2015年11月28日土曜日

Q67. What is pity?

Pity is an attitude when one empathizes with another's sadness.

  Pity is also called compassion or sympathy.
  Pity is an emotion which branches out from sadness that is caused by sympathy.
  People feel pity when they hear another's unfortunate story. Pity is an emotion of sympathy for the other's misfortune.
  People try to help an unfortunate person when they feel pity. For example, people weep with the person in sympathy, gently put their arm around the person's shoulders, or silently stay with the person.
  Usually emotions directly spread to others. However, since sadness is unpleasant if it spreads as it is to another person, people would avoid the person who feels sadness. So pity occurs as an emotion exceeding the pleasure or displeasure.
  Pity enhances the cooperation in a group. Pity is an emotion that branches out from sadness, it can be called an emotion that connects love's behaviors with a sad situation.

Q66. What is hatred?

Hatred is an attitude of anger when a love is lost.

  Hatred is an emotion that branches out from sadness depending on the situation.
  In many cases of revenge in the Edo period a person felt hatred towards his or her parent's enemy. The person whose family was killed hates the culprit. Hatred has an extreme intensity that exceeds anger. Hatred makes people take revenge. Out of all the emotions hatred is the most dangerous.
  The difference between hatred and anger is that hatred involves love, and also anger is a threat whereas hatred an attack.
  Hatred is an emotion that one feels towards what causes one to lose an object of love. This is originally an emotion directed towards other humans, but can be directed towards other creatures or natural phenomenon if the object is personified. It is possible to hate earthquakes for example if one's child dies in an earthquake.
  There is an inclination for believers of different religions to hate each other. The gods of a religion is given love, which is altruistic behavior without compensation. Many religions deny other gods from other religions. Since denial is the same as an attack against and object of love, so people easily hate believers of other religions.
  Love has the power to maintain families or groups. Hatred developed as a punishment for acts which lead to a group's destruction. Hatred punishes the person who doesn't respect another's love.
  However, the actual carrying out of acts of hatred is replaced by laws, so acts of hatred are a breach of the law]. In modern society the law has the same effect as hatred for everyone, so we must stop acts of hatred.
  Hatred may be peculiar to humans. A female gorilla will sometimes mate with the male who killed her infant. War and the killing of infants among chimpanzees has been recorded but there are no cases of revenge. Based on this gorillas and chimpanzees may not feel hatred.

2015年11月23日月曜日

Q65. What is jealousy?

Jealousy is an attitude in which we are on alert to prevent the loss of an object of love.

  Jealousy is an emotion derived from expecting to feel sadness.
  An older brother may pick on his new baby brother if he appears to be stealing away the mother's love. Or you may feel jealousy if you see your lover getting along well with another member of your gender. Jealousy occurs by expecting to lose an object of love.
  Therefore, if you love your job you may feel jealous of a capable person who could potentially take your job from you.
  When we feel jealousy we act to test that relationship in order to strengthen it. For example, a wife pinches her husband when he looks at an attractive women flirtatiously/longingly. It is a weak attack against the object of love. Jealousy is an emotion designed to maintain and affirm love. Jealousy can be called the defensive behavior of love.
  Jealousy is an emotion derived from sadness. Jealousy is an emotion which combines the actions of anger with the danger of losing the object of love. So there is an inclination for those who easily become angry to easily become jealous.
  Something similar to jealousy can be seen in chimpanzees. A chimpanzee male sometimes takes a female away from the group to mate, and if the female resists, the male repeatedly attacks and soothes. This is thought to be a prototype of jealousy and hate.

Q64. What is loneliness?

Loneliness is a feeling when an object of one's love is absent.

  Loneliness is the emotion branching out from sadness's appraisal.
  Loneliness is felt when we are alone or we don't have the object of love with us. We feel loneliness when we realize that the object of our altruistic behavior is not here. Loneliness can be called the opposite of happiness.
  Crying, the stagnation of various activities, or enhanced empathy for example are displays of loneliness, which is the same as sadness.
  The facial expression and behavior of loneliness has the purpose of requesting relief from others. This promotes obtaining a new object of love. Loneliness makes people change their behavior pattern by reappraising and reflecting on their lifestyle, and avoid loneliness which is unpleasant. This is the same as sadness.
  Pets can drive away loneliness because pets become the object of love. That some women have an unnaturally large number of potted plants for example is sometimes due to loneliness.

Q63. What is sadness?

Sadness is an urge when an object of love is lost.

