Every emotion serves a purpose. Every feeling arises for a reason. Emotions don’t make you virtuous and they don’t make you evil. Expressing joy when you “should” be feeling sad does not make you a bad person. Your actions define your character, not your affect. I use the term “affect” here in the context of which it is used to describe someone’s proclivity to express their emotions. Some people are very reactive to certain situations and are naturally inclined to express their emotions with intensity. Others are lower on the positive affect scale and can rarely show positive emotion. They can come off as cold or even insensitive, but in reality they just don’t feel much, or as much, as the average person. It’s also important to note that affect exists as a spectrum; one does not have to be either one or the other.
It’s been shown that one’s affect, or their tendency to express positive and/or negative emotion, is very much hereditary, as well as a consequence of upbringing (secure v insecure attachment). For the most part, it’s programmed in us by the time we become adults. There are benefits to both positive and negative emotions and I will lay out a few examples from the book Authentic Happiness by Martin E.P. Seligman, former president of the APA:
“Negative emotions- fear, sadness, and anger- are our first line of defense against external threats, calling us to battle stations. Fear is a signal that danger is lurking, sadness is a signal that loss is impending, and anger signals someone trespassing against us. More than that, these external threats are all win-loss (or zero-sum) games, where whatever one person wins is exactly balanced by a loss for the other person. The net result is zero…. A fight to the death is the quintessential win-loss game in evolution, and as such it arouses the panoply of negative emotions in their most extreme forms. Natural selection has likely favored the growth of negative emotions for this reason.”
The last sentence of that passage stood out to me because it means negative emotions serve the purpose of ensuring our survival. It’s not hard to see why philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and several other fields have been obsessed on studying negative emotions. These negative emotions can seem out of place in a world where everything is at our fingertips. The negative emotions we evolved to express can seem immoral in a world where we don’t have to fight to the death. I’m here to remind you that they are not. These emotions are critical in narrowing our attention so that we can identify the problem or threat at hand, and put a stop to it. You don’t need to attacked by a knife-wielding stranger to know that fear is useful. Fear keeps us alert for people who pretend to be our friends just so they could take advantage of us. Anger allows us the courage to stand up to the partner that insists on being abusive. These negative emotions are a defense in the “win-loss” sum games Seligman talks about. They protect us from losing what people are trying to take from us. They serve the purpose of helping us maintain the few resources we harbor in this world where people are always trying to take things from us.
I myself am someone who tends to express negative emotions better than positive emotions. I am good at win-loss zero sum games because I am extremely competitive. I use the affect bestowed upon me to my strengths. We live in a world where people insist that we should allot most of our resources to working on our weaknesses, as opposed to our strengths. I know for a fact that I had that concept pounded into my head throughout elementary school. I would make the argument that psychology disagrees with that ideology because people aren’t as malleable as we thought they were- especially when it comes to how we express emotions. Seligman makes the claim that doubling down on your strengths is the best strategy for exactly that reason. We can only change our affect so much. It’s important to know where to lie in terms of positive affectivity and negative affectivity so that you can use the tools at your disposal, rather than trying to act how the world tells you you should act. People with negative affectivity have countless advantages available to them based on the way they see the world. For example, someone who tends to lack emotion is calm and cool under pressure and has the ability informed and well-thought out decisions, as opposed to someone who experiences all the stress of a situation. With that being said, those with a positive affect have their own unique perspective of the world.
Positive affectivity exists for many reasons and has many benefits other than just making people feel good. Seligman summarizes Fredrickson’s theory of the evolutionary purpose of positive emotions as such:
Positive emotions “broaden our abiding intellectual, physical, and social resources, building up reserves we can draw upon when a threat or opportunity presents itself. When we are in a positive mood, people like us better, and friendship, love and coalitions are more likely to cement. In contrast to the restrictions of negative emotions, our mental set is expansive, tolerant, and creative. We are open to new ideas and new experience.
