Greed is out, Empathy is in

When people do evil things, such as when they commit
genocides in Bosnia or Rwanda, we call them "animals." If
people do altruistic things, such as when they save another's
life or give generously to the poor, we attribute this to our
noble human morality. We call them "humane."

Based on his fieldwork and research on chimpanzees, bonobos, and capuchins Doctor Frans de Wall said - "many animals are predisposed to take care of one another and come to other beings aid. Their strong similarity to human biology suggests that every person is destined to care for others.

"To effectively learn from others, apes need to see an actual fellow ape: Imitation requires identification with a body of flesh and blood. Recently we are beginning to realize how much human and animal cognition runs via the body. The body produces internal sensations and communicates with other bodies that construct social connections and an appreciation of the surrounding reality." - Waal stated.

Empathy is an automatic response, as old as mammalian maternal care. Mothers and children play games of clapping each other’s hands following a certain rhythm. These games involve imitating the other and synchronization among the two.

We are far from being isolated , indeed we are strongly interconnected, trough our bodies and emotions at a very high level. This might sound odd in the West, with it's tradition of individuality. Nevertheless Homo sapiens tends to be easily swayed in one emotional direction or another depending on his peers.

Waal thinks - "humans can be described as animals that need to work to keep selfish and aggressive urges under control, but also as animals that can engage in cooperative work. They are among the most aggressive primates, but they can also relate to each other properly. Many economists and politicians model human society based on the aggressive instincts mentioned before, even dough survival through cooperation is a frequent scenery. This suggests that there is a long evolutionary history of compromise and peaceful coexistence. It seems empathy is part of the survival package; human society depends on it as much as animal communities".

"The way our bodies—including mood, posture, and so on—are influenced by surrounding bodies is one of the mysteries of human existence. It’s also one of the most underestimated phenomena, especially in disciplines that consider humans as rational decision makers. Rather than individually weighing the pros and cons of our own actions, we occupy nodes within a tight network that connects all of us in both body and mind ". - Concluded Waal.

Emotions

An emotion is a complex reaction from a person to a perception. This reaction induces him or her to assume a body response, a facial expression, a gesture or select a specific behavior. An emotion takes place between a perception and a subsequent reaction.

How we feel about things is the central concern for people, because emotions mediate between our bodies with their physical perceptions and images of the world and our minds with their concepts and ideas. Physical experiences and the biochemical reactions in our bodies trigger emotions in the consciousness, and the conscious and subconscious responses of our emotional feelings stimulate biochemical processes in the body. Human beings are well integrated systems, and any separation between the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual is artificial, merely for purposes of analysis.

Anger: a very active with forceful emotional energy directed toward someone. It is usually triggered by some outward event which provokes a reaction. This event may be a direct attack, threat, or insult or the frustration of a desire or attempt to control or manipulate a situation.

Anxiety: experienced when many fears, which are not clearly perceived or understood, are felt subconsciously. The complexity of our contemporary society tends to promote anxiety because of the dangers which are difficult to understand, remedy, or avoid.. A variant of anxiety is related to desire and is impatience or being anxious for something to happen or afraid of what might happen.

Desire: a sense of longing for a person or object or hoping for an outcome. The same sense is expressed by emotions such as "craving" or "hankering". When a person desires something or someone, their sense of longing is excited by the enjoyment or the thought of the item or person, and they want to take actions to obtain their goal.

Eagerness: an enthusiasm that anticipates the fulfillment of a desire. Thus joy is experienced solely because of expectation. Young people tend to be more eager, because they have less experience but more energy and desire. The excitement of eagerness can cause impatience and, if the pleasure anticipated is delayed, consternation. Yet somehow the joy in eagerness prevents it from being sorrowful.

Fear: originated in the basic evolutionary instinct for survival in perceiving and avoiding life-threatening dangers. Thus fear warns us of dangers and moves us to take adaptive action.
Fear can be used to manipulate motivations in order to control people's behavior. Fear of punishment is the main weapon of social control by threatening either to do something negative or remove something positive.

Greed: commercial society constantly promotes it in the process of trying to sell products. Thus these feelings can be very common and socially approved. Nonetheless they can cause discontent and even ruthless competition. Greed is a feeling of never being satisfied with what we have but always wanting more.

Guilt: understood as a social phenomenon that happens between people as much as it happens inside them. Guilt appears to arise from interpersonal transactions and vary with interpersonal context. In particular, guilt patterns appear to be most common, and most consistent in the context of communal relationships, which are characterized by expectations of mutual concern. Guilt serves various relationship-enhancing functions, including motivating people to treat partners well avoid transgressions and redistributing emotional distress..

