Emotion----A very short introduction
Last year, my aunt gave birth to a girl. And in this summer holiday, the majority of my free time have been devoted to this little infant. I played with her, made noodles for her, sang for her to make her go to sleep. Although only a little more than one year old, she already possessed some higher emotions, such as jealousness and grievance. If I pretended to be close to my aunt, her mother, she would be jealous and cried and even pulled me away from her mother. If she did something wrong, chucking the food everywhere for example, being glared at angrily, she would manifest the emotion scary mixed with grievance. All my family burst into laugh seeing her lovely expressions. I was so amazed at some of her emotions that I decided to study the emotion of humanity. Because of these interesting experiences, I can have a better understanding of the introductions of the author in the book of Emotion.
So hard it is to describe emotions accurately although they can be felt by everyone. Before I read the book, I never knew that there is so much knowledge in people's emotions. For instance, emotions can be roughly classified into basic emotions, specific emotions and higher cognitive emotions. Besides, emotions can affect our attention, memory and perception. The book---- Emotion----A very short introduction, can be classified a scientific kind of book. However, maybe because the object it introduces is called emotion, the words it uses are understandable and humorous instead of elusive or deep, sometimes with interesting stories. The author also adds some of his own understanding about emotion to this book to make it much clearer. That is the reason I like it very much.
From this book I can perceive the author is a person full of passion. He is not only an author, but also an anthropologist, philosophy and scientist. Just as the book describes, happiness lasts longer while joy lasts shorter. In the several days that I read this book, my heart was filled with the emotion that should be called happiness. It was really a journey of soul. Actually, reading a book is not to absorb and believe its contents completely, sometimes, we should think over it, raise questions about it. So I will tell something about my understanding, thinking and questions later.
As the author says, his choice of topics reflects his own idiosyncratic interests and his guesses about what will prove most interesting to us. Yes, almost every chapter the author introduces interests me very much. First, with a discussion of the variety of emotional experiences in different cultures, the author puts forward that emotions constitute a kind of 'universal language' that binds humanity together into a single family. Next, he explores the evolutionary history of emotion, and argues that emotions were - and still are for survival. Then, how emotions affect 'cognitive' capacities such as memory, attention, and perception is explained. At last, the author discusses the recent developments of artificial intelligence, and speculates on where it will all lead.
After the main contents of the book in the paragraph above, I would like to talk about the change of my view to the humanities. Since I am a science student, I don't realize the importance of the humanities, just regarding the art experiments not as important as the scientific experiments. In the course of reading the book, I found the author cite a lot of experiments which made by the art scientists. These scientists designed their elaborate experiments and then draw some amazing conclusions about the emotion. Now I realize that the researches made by the art scientists are also of utmost importance to the development of human beings. So I should be grateful to this book because it changes my prejudice to the art experiments.
Several thoughts of mine with regard to this book will be written in the following parts.
1.
I am very interested in how emotions come out and be recognized by people. According to the author, emotion can be defined as a limbic brain process. In all mammals, including ourselves, basic emotions such as fear and anger are mediated by a set of neural structures known as the limbic system. These include the hippocampus, the cingulated gyrus, the anterior thalamus, and the amygdale. All these structures are tucked away in the centre of he brain, underneath of the outer layer of neural tissue known as the neocortex. Emotions come into being from them. It seems that evolution did not just shape our capacity to feel and express emotions, but also gave us special purpose mechanisms for emotional recognition. Evidence is now mounting that the ability to recognize facial expressions of emotion is subserved by specialized neural circuitry. These circuits comprise key limbic structures are damaged, the circuit is broken and the ability to discriminate between different facial expressions of emotion is diminished. Bilateral damage to the amygdale, for example, reduces people's ability to detect negative emotions such as fear and anger.
2.
In the chapter 'short cuts to happiness', the author refers that colors can have effects on our mood. Color rarely affects our emotions directly. When we are in a room which only has one single color for a long time, red for example, it may put us into an irritable mood, with the result that it takes less to make us lose our temper. In fact, almost every color has effects on our mood.
