Biological and psychological significance of emotions
Emotions are human experiences accompanied by feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness, pleasure and displeasure, as well as their various shades and combinations. Pleasure and displeasure are the simplest emotions. Their more complex variants are represented by such feelings as joy, sadness, sadness, fear, anger.
Suddenly finding ourselves close to a precipice, we experience the emotion of fear. Under the influence of this fear we withdraw to a safe zone. The situation itself has not yet harmed us, but through our feeling it has been reflected as threatening our self-preservation. Signaling the immediate positive or negative meaning of various phenomena, emotions reflexively regulate our behavior, encourage or inhibit our actions.
Emotion is a generalized, generalized reaction of the organism to vital influences (from Latin "emoveo" - to wave).
Emotions regulate mental activity not specifically, but through the corresponding general mental states, influencing the course of all mental processes.
The peculiarity of emotions is their integration - arising under appropriate emotiogenic influences, emotions capture the whole organism, unite all its functions in a corresponding generalized stereotyped behavioral act.
Emotions are an adaptive product of evolution - they are evolutionarily generalized ways of behavior in typical situations.
It is due to emotions that an organism turns out to be extremely favorably adapted to the surrounding conditions, as it, even without determining the form, type, mechanism and other parameters of the impact, can react to it with a saving speed with a certain emotional state, reducing it, so to speak, to a common biological denominator, i.e. determine whether this particular impact is useful or harmful for it.
Emotions arise in response to features of objects that are key to satisfying a certain need. Certain biologically significant properties of objects and situations cause an emotional tone of sensations. They signal an organism's encounter with a sought-after or dangerous property of objects. Emotions and feelings are subjective attitudes to objects and phenomena, arising as a result of reflection of their direct connection with actualized needs.
All emotions are object-related and bivalent - they are either positive or negative (because objects either satisfy or do not satisfy the corresponding needs). Emotions prompt stereotyped forms of behavior. However, the peculiarities of human emotions are determined by the general law of human mental development - higher formations, higher mental functions, being formed on the basis of lower functions, reorganize them. Emotional-evaluative activity of a human being is inseparably connected with his conceptual-evaluative sphere. And this sphere itself influences a person's emotional state.
Conscious, rational regulation of behavior, on the one hand, is prompted by emotions, but, on the other hand, it opposes current emotions. All volitional actions are performed in spite of strong competing emotions. A person acts by overcoming pain, thirst, hunger, and all kinds of urges.
However, the lower the level of conscious regulation, the more freedom is given to emotional-impulsive actions. These actions have no conscious motivation, the goals of these actions are also not formed by consciousness, but are unambiguously predetermined by the nature of the impact itself (for example, impulsive detachment from an object falling on us).
Emotions dominate where there is insufficient conscious regulation of behavior: when there is a deficit of information for the conscious construction of actions, when the fund of conscious ways of behavior is insufficient. But this does not mean that the more conscious an action is, the less important emotions are. Even thinking actions are organized on an emotional basis.
In conscious actions emotions provide their energetic potential and strengthen the direction of action, the effectiveness of which is most probable. Allowing greater freedom of conscious choice of goals , emotions determine the main directions of human activity.
Positive emotions, constantly combined with the satisfaction of needs, themselves become an urgent need. A person strives for positive emotions. Deprivation of emotional influences disorganizes the human psyche, and the long-term deprivation of positive emotional influences in childhood can lead to negative deformations of personality.