PSYC12H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Martha Nussbaum, Epicureanism, Tania Singer
Document Summary
An emotion is a psychological state or process that mediates between our concerns (or goals) and events of our world. Emotions are rational in that they help us deal adaptively with concerns specific to our current context. They are local to the concern that has achieved priority, and the emotion makes it urgent. Emotions are the source of our values and help us form and engage in our relationships. Although emotions come to us individually, most of our important emotions don"t" just occur to us individually. Darwin proposed that emotional expression derive largely from habits that in our evolutionary or individual past had once been useful. Emotional expressions are based on reflex-like mechanisms, and some of them occur whether they are useful or not. They can be triggered involuntarily in circumstances analogous to those that had triggered the original habits. For darwin, expressions showed the continuity of adult human emotions with those of lower animals and with those of infancy.
