Our Emotional Life

Human beings are emotional beings. It would be hard to imagine life without happiness, sadness, anger and the other emotions that are part of the rich tapestry of the human experience. Yet defining our emotions has been a significant area of disagreement largely because those exploring this field have used a different basic interpretation of the nature of emotions. These basic interpretations fall into three traditions: emotions are feelings, emotions are motivations, and emotions are evaluations. These notes cover some of the emotional distinctions found in this ontological approach.

They do not offer a full explanation of these principles rather they provide a basic understanding of what is involved.

Traditional View of Emotions

Human beings are emotional beings. It would be hard to imagine life without happiness, sadness, anger and the other emotions that are part of the rich tapestry of the human experience. Yet...

Physiological Basis of Emotions

One of the most popular theories about the human brain is known as the ‘triune brain theory’. Attributed to Paul MacLean and popularised by writers such as Carl Sagan and Daniel Goleman, the...

Affect and Affective Realism

Interoception produces a bi-product known as ‘affect’, which is the sense of feeling that we experience throughout each day. Feelings that we have to make meaningful. Affect falls into two very...

From Affect to Emotion

We all experience affect, our sense of pleasantness and arousal. However, affect stems from interoception involving all internal sensations, so when is that sensation an emotion and when is it...

From Affect to Mood

Human beings generally take two stances to life – a constructive stance and a defensive stance. A constructive stance involves an approach that tends to accept reality, seek possibility, and...

Moods and Emotions

If moods relate to our general sense of affect, emotions are related to specific situations in which we find ourselves. As with moods, emotions are related to predictions, interoception, affect...

Some Basic Moods

Our moods are feedback loops of habitual ways of making predictions and simulations based on our habitual ways of observing. Those simulations impact our body resources leading to certain interoceptive...

Five Basic Emotions

As they result from our habitual stances to the world and the resultant predictions and simulations, moods are constant through our lives and form the emotional feedback loops and interpretations...

Linguistic Reconstruction

Our moods stem from our habitual physical experiences of affect (valence and arousal) and we can make them more meaningful through refined language-based distinctions. By more effectively ...

My thoughts on our emotional life have shifted dramatically over the past few years following my introduction to predictive brain theory and the compelling work of Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett. This video provides a wonderful overview of her ideas about the root of our emotional life.

Our Emotional Life

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