act of knowing is created, and the individual knows “to whom this is happening.” The “seer” and the “seen,” the “thought” and the “thinker” are one in the same.” By mapping the brain scientists can have a better understandi...