Understanding The Importance of Emotions and Feelings

Because our immediate environment is rich in dangers and opportunities that range widely in importance, our brain needs something akin to a thermostat to determine when a specific challenge is sufficiently important to activate the several systems that focus attention and develop appropriate responses. Emotion, centered principally in a small set of subcortical brain systems, is our biological thermostat and central to cognition and educational practice.

Although emotion is a somewhat vague word, recent scientific developments are clarifying the term and changing some previously held beliefs about the biology and function of emotion. Emotion is an innate, powerful, and principally unconscious process. It alerts us to problems but doesn't bother us with processes that don't require conscious attention. For example, emotion alerts us to an opportunity for food, but it doesn't continually report on the digestive process that follows eating unless the food turns out to be indigestible. Further, we don't consciously choose to be emotionally aroused, and such arousal often interferes with what we are currently doing. In effect, our emotions tell us to stop doing what we are currently doing and to attend to a more important challenge.

Emotion responds most vigorously to high-contrast information. This tendency is biologically sensible. Emotion will merely monitor or ignore steady states and subtle change, staying the course rather than expending cognitive energy on what isn't problematic or fluctuating. Emotion can thus trick us into not recognizing the subtle body language that indicates a gradually encroaching problem until the problem suddenly becomes menacing. For example, the recent spate of school killings came as a surprise to many educators and classmates who had worked daily with the perpetrators and hadn't suspected a thing. We are also surprised when an unnoticed former student turns out to be very successful.

Emotional arousal doesn't define or solve the challenge. Instead, emotion activates the problem-solving processes that develop the response, just as our immune system separates the tasks of recognizing and responding to our body's microscopic invaders. Rather than solve the challenge, our emotions alert us to the challenge's existence, a subtle but important distinction, and then may continue to arouse us to maintain interest in the problem.

Although emotions don't solve our problems, they can bias the direction of the response. Temperament is a seemingly innate element of our emotional system that unconsciously predisposes emotional arousal toward danger or opportunity. A person's temperament typically centers somewhere along a continuum between uninhibited and inhibited, with boldness being processed principally in the left hemisphere and anxiety in the right hemisphere. When emotionally aroused, the bold tend to be initially curious about a potential opportunity, and the anxious wary about a potential danger. Temperament enhances a quick and confident move toward a response. Because we frequently follow our temperamental bias, we tend to become quite competent with it over time.

Emotions (like temperament) are neither positive nor negative in themselves. Emotions evolved to alert us to specific kinds of problems, so all kinds of emotions are developmentally important. Just as theorists have proposed several different ways of categorizing intelligence, so scientists differ somewhat in their classification of emotions. Fear, anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness as our primary emotions and includes embarrassment, jealousy, and guilt among our secondary, or social, emotions. Note that most of these emotions alert us to negative situations. All brain systems, including emotions, must be developed.

But how do we become conscious of the signals from our unconscious emotions?