The way I want to see it- as an oversimplified characterization of positive and negative emotions- is that negative emotions serve to ensure our survival, while positive emotions aim at providing us with a higher quality of life, while also providing us with the support to ensure our survival. The difference between positive feelings and negative feelings, are that positive feelings lead to “win-win” encounters as opposed to “win-lose” (zero sum” encounters where one person wins and the other loses. Positive feelings aim at growth, because they allow both you and whoever you are interacting with, the opportunity to mature as a consequence of the encounter. Countless experiments have expressed the profound effects of positive emotion on creativity, cognition, and problem solving, in the short-term. Just as important, by acting out these characteristics of positive emotion, you maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue (Seligman 44).
So, what’s the point? There are a few main points that I want to emphasize now that we have a basic understanding of the literature of affect and emotions.
First, is that each of us have a proclivity to express more or less emotion, and even more specifically, positive or negative emotions. Because our affect is largely hereditary, we need to accept it and use it to our strengths. Excel at using what you have to benefit from its virtues, as opposed to desperately trying to become something you’re not. This does not mean you shouldn’t work on your weaknesses, because it’s important to address the shortcomings that may prohibit you from becoming as balanced as YOUR GENES ALLOW. Emotional intelligence is knowing how to use the tools that are available to you.
Second, feelings and emotions are messages! As simple and self-explanatory as it may sound, emotions serve to tell you how you feel about a situation. Therefore, it is important to label your emotions correctly because they will teach you about yourself, the situation, and how to respond appropriately. Your emotions teach you more about yourself by dictating whether they are appropriate in response to a situation or not. They provide information on your affect and how you will respond to a similar event in the future. This information is critical for understanding which situations you are good at dealing with and which situations you struggle with. You can use this information to decide whether you should approach a certain situation, or distance yourself from it. Knowing how you will feel about a situation is an important step to really understanding yourself. It’s hard to fake emotions, and even harder to inhibit them. Put yourself in situations that will invoke authentic emotions. Whether positive or negative, these emotions become easier to understand and control when you are situations that you know you belong in.
Lastly, I want to address the fact that presenting a facade of carelessness and nonchalance, has become the popular thing to do nowadays. This is wrong on so many levels that I don’t even know where to start. First and foremost, it’s an unhealthy way to go about living your life. Unless you are someone who naturally expresses less emotions, then you are living a lie. If you don’t confront your emotions when they confront you, they will silently haunt you from the depths of your unconscious. Pushing your emotions down is a SHORT-TERM solution. The more you run away from what your own body is trying to tell you, the bigger your emotional baggage will grow. Listening to your emotions will help you develop healthy coping mechanisms, as opposed to maladaptive defense mechanisms that will manifest themselves over and over and over again as bad habits. Examples of healthy coping mechanisms include altruism, meditation, humor, and physical activity. Maladaptive coping mechanisms include, ESCAPE, numbing, and even self-harm. Life is too short to pose as someone who is careless and cold, when you can experience every peak and valley of life to its fullest. If you don’t control your emotions, they will control you.
In addition to that point, when you push your emotions aside, you miss out on their value. “Studies show that depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas happy people are much more skillful than others judge them to be” (Seligman 37). Happy people also remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both (37). So yes, there is a practical purpose to feeling sad or depressed. Obviously, too much of it is enough to lead to clinical depression, but its clear that there is actual value in negative emotions as well. It’s interesting that when one is feeling the depressed, their perspective of their own reality is the most accurate and the least distorted. This new lens at which a depressed person sees the world is there to help you understand how the events that led to your feeling sad unfolded and what role you may have played in that process. In short, depressed people are better at assessing success and failure. The evolutionary explanation for this seems simple: the better you are at assessing your failure, the better you will become at succeeding in the future.
Your emotions are a gateway into a better understanding of yourself and the world around you. Evolution is that which chooses, and it chose the emotions we possess today for a reason. Your emotions contain wisdom that cannot be discovered through sheer thought alone. We are terribly flawed humans who suck at thinking. Let your mind and body tell you know what you need to know about yourself and you will develop a mastery of your impulses, your reactions to those impulses, and the way in which you perceive the world.