Because I am interested in this aspect, I want to talk more about this.
Different colors always breed different feelings. Black always gives you the feeling of authority and power. And white innocence and purity. Reflecting light, people always consider it a summer color. Currently the most popular decorating color, green symbolizes nature. Usually it make us feel closer to nature. It is the easiest color on the eye and can improve vision. It is a calming, refreshing color. Purple, the color of royalty, purple connotes luxury, wealth, and sophistication. Also some colors rise our appetite for food. Green, brown, and red are the most popular food colors. Red is often used in restaurant decorating schemes because it is an appetite stimulant
3.
Emotional intelligence is a fashionable word nowadays. People always say higher emotional intelligence means knowing when to follow feelings and when to ignore them. Because we have heads as well as hearts, we are neither completely rational nor completely emotional. The elegant balance between the two is what we refer to as emotional intelligence.
We should all pay attention to emotional intelligence because it concerns our relationships with others. It even matters whether we can succeed or not. We should improve ourselves by practicing reading people's emotions, which can benefit us a lot.
4.
People know more or less that emotions can affect our cognitive capacities such as memory, attention, and perception. And they know how to put these effects into use to some degree. Advertisers may use humor to put us in a good mood, hoping that this will render us more vulnerable to their products. And our subliminal perception can protect us from some dangers. The book describes the relationships between emotion and memory, attention, as well as perception. When an emotion occurs, our mental spotlight suddenly contracts, focusing on one small thought to the exclusion of all others. Emotions also help to etch events more deeply in out memories. Any event that produces a strong emotion in us, whether negative or positive, is recalled more easily and more accurately than an emotionally neutral event. And emotions and moods exert a powerful influence on decision-making and judgment. The opinions we form of objects are often affected by the mood we happen to be in when we meet them. People in good mood are likely to judge the same object more positively than people e in a bad mood.
5.
The narrative, the natural selection gives us the capacity to feel happy, and then passes on the genes, fascinates me deeply. I never thought that there exists such wonderful theory in them before. Even after reading it, I still consider it inconceivable. Natural selection did not design our minds to think directly about how best to pass on out genes. Instead, it gave us the capacity to feel happy, and then it made the experience of happiness contingent on doing the things that help our genes to get into the next generation. The reason that falling in love makes us happy is that those of our ancestors who liked falling in love were more likely to pass on their genes tan those who preferred solitude. And in the stone age and before , the only way for our ancestors to be happy was by doing the things that helped them to pass on the genes. How amazing!
6.
Robots can really have emotions in the future? Another controversial topic. I have seen the film 'terminator' and 'the bicentennial man' before I read the book. At that time, I just regard them as recreational films. However, it gives us a brand-new view to think about whether it can be a reality.
I have never heart before that computers can evolve their own programs. A relatively recent branch of computer science, known as artificial life, is experimenting with just such self-evolving software. Instead of writing the program themselves, computer scientists working in artificial life generate random sequences of instructions, and allow these mini-programs to compete with each other for space on the computer's hard disk. The programs that perform better than others in the task at hand are allowed to male copies of themselves and occupy more memory space, while those that perform badly are erased, the copying process, however, is deliberately made imperfect, so that the occasional error creeps in. this provides for the generation of mutant programs, some of which are even better at performing the chosen task than their parents and so cone to dominate the hard disk. If this process is repeated for many generations, the beneficial mutations accumulate, leading to exceptionally effective programs that no human could have designed by normal methods. In fact, it is evolution by natural selection.
7.
After reading the book, I also come up with a question about feeling moved. What's it? The word 'move' in the dictionary is explained to cause somebody to have strong feelings, especially of sympathy or sadness. So feeling moved is emotion or a mood? Is it the basic one, the special one or the higher cognitive one? I discovered that some people are very easy to be moved, poems for example, while other people are hard to be moved. What's it concerned with? That is a question which to be studied deeply.
With the closure of the book, the emotion of satisfaction rise in my heart. Surely, I have already learnt more than before about this topic. This book opens a new field for me to learn and I will study further. I want to say thanks again to this book, Emotion----A very short introduction.