Jealousy: a specific kind of anger resulting from possessive love, attachment, suspicion, mistrust, fear, and selfishness. Jealousy is a bondage where we place chains on our love and try to hold on to someone or something by restricting them. Basically it grows out of insecurity in a relationship and fear of losing the object of desire.

Love: a good feeling that is actively directed toward someone or something. Love brings enjoyment to what we do; we say, "I love to do that.". Love is also the emphathy; we feel someone's emotions and concerns. Love uplifts people into a higher joy.

Modesty: reluctance to reveal oneself to others either physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. A modest person does not necessarily feel inferior or superior but rather private. Inhibitions against exposing oneself can also prevent sharing and communication. Yet often modesty is a sense of dignity and self-worth which can extend into exclusivism and elitism. Everyone has a right to privacy; and when not extreme, modesty is usually respected. On the other hand, the lack of all modesty in exhibitionism usually indicates vanity or the desire to shock.

Shame: located primarily as a social emotion, with a normative function of monitoring social bonds between people - rather than, as it is usually framed, as a 'self-conscious', 'negative' and 'pathological'emotion. This reframing of the healthier experience highlights the function of shame in building and strengthening relationships.

Worry: a continuing fear or an anxiety that is focused on a particular concern. Worry comes from a lack of faith, a negative view of the future, and a failure to take the needed steps in the present. Fears are designed to warn us to do something or avoid something; but if we fail to act, the fear continues to worry us. If we are wise, worry is completely unnecessary.

Joy and Happiness

Happiness is an expansion, a connection; is connecting with another person, with nature, with a situation. You feel joy when you're not really aware of yourself as distinct. The separateness that comes with all those other things like anger and fear, make you feel like you're a little isolated thing having an awful time.

When we think of happiness, children often come to mind; that the drive for happiness is one that motivates our daily actions, even in adulthood. It's one of the basic emotions that include anger and surprise. This drive for happiness impels you to seek out the things that make us feel good. Almost all the things that bring you joy now are things that brought you joy in your childhood. Every day there's something to discover in nature, and in culture, actually, but you knew as a child you really are discovering something every day. Then if you can bring that into your adult life; you wake up every day thinking there are things to learn and discover and to delight you with, then you're going to have a fair bit of joy in your life.

It is interesting to remember that emotions can be contagious, so you can be in a group and if the group is generally, you know positive, enthusiastic, those emotions can be contagious and if it's a fairly cynical group that can be contagious. And organizations are big social systems where they can create environments that facilitate and help people to increase their wellbeing or, in fact, can decrease it. And I think there's been far too little attention to that area so those are the types of things that I'm especially interested in, and understanding what creates a healthy environment where people are able to learn how to utilize their emotions in ways that benefit themselves and others. In my mind, in turn, it spreads back out into society.

Most of the people think that joy decreases with age but there's an emerging set of research that's showing that with aging the part of that regulates negative emotions actually becomes better able to do it, and, in a sense, takes the brakes off the positive emotions. So they end up being less anxious, less neurotic and so on (this is in normal ageing). And the question of course has been 'why would that happen?' And up until now a lot of neuroscience research hasn't addressed this question because they say, 'well surely evolution hasn't selected for something that would improve function after the productive years', that evolution would only select for something in the years when children can be produced. Who knows? Maybe it happens because our ancestors used to live longer than we do.

Happiness is a strange notion for scientists. What is the psychological state called "happiness" for? It can't be that natural selection designed us to feel good all the time out of sheer good will. Presumably our brain circuits for happiness motivate us to accomplish things that enhance biological fitness. With that simple insight one can make some sense of some of the puzzles of happiness that wise men and women have noted for thousands of years. For example, directly pursuing happiness is often a recipe for unhappiness, because our sense of happiness is always calibrated with respect to other people.

Perhaps we can make sense of this by putting ourselves in the shoes of the fictitious engineer behind natural selection. What should the circuit for happiness be doing? Presumably it would be assessing how well you're doing in your current struggle in life, whether you should change your life and try to achieve something different, or whether you should be content with what you're achieved so far, for example, when you are well-fed, comfortable, with a mate, in a situation likely to result in children and so on. But how could a brain be designed in advance to assess that? There's no absolute standard for well-being. A Paleolithic hunter-gatherer should not have fretted that he had no running shoes or central heating or penicillin. How can a brain know whether there is something worth striving for? Well, it can look around and see how well off other people are. If they can achieve something, maybe so can you. Other people anchor your well-being scale and tell you what you can reasonably hope to achieve.