  Sadness is also called sorrow, woe, or grief.
  Sadness is an emotion which branches out from love's disappearance.
  We feel sad when we lose a family member, or are apart and unable meet anymore. Sadness is the loss of the object of love. We feel sad when we lose the object of altruistic behavior.
  Sadness has a special facial expression. The inside ends of the eyebrows are raised, the eyes are narrowed aslant, and both ends of the mouth are lowered. Also the person typically cries. Tears are the main expression of sadness. Strong sadness makes them crouch down on the spot. Their physical movements slow down, which accompanies the stagnation of various activities.
  The act of crying is a signal that calls for others to come when something they cannot deal with alone occurs, so it occurs not only in sadness. Crying when sad is a message telling everyone that they lost their object of love and that they need a new object of love.
  The stagnation of various activities carries out the function of making the person reappraise and reflect on their lifestyle and change their behavior patterns. This is because something bad happened, so this is done to avoid it happening in the future.
  Sadness is unpleasant, so we make efforts to avoid sadness. The cause of sadness is the loss of the object of love, so we make efforts not to lose the object of our love.
  Also the person that is currently sad empathizes with other's emotions well. This is in order to find a new object of love.
  Therefore, it is an instinctively correct decision to court and win the heart of someone who is crying because they are sad at being dumped by the object of their love. From instinct's point of view, this is the purpose of sadness. However, since this is a genetic pattern and not that person's will, the possibility of being disliked is high.
  If a person doesn't feel sadness then he or she won't cry, and cannot get assistance from others which is an effect of crying. That person is strong, but gives the impression of being unapproachable. On the contrary, those who easily feel sad and cry are thought to be undependable and gloomy people.
  Sadness developed in humans because we can get the aid of our fellow humans by displaying sadness. We can assume that animals which form groups and live together can feel sadness. However, we can assume that birds, reptiles, and fish don't feel sadness. They can be seen doing strange things when they lose their partner, but this seems to be just confusion, not sadness.

Q62. What is honor?

Honor is a feeling in which the actions of love are appraised by the person.

  Honor is an emotion branching from love's appraisal. Honor is different from pride, which was previously mentioned. Pride is an emotion derived from shame, in other words, derived from anger.
  Honor is felt when a person's success at work is recognized by society or that his or her work should be recognized, when a persons's work is praised by others, or when a person realizes that he or she was helpful to others. In other words, honor is to feel that one's actions bring love to an unspecified large number of people.
  Honor urges people to take stable actions, to be decisive, to behave confidently, to make their actions more proactive than considerate.
  Honor is an emotion of appraisal for actions of love. Happiness is an appraisal of love's current situation, while honor is an appraisal of the actions of love. Also, happiness is mainly appraised at the family level. On the other hand, honor is mainly appraised at the bigger group level.
  A pro-democracy activist was captured and sentenced to death in a dictatorship. At that time people said it was an honorable death when he was executed without letting his beliefs be altered or fearing death. This is because they believed that this behavior was an act of love which gave courage to the people in that country.

Q61. What is happiness?

Happiness is a feeling in which love is satisfied.

  A sense of well-being is also a kind of happiness.
  Happiness is the emotion branching out from love's appraisal. Happiness is an emotion in which the current status of love is appraised.
  It is assumed that a newly married couple is happy during their wedding ceremony. The object of love is present, and the love is reciprocated. This is mutual love. Happiness is thought to be the degree of feeling satisfied with love's behavior. Of course there is no need to limit this to the relationships between men and women. Since love is an altruistic behavior without compensation, happiness will occur when altruistic behavior without compensation is mutual.
  In happiness people let go of their wariness, and rest both physically and mentally. It also causes their life style and pattern of thinking to stabilize. Happiness maintains success by not changing, which is to say a person becomes conservative.

2015年11月8日日曜日

Q60. What is love?

Love is an attitude in the form of the exchanges between a mother and child.

  The sixth basic emotion is love.
  Love is maternal instinct added to interest, in other words it is interest modified by the principle of blood selection, and also extends to others of the same species. Love is an emotion which branches out from interest depending on the situation.
  Love is not only that found between lovers, but also includes family love, parental love, fraternal love, love for humanity, and friendship. In addition, respect and worship are also variations of love.
  Actions of love in humans is to do something for another person, or accepting and staying with someone. Love is an unconscious sense of duty to do something for another.
  In the mother and child relationship, a mother gives love and her child receives this love. When these two sides are felt at the same time, it is love. Since human beings have a tendency to be neotenous, which means they retain child-like elements even after they become adults, so a child-like sensibility will remain in adults. For example, the desire to be spoiled or taken care of, a sensibility by which children depend on their mother, is not lost and coexists with love given to others as an adult. In love between adults both parties behave as both mother and child, mutually giving and taking.
  Parental love is indispensable to babies, and friendship among adults is also advantageous to survival. Love is connected to maintaining a group. Actions of love exist in most animals which look after their offspring. We can assume that they have love, but the love's size and complexity is different.
Love is helpful in maintaining a group.
  Love is maternal instinct, so it's primarily for females. Therefore, on average it is seen more strongly in females. The relationship of a parent and a child is eternal, so love can also be eternal.
  In the history of evolution, there is the condition that love spreads to others not only to children. Love develops in animals whose sustenance depends on its fortune/luck regardless of the individual's ability. These kinds of animals profit largely from helping others.
  For instance, researchers have confirmed that vampire bats may share blood they drank with each other. At that time the vampire bat first gives blood to another bat which gave it blood before regardless of their genetic relation. This can be said to be an act of love.
  Attachment behaviors can be seen in apes. Grooming and mouth-to-mouth feeding in apes corresponds to caresses and kisses in humans. Hugs and such actions are completely the same in both apes and humans.
  The triggers that cause love to occur are the object of love being cute like a baby, or sharing everyday life and an interest, for example, those going through life together, lovers, a husband and wife, or a parent and child. It is easy for love to appear between those who work together. In the case of the same sex, they usually become friends and it is called friendship.
  We easily feel love when the other person's interests, character, values, mannerism, or appearance is similar to our own. It is because the person who is similar to you is your child. We feel we want to do something for the person who is similar to us. So a husband and a wife, a parent and a child, and siblings cannot have love unless they share an interest or their lives.
  Love has a process.
  In the first step interest ,which can also be called fondness, makes us search for someone compatible. In this period, we endeavour to learn about the other person and try to like the same things for example.
  In the second step we act to test a relationship. We deliberately act in a way that the person may dislike to confirm how much we are accepted. For example, we tease each other when we become close to a person.
  Love between lovers includes attachment behaviors. Lovers cuddle each other like a child. The behavior is like that between a mother and child, in which the couple alternate between the roles of mother and child.
  A typical example of this is one of the lovers telling the other to open his or her mouth and feeding him or her. Researchers think that a kiss is a transformation of the primitive age behaviour of a mother giving a baby food after chewing it and making it soft. Skin contact such as caresses is originally designed to set a baby at ease. Holding hands is a behavior between a mother and a child. A lover is exactly like "my baby". Through these behaviors we unconsciously recall memories of our mother's love during our childhood. As a result an emotional memory of love is formed when this recalled emotion is directed towards our lover who is currently with us.
  An adopted child may behave like an infant to its new parents. They cry, throw a tantrum, want to use a diaper even though they are already potty trained, or want to breastfeed or use a bottle which they no longer need.
  Those who don't have a blood relation and don't experience mother-child behavior naturally need to trace a mother and child's relations to attain a deep relation like between parents and children. In this way we make emotional memories of love.

