As our emotional life develops, can it go wrong? Is it possible to be too happy or too sad or too angry? Is it useful to face life with a moderate degree of anxiety? Emotion is always normal. It can be extreme or unusual, but it is always providing information for whoever is experiencing it. It might be seen as inappropriate by other people, but for those who are experiencing the emotion, it is simply their experience. They might be able to limit its expression on the outside but unable to influence directly their own personal emotional reaction. Emotion is functional, both in the immediate sense of providing information, and in the true evolutionary sense of being adaptive (otherwise it would not have been preserved by natural selection). However, emotions have also been seen as contributing to most forms of mental illness, leading Oatley and Jenkins (1992) to ask: how can emotions malfunction?
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Sunday, December 12, 2010
CAN EMOTIONS MALFUNCTION?
As our emotional life develops, can it go wrong? Is it possible to be too happy or too sad or too angry? Is it useful to face life with a moderate degree of anxiety? Emotion is always normal. It can be extreme or unusual, but it is always providing information for whoever is experiencing it. It might be seen as inappropriate by other people, but for those who are experiencing the emotion, it is simply their experience. They might be able to limit its expression on the outside but unable to influence directly their own personal emotional reaction. Emotion is functional, both in the immediate sense of providing information, and in the true evolutionary sense of being adaptive (otherwise it would not have been preserved by natural selection). However, emotions have also been seen as contributing to most forms of mental illness, leading Oatley and Jenkins (1992) to ask: how can emotions malfunction?
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