Jealousy

Jealousy is seen as a negative force. It's the main fuel for crimes of passion and is linked with brutality, including domestic violence, and even murder. But the great psychologist Sigmund Freud believed that it's not only normal, it's actually desirable to feel jealous. And like all other emotions it's developed to give us the best guess at what's happening in our lives.

The thinking is that the emotions systems developed to give us instant solutions to commonly experienced problems in our environment. That meant that very quickly the whole body could respond. So it's not just a thought thing but that literally the emotions play an important role in coordinating the internal functions; heart rate, respiration, muscle tension and the like. So these developed really to give us very instant kinds of solutions to commonly experienced – either threats or opportunities – in our environment; things that related to surviving in comfortable ways.

People are at their healthiest and at their happiest when they're involved in satisfying relationships; whether we're talking about childhood or we're talking about adulthood. Engaging in satisfying relationships is associated with all kinds of wonderful things; lower cardiovascular threat, greater immune system response, greater wellbeing. And so what jealousy does is it alerts you and impels you to the threat that your relationship is going to be lost. I like to call jealousy a social emotion as opposed to kind of a more basic emotion. And most of us accept the view that we have basic emotions like anger and fear that impel us to flee a danger or to attack a conflict. Social emotions are emotions that you're going to see in social species like humans, and what they do is help us navigate our social landscape, much as more basic emotions help us navigate the physical one.

The main point about jealousy is it's not just about, is my partner having sex with someone, or is my partner saying 'I love you' to someone – because that only happens in terms of romantic relationships at a certain stage of one's life. It's really about protecting valued relationships at all stages of life, because you have to be successful as a child in protecting relationships to reach sexual maturity. And then you have to be able to form relationships with romantic partners as well as with other individuals to help you succeed in life, and it's the grand total of that that I think makes you lead a very adaptive life, both in terms of propagating your genetic material, but also in terms of having a life well lived.

All humans at kind of a very innate level have the capacity to feel jealous, and will feel it when they sense that the relationship is being threatened, but that's the integral part. What determines when you feel that your relationship is being threatened, that varies a lot by cultural, by social learning, by past experiences. So think about your friends, you co-workers. Some individuals may react incredibly jealously when their partner simply smiles at someone else, and other people that doesn't bother them at all. And I think that is related to how the actions by their partner make them feel about themselves. Some people who have different secure levels of attachment may be more or less jealous by a certain act. And some cultures allow certain interactions between men and women that other cultures proscribe, and I think as we grow through our lives we're constantly tuning our threat detection mechanisms, so to speak, based on our past experiences and based on our culture.

Shake the disease

Alexithymia causes difficulty in understanding, differentiating and communicating emotional states. One of the predominant characteristics on the relationship level is a limited capacity of having emotional connections with people since they are not able to see both in themselves and in others the shades of emotion, just the ones considered good or bad. Another characteristic of alexithymics is an attenuated capacity of controlling their impulses, so much so that some of them discharge the tension caused by the unpleasant inner states by compulsive acts, such as abusing food or substances, or through distorted sexual behavior.

Its symptomatollogy include dissociative experiences, low self-esteem, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and also a tendency to develop internet addiction. The difficulty in identifying emotions is associated in a significant way with an elevated risk of developing Internet addiction. On the other side an emotionally impoverished world along Internet addiction (or any other gadget or media like addiction). Addiction to technologies and emotional impoverishment are, in my opinion, codependent. If it is true that alexithymia promotes addiction, excessive use of technologies which in its turn leads us to a “second-hand” emotional life and a disconnection from the place where the emotions get activated, recognized and mature.

An incapacity of identifying emotions means a major risk of addiction. This makes me observe that lack of awareness on our own emotions (and our inner life in general) leading us to act mechanically and become servomechanisms of technology.If we do not understand what we feel, don’t listen to ourselves, consequently we’ll not get to know ourselves, and our lives will depend on external stimuli, which will trap us repeatedly. Therefore, our identities will depend on external inputs, since we’ll not have any other identity, apart from the one which is mirrored in the Net.

An alexithymic’s limited introspective life is a condition which is replicated in everybody who lives in a continuous flow of information, paying attention only to the inputs which come from the outside. The internal life and capacities for introspection become more and more impoverished, and it becomes more difficult to transfer attention from the external to the internal. The awareness of our feelings is an embodied process as much as a mental one, while using the Internet limits us to a mental sphere which takes us away from the connection with the body, taking the awareness of feelings even farther away.

Awareness of our own emotions prevents the dissociative experiences typical of alexithymics because it keeps our feet on the ground and anchors us to the body. Since ever, the best way to gain insight to our emotions – and not just that – is meditation; where the flow of information is only witnessed, made aware, and not acted upon. Fundamentally not clicked.