5.29 A theory of emotion  (Page 2/4)

Analyzing anything, however, has many levels of complication. A kid playing a video game generates the emotion fun. That could be the first level of analysis of an event, stating the obvious emotions involved. The next level would be asking, “what are all the emotions involved”. To do that you would have to understand that all emotions are mixed, that the emotion “fun” the boy has could be mixed in with the feeling anger or frustration if he lost a fight or something. Also, how a specific negative event playing the game (say losing a battle) influenced his feelings of fun after that event. Also, his cognition might play a role, did he say something to himself after he lost to make himself feel better? Did his therapy session talking about how to deal with defeat alleviate his pain at the loss?

To have a complete understanding of everything, you could analyze the degrees of fun the boy has during the game, when it elevates and when it decreases. Is all of life like this video game, with variations of fun and anger and cognitive influences? If viewed simply, then yes, however there are many many things that happen in life that can be analyzed and the emotional components explained. It would be useful if I could describe a few principals that would apply to all of these events:

• Negative events generate fear, which causes people to either flee or shut down.
• Positive events generate pleasure, which results in encouragement and motivation.

That’s pretty much all I can think of, I suppose I could say that my theory has two parts, the pleasure instinct and the pain instinct, and that all emotions stem from these two instincts. Everything is going to generate some amount of pleasure and some amount of pain, causing reward and punishment, it is almost Pavlovian. However it is more complicated than that, while my theory works on the small individual direct event level (thing A causes you to be motivated to do thing B) it also works in small ways on everything, like one event might motivate you for something else entirely. Freud believed in a death instinct and a sex instinct, which, if you think about it, is similar to my theory.

The pleasure and pain instincts apply when any emotion happens. Every emotion is going to be a certain amount painful, and a certain amount pleasurable. Furthermore, the meaningful aspect of the emotion is going to be how pleasurable or painful it was. Learning emotionally could be viewed as long term pleasure. So if an event is meaningful instead of just fun or pleasurable it would still be placed under the category of pleasure because this meaningful activity adds to your life overall, thus causing long-term pleasure. It is almost like intelligence is fun, only in a different more long term way. Also, an even that is fun is also going to contribute to long term intellectual emotional development as well, because a fun event is going itself to contain information, and be motivating and inspiring. That also explains why negative and painful events can be beneficial over the long run for both fun and emotional intellectual development. They can be because the event itself might communicate information to the person, or help them understand something. Almost like learning a lesson the hard way. The point is that pain or pleasure is the stimulus behind all fun, learning, and long-term fun and learning. In other words, the pain and pleasure you get from events helps you out all the time, not just for those specific events. Pleasure is inspiring and encouraging, while pain is more of a learning experience. So every emotion is going to inspire in some ways if it is pleasurable, and you might learn from painful emotions.