instance, I watched anger in people who expressed it as rage, and I studied what they were trying to accomplish. I also watched people, like my mother, who were never openly angry; I contrasted their behavior with the behavior of the rage-filled people I knew. How did life work for them? What did their anger do for them? What did it prevent them from doing?
I watched people who expressed lots of fear and anxiety and contrasted them with people like my father, who never seemed to feel much of either emotion. I studied how people lived and the things they were able to accomplish in their relationship with these emotions. I also watched neighbors who were seemingly always depressed, and I contrasted them with people who always seemed to be upbeat. I studied how peopleâs lives worked or didnât work in relationship to depression and happiness. For me, emotions were the most interesting parts of human nature; but in this special area of interest, I was pretty much alone.
People never seemed to want to talk about emotions at all. It was almost as if they were ashamed of emotions and couldnât bear to hear anything about them. This was very strange to me, and it took me almost two decades to acquire a functional, empathic understanding of emotions and their purposeâ not because it takes decades to understand emotions, but because our ways of approaching, thinking about, and dealing with emotions are so backward and unhelpful. Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, people who come across my work are startled by the absolute newness of it (it is still the only work anywhere that covers all of the emotions in terms of what they do and how to work with them) and by the absolute âWell, duh!â aspect of what anyone should have known.
Emotions were not well understood when I was young. Although a great deal of work is now being done in emotion research, emotions are still an area of massive confusion in numerous academic fields. If youâd like to read about the process that I underwent in my quest to understand emotions empathically, my book The Language of Emotions is a chronicle of that decades-long work. In this book, however, weâll move forward without too much preamble, except for an introduction to the most helpful definition of emotions that Iâve found so far, plus a discussion of four key problems that lead directly to emotional confusion.
ACTION-REQUIRING NEUROLOGICAL PROGRAMS
In his work as a neuroscientist of emotion, Antonio Damasio has been able to study people who have lost their ability to feel some or all emotions. If you have been trained to think of emotions as mostly problematic, you might think of these people as lucky. Many of us imagine that without emotions, people would be completely rational, like a computer or like the hyperlogical and seemingly unemotional Star Trek character Mr. Spock. However, nothing could be further from the truth. What Damasio discovered as he worked with many emotion-impaired patients throughout his career is that each emotion has a specific role in the maintenance of essential social and cognitive functions. If you take emotions away from people, they donât become smarter; instead, they become less able to function independently, they lose many of their interactional skills, and they often require direct assistance to care for and protect themselves.
For instance, Damasio wrote about a male patient 28 with brain damage that severely impaired his emotions. Although this patient was still able to think, speak, and drive, he had a fascinating inability to make simple decisions. Damasio described giving this patient two possible dates for anupcoming appointment and then watching in frustration-tinged fascination as the man spent nearly thirty minutes listing all of the possible differences between the two appointment dates (weather, driving conditions, other appointmentsâhe was exhaustive). Finally, Damasio spoke up
I watched people who expressed lots of fear and anxiety and contrasted them with people like my father, who never seemed to feel much of either emotion. I studied how people lived and the things they were able to accomplish in their relationship with these emotions. I also watched neighbors who were seemingly always depressed, and I contrasted them with people who always seemed to be upbeat. I studied how peopleâs lives worked or didnât work in relationship to depression and happiness. For me, emotions were the most interesting parts of human nature; but in this special area of interest, I was pretty much alone.
People never seemed to want to talk about emotions at all. It was almost as if they were ashamed of emotions and couldnât bear to hear anything about them. This was very strange to me, and it took me almost two decades to acquire a functional, empathic understanding of emotions and their purposeâ not because it takes decades to understand emotions, but because our ways of approaching, thinking about, and dealing with emotions are so backward and unhelpful. Even today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, people who come across my work are startled by the absolute newness of it (it is still the only work anywhere that covers all of the emotions in terms of what they do and how to work with them) and by the absolute âWell, duh!â aspect of what anyone should have known.
Emotions were not well understood when I was young. Although a great deal of work is now being done in emotion research, emotions are still an area of massive confusion in numerous academic fields. If youâd like to read about the process that I underwent in my quest to understand emotions empathically, my book The Language of Emotions is a chronicle of that decades-long work. In this book, however, weâll move forward without too much preamble, except for an introduction to the most helpful definition of emotions that Iâve found so far, plus a discussion of four key problems that lead directly to emotional confusion.
ACTION-REQUIRING NEUROLOGICAL PROGRAMS
In his work as a neuroscientist of emotion, Antonio Damasio has been able to study people who have lost their ability to feel some or all emotions. If you have been trained to think of emotions as mostly problematic, you might think of these people as lucky. Many of us imagine that without emotions, people would be completely rational, like a computer or like the hyperlogical and seemingly unemotional Star Trek character Mr. Spock. However, nothing could be further from the truth. What Damasio discovered as he worked with many emotion-impaired patients throughout his career is that each emotion has a specific role in the maintenance of essential social and cognitive functions. If you take emotions away from people, they donât become smarter; instead, they become less able to function independently, they lose many of their interactional skills, and they often require direct assistance to care for and protect themselves.
For instance, Damasio wrote about a male patient 28 with brain damage that severely impaired his emotions. Although this patient was still able to think, speak, and drive, he had a fascinating inability to make simple decisions. Damasio described giving this patient two possible dates for anupcoming appointment and then watching in frustration-tinged fascination as the man spent nearly thirty minutes listing all of the possible differences between the two appointment dates (weather, driving conditions, other appointmentsâhe was exhaustive). Finally, Damasio spoke up
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