Emotional Effect

What effects do emotions cause?

By “emotions”, I’m referring basically to the technical definition; a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others. I talked about more details of my interpretted description of emotions, and potentials to alter them, in a post from almost 1 yr ago; The Notion of Emotion. I also hypothesized how all emotions seem like they could be the effect caused by 2 basic categories of reinforcement triggers (positive, for pursuance, and negative, for avoidance), in my last post; Emotion Reinforcement. Assuming emotions are an after effect of reinforcement triggers (retriggers for short), for the function of subconscious reactions (based on instinct), how do these emotions affect our reactions and decisions?

Emotions seem to tend to have a prolonged effect on our reactions. The various categories of emotions seem to be basically, the most common tendencies for the stronger, longer lasting, concoctions of neurochemical influencers. Throughout any person's life, there could be many other variances of combinations of neurochemicals, and many instances of lower degrees of the retriggers, but we’ve labelled and categorized (even if obscurely) the strongest emotions. Since these emotions have earned a label, they must have proven to be beneficial, from a tendency of circumstances occurring, which would benefit the individual to have the effects of those neurochemicals. Since these emotions are prolonged (in effect) enough to earn a label, the circumstances which cause them, likely require a type of reaction, which would be beneficial over a longer time period.

With typical subconscious reactions, there may be many circumstances which only require a quick, short term reaction. These situations would cause retriggers to a weaker degree of influence, for a shorter time, such as a small prick of pain, as a retrigger for avoidance in the future, caused by a minor scrape from a branch, or the 20th mouthful of grass for a deer, as a weak retrigger for pursuance, for beneficial nutrition. Typical temporary subconscious memory for an animal is short term, such as a deer remembering what it saw 10 mins ago, so perhaps certain retrigger combinations developed to be longer lasting, when necessary to continue causing certain reactions. 

A neurochemical concoction of fear, for eg, would benefit that deer, to cause the effect of making it keep running, and keep being alert, if it saw a wolf 20 mins ago. The retriggers which cause what we might call anticipation, for an elephant in Africa to pursue finding a water source, requires longer lasting neurochemicals, to cause the elephant to keep searching for hours. Love could be considered a very long lasting and very strong form of admiration or enjoyment of being with another individual, as an effect of retriggers to cause them to pursue another, which is beneficial for their own, or species’ as a whole, survival. 

These longer lasting effects of retriggers would be developed as a unique combination for each species benefit, over many generations. As humans have exited a natural environment for which these retriggers were intended for the benefit of, perhaps a lot of emotions are triggered unnecessarily in our modern artificial lifestyles. Beyond technological and societal advancements creating a very different environment, artificial selection of our breeding would have an additional skew of genetic compositions of these neurochemical retriggers causing emotions. Perhaps our ability to consciously analyse the causes and effects, and focus on the enjoyment and sense of meaning of circumstances causing after effects from reinforcement which is positive, is a positive, of; Emotional Effect.