There is no doubt that emotions play a significant role in our lives, they can generate stimuli and powerful energies to achieve goals that we set ourselves, but they can also generate frustrations.
An emotion is an affective state that we experience, a subjective reaction to the environment that is accompanied by organic changes (physiological and endocrine) of innate origin, included by experience. Emotions have an adaptive function of our organism to what surrounds us.
It is a state that occurs suddenly and abruptly, in the form of more or less violent and more or less fleeting crises. In the human being, the experience of an emotion generally involves a set of cognitions, attitudes and beliefs about the world, which we use to assess a specific situation and, therefore, influence the way in which that situation is perceived.
For a long time emotions have been considered unimportant and the most rational part of the human being has always been given more relevance. But emotions, being affective states, personal internal states, motivations, desires, needs and even objectives. In any case, it is difficult to know from the emotion what the future behavior of the individual will be, although it can help us to intuit it
As soon as we have a few months to live, we acquire basic emotions such as fear, anger or joy. Some animals share with us these very basic emotions, which in humans become more complex thanks to language, because we use symbols, signs and meanings.
Each individual experiences an emotion in a particular way, depending on their previous experiences, learning, character, and the specific situation. Some of the physiological and behavioral reactions that trigger emotions are innate, while others can be acquired.
There are 6 basic categories of emotions:
Fear: Anticipation of a threat or danger that produces anxiety, uncertainty, insecurity.
Surprise: shock, amazement, bewilderment. It is very transitory. It can give a cognitive approximation to know what happens.
Aversion: Disgust, disgust, we tend to move away from the object that produces us aversion.
Anger: Rage, anger, resentment, rage, irritability.
Joy: Fun, euphoria, gratification, content, gives a feeling of well-being, security.
Sadness: Grief, loneliness, pessimism.
If we take into account this adaptive purpose of emotions, we could say that they have different functions:
Fear: We tend towards protection.
Surprise: Helps to orient ourselves to the new situation.
Aversion: It produces rejection towards what we have in front of us.
Anger: It leads us towards destruction.
Joy: It induces us towards reproduction (we want to reproduce that event that makes us feel good).
Sadness: It motivates us towards a new personal reintegration.
Humans have 42 different muscles in our faces. Depending on how we move them, we express certain emotions or others. There are different smiles, which express different degrees of happiness. This helps us to express what we feel, which on many occasions is difficult for us to explain in words. It is another way of communicating socially and feeling integrated into a social group. We must bear in mind that man is the social animal par excellence.
Different facial expressions are international, different cultures, there is a similar language. We can observe how in blind or deaf children when they experience emotions they show it in a very similar way to other people, they have the same facial expression. Possibly there are genetic, hereditary bases, since a child who does not see cannot imitate the facial expressions of others. Although the expressions also vary a little depending on the culture, sex, country of origin etc. Women have more sensitivity to better capture facial expressions or emotional signals and this sensitivity increases with age. Another example is the faces of the Orientals, especially the Japanese, they are quite expressionless, but it is in the face of others, because at an intimate level they express their emotions better.
Facial expressions also affect the person who is looking at us by altering their behavior. If we observe someone who cries, we become sad or serious and we can even cry like that person. On the other hand, anger, joy and sadness, fear, surprise and aversion of the people we observe are usually quite well identified.
Emotions have particular conductive components that are the way they are displayed externally.
They are to some extent controllable, based on the family and cultural learning of each group:
Facial expressions
Actions and gestures
Distance between people.
Non-linguistic components of verbal expression (non-verbal communication).
The other components of emotions are physiological and involuntary, the same for all:
Shaking
Blush
Sweating
Heavy breathing
Pupillary dilation
Increased heart rate
These components are what are at the base of the polygraph or the "lie detector". It is assumed that when a person lies they feel or cannot control their physiological changes, although there are people who with training can control it.
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