Fear or Attraction? Happiness or Illusion? Anger or Calm? Cognitive scientist, author of The Theory of Attraction, Jim Davis briefly explains how invisible forces affect our unconscious, the unconscious affects our mood, and why emotions arise that we are not aware of.
What does it mean to have emotions? It seems obvious that to have emotions is to experience them. If you are happy, but you do not know it, in what sense can you really be happy?
Similar thoughts were heard by William James ⓘ
American psychologist, creator of one of the first theories in which subjective emotional experience is correlated with physiological functions.
… Conscious feeling, he believed, is what distinguishes emotions from other mental states, such as desires. He wrote that without a conscious feeling, "we believe that we have nothing left behind, there is no" mental substance "from which emotion can be formed." Sigmund Freud agreed:
But emotions are complicated things. Even if we do experience emotions, there are details associated with them that we usually know nothing about. Clinical psychologists, for example, recommend that patients with uncontrollable anger problems look for warning signs - such as sweating in the palms or a spasm of the jaw - so that they are prepared for an upcoming fit of anger and can soften it. And when we're scared or sexually aroused, our heart rate and breathing rate increase without our knowledge (although we can recognize this change if we focus on it). Moreover, fear seems to be able to covertly intensify sexual arousal - or be mistaken for it.
Consider one study from 1974 (2). The researchers used attractive female interviewers to interview a group of men, one interviewing men crossing a dangerous suspension bridge, and another interviewing a group crossing a bridge that was not scary or dangerous. The women asked the men to fill out a questionnaire. People on the “dangerous” bridge responded to questions with more sexual connotations and were more inclined to contact the female interviewer after the survey. This suggests that people on the "terrible" bridge (unconsciously) interpreted the reaction of their bodies to danger as an emerging attraction to a woman.
But how can unconscious emotions be demonstrated in action? We know that emotions affect us. When we're in a good mood, for example, we like everything more. If we find a situation in which an emotion has a predicted effect, but the people we are watching are not aware of the predicted emotion's appearance, then we might go for something.
Promotional video:
This is what the psychologists Peter Winckelmann and Kent Berridge tried to do. In their 2004 experiments, they showed the participants images of happy and upset faces, but tried to influence the subconscious - they showed the pictures so quickly that the respondents could not consciously understand what they were showing them at all. They were then tasked with drinking a new lime-lemon drink and evaluating it. When asked how they were feeling, it was clear that they did not have a conscious awareness of any mood changes. But people who were shown happy faces not only rated the drink better than other subjects, they drank more of it!
Why do some unconscious forms of happiness affect us? As Winckelmann and Berridge note, "From an evolutionary and neuroscientific perspective, there is good reason to believe that at least some forms of emotional response can exist independently" of our consciousness.
Perhaps emotions only exist because they work without conscious processing. Scientists note:
Indeed, a 2005 study (3) showed a difference in unconscious and conscious fear patterns in the brain. The researchers believe that this will help us understand the mechanisms underlying post-trauma fear, which they say is "automatic and not directly consciously controlled."
When we begin to think about it, it no longer seems strange that unconscious emotions are expressed improbably. After all, who among us has not heard someone screaming gloomily: "I'm not angry!"