What positive emotion do you feel most often?
Our culture is a strange one. It tends to fear emotion, or at least the expression or display of emotion. It prefers to see ‘affect’ as psychologists dub it as an unnecessary excrescence or a survival from a more primitive state of human development either as a species or in the life purse. The brain used to be described in terms of layered parts that are meant to replicate the development of the advanced human brain, the most developed being the vast folded surface of the human cortex. It’s vastness is often compared, with its necessitated landscape of hills and valleys to the smooth surface of the cortex of the rat brain.
The most ‘primitive’ area underneath the cortex and connecting directly to the transit of messages up and down the spinal column was once dubbed the ‘reptilian brain’, for reptiles can be clearly thought of as the most primitive animal. However, modern neuroscience has contradicted much of this thinking. The structures of the central brain are as implicated in complex thought development, storage and retrieval.of ideas and procedures as some areas of the cortex. This is after the age of the hippocampus, that part of the core named by anatomists in Ancient Greece, named because of its resemblance to a seahorse.
These primitive areas are associated with fight, flight and frolic responses, all necessary for survival of self and perhaps species and have, by sociobiologists of the thickest kind, been equated with the selfish drives necessary to ensure the survival of the most adaptive, that animal which gets out of the way of predation or best fights for food or to stop itself being food, and.for the best mate to spread its reproductive potency.
But in fact emotion is much more complex and the ontology of emotion must have an epistemological element, that element that interprets the category and meaning of the emotion. One such categorical exercise is the decision that emotions fall broadly into only two camps: positive or negative. But, clearly such categories are both simplifications and minimisations of the complex function of emotions in relation to sensation, cognition, behaviour and planning. Sometimes, emotions serve. A function so refined that the very best in what is called pure thought would be unthinkable without them. Great scientists like Einstein knew this.
We like to decide that fear and hate and anger are all negative but are they, and if so is it only in some extreme variants of what we call these emotions. In fact love, described as a positive in most value systems both ethical and spiritual can equally be the source of great damage to self and other.
In health and social care the danger of ‘enforced cheerfulness’ has been noted in mental health care and particularly in the management of suicidal ideation, ointment or planning. The axion to ‘think only positive thoughts’ often fails not only because people in anxious and depressive states are not only apt to misjudge what is positive or negative to them in the current circumstances but be unable to apply the thought other than in a harmful self-blaming way.
Positive Psychology was a movement born out of cruel experiments on animals, by Seligman, and applied to those unfortunate enough to be so trapped in appallingly bad mental health services that they must follow not only the instructions of the institutions but prove that they can reproduce it’s simplistic thinking in themselves. The most unfortunate of its precepts was ‘learned helplessness’,, rarely used but entrain self-help successfully because ignorant of the continua between self and the social supports which bolster self through help, including facilitation and teaching in the manner described by Vygotsky.
The stress on positive and negative rather than on the complexity of expressed emotion, integrated reflexively with thought, action and bodily sensation is a means of limiting mental health and education into emotional awareness and literacy. The skill is in reading emotion contextually with other biological, psychological and social systems. It is a big task but possible for anyone. It is used in the best kind of work with people with a learning difficulty, even severe ones often labelled disability. It works with the person, maturing their judgement. It is harmed by injunctions to think only positive thoughts and feel positive feelings. In the end it is the therapist that decides what is positive in these situations. What they do can be extremely harmful.
Hence, I cannot answer this question. Most often I try to read my feelings in terms of their effect on lots of things including self and others. It’s all I can do.
Love
Steve xxxx
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