5.29 A theory of emotion  (Page 3/4)

Pleasure and pain function in the mind in many ways. The influence emotions, thoughts and the long term conscious and unconscious impact on thoughts and emotions. There are different types of emotion and thought that are influenced by different types of pain and pleasure:

• Different types of thought can vary in how emotional they are, for instance moral decisions could involve a lot of emotion compared to simple decisions. Important thoughts about emotional things (like loved ones) might also be very emotional.
• Emotional thoughts are more intellectual pleasure than regular pleasure (because it is a thought instead of a real event).
• The more emotional the thought, the greater its long term impact and significance might be on your emotions. Like the thought "I love person x". Of course, a non-emotional thought might also have a long term impact on how much pleasure and pain you experience.
• For each different type of emotion, you could have a thought that is emotional in that way.
• Every emotion is going to be a certain type of pain or pleasure. This pain or pleasure will vary between being intellectual and emotional. The more aware you are of the pain or pleasure, the more intellectual it will be. That shows how you might be suffering or in pleasure but not know it. If you don't know how much pain or pleasure you are experiencing, how much are you actually experiencing it? There is an unconscious element of pain and pleasure. Also, the pain and pleasure, or the emotion generating those feelings, might itself be of a more intellectual type or emotional type. For instance, if you are picked on, it is because you understand that you are being insulted that results in the emotional pain. That makes the pain in part intellectual because it stems from your understanding.
• Just like every emotion is going to be a certain type of pain or pleasure, every thought is going to be as well. Like emotional thoughts or non-emotional ones.
• An insult affects emotions because you understand that it is an insult, but normal events (like working or interacting with someone) generate emotion because you have a large unconscious emotional understanding of the significance of the event. At birth they might generate emotion because that is simply how you experience emotions, however after a long time the emotion that events generate is going be based much more on your experience, and what your experience is going to teach you is how much you enjoy that event.
• The fact that thought can influence emotions, pain and pleasure is amazing if you think about it. Is a thought a real experience? Thoughts don't even last very long. However, you could think of thoughts as tied in with emotion (since thoughts can be emotional, that shows how they are real). For instance, if something bad happens, you are going to experience pain because of real reasons that could be thought about. You change the nature of the emotion by altering how you think it affected you because the emotion was really just thoughts about the event, so you change the emotion by changing the thoughts that make up the emotion.
• Since emotion is so tied in with thought, pain and pleasure can be long term because you are always thinking. Something bad might happen to you, but you unconsciously think aboout the event for a while after, causing you to experience pain.
• The type of pain and pleasure can be explained by explaining the thoughts that make up the emotion, or the emotions that make up the thoughts. Also, real events and their emotions can be explained with thoughts. It is like a real event causes a series of thoughts about the event that determine how you are going to feel about the event both during the event and after. The thoughts are so real (are based in emotion), yet only thoughts, so therefore you could control how you feel about events and how they affect you to some degree. That shows the importance of talking about your feelings. There are also learned responses which also show the importance of thoughts. The response might have been learned from thoughts or unconscious thoughts. Therefore, it could also be unlearned just by thinking.
• Thoughts can change the nature of emotion. For instance, if someone makes you happy, the more you highlight why they make you happy the more the relationship will be enhanced. Also, thoughts can direct a negative emotional response. For instance, if something bad happens to you, if you think that what happened was really bad then you might feel even worse then if you trained yourself to not care. In other words, your emotional response to events is really just an intellectual, learned response that is determined by thoughts and your thoughts over the long-term. If someone is insulted, they have learned that insults are bad over time, and that is why it makes them feel bad. It also causes them to think about the negative thing that was said, and if it is true, might make them think that they are a failure in some way. In that case, simply by thinking about the insult and why it isn't true, or why it shouldn't affect your feelings could make it so the insult doesn't carry weight the next time.
• Changing your thoughts in an attempt to change your emotions is almost like trying to change your programming because emotions are harder to control than thoughts. In the movie Terminator 3, the evil terminator changed the programming of the good terminator to kill the hero of the movie. When it was time to kill the hero, the hero tried to convince the terminator that it didn't want to kill him. The terminator struggled with back and forth switching between programming commands until it finally was able to not kill.