Q59. What is courage?

Courage is a synthetic emotion that is a combination of fear, and love or hope.

  The opposite emotion of fear is courage.
  Courage is to overcome fear by suppressing it and taking action. There is no courage without fear. To feel absolutely no fear is not courage. Courage is being aware of fear but not taking action based on fear.
  The reason we need courage is because as human culture developed situations in which fear is not an adaptive response increased. It is more dangerous if a person who encounters a bear just cowers in fear, even though the person has a hunting riffle.
  There are two kinds of courage, courage with hope (self-confidence) and courage with love. Courage is not a specially fixed emotion, but is fear plus hope or fear plus love.
  Acrobats do not fear heights when they walk a tightrope, this is because they have confidence to succeed, courage from hope.
  For example a parent jumping into a river to rescue their child is courage from love.
  We call it courage when a situation is scary and love or hope overcomes the fear. So without love or hope there is no courage. The strength of courage is in proportion to the strength of love or hope.
  In an old book from China, the Analects of Confucius, it says, "a benevolent person is brave, but a brave person is not necessarily benevolent." This means that all people who are truly compassionate towards others can act with courage, but a courageous person is not necessarily compassionate.

Q58. What is awe?

Awe is a response of inaction against fear.

  Awe is an emotion which branches out from fear depending on the situation. It is fear but there is no flight or resistance. It means that you save strength by not trying to pointlessly escape or resist for those times which judging something to be a threat is a mistake.
  Awe occurs when you meet an overwhelming strong force and feel that your destiny is decided regardless of your own decisions. A special feature of awe is that even though the object of awe is mightier than the object of fear there is little unpleasantness. An object of awe is also an object of respect, so awe sometimes occurs with love.

Q57. What is anxiety?

Anxiety is a feeling we get when we expect to feel fear.

  Anxiety is also called worry, uneasiness or apprehension.
  Anxiety is an emotion derived from expecting to feel fear. We feel it before an exam, in the dark, and in solitude. We also feel anxiety when entering an unknown world such as a first trip overseas. It is thought that anticipating fear makes people feel anxiety.
  Anxiety makes people act more carefully, and increases their wariness. For example people thoroughly carry out safety checks when anxious. Also people become tense to be able to respond at any time.
  Unlike depression, anxiety makes people unable to calm down and continue searching for a way to solve the problem.
  Anxiety is an emotion in which fear is sustained/prolonged by intellect. The feeling of tension as adapted for fear also occurs in anxiety. Cautiousness when it is dark or when one is alone is natural, but it is not needed as much in today's safe society, so the tension and excitement of anxiety is excessive.
  Anxiety is the fear of something which is not here. Anxiety cannot be formed without memory. It is thought that anxiety occurs because human beings have acquired good memories and imaginations, and have a notion of time.

Q56. What is relief?

Relief is a response when fear has disappeared.

  The derivative emotions of fear are relief, uneasiness, and awe.
  Relief occurs when fear or uneasiness, which is an expectation of fear, disappears. Relief is an emotion which branches out from fear's disappearance. For example, an airplane which we are riding shakes violently and after the shaking subsides we feel relieved. Relief occurs when one is released from danger or anxiety.
  When people feel relief they heave a sigh of relief and smile. After this they let go of their wariness and physically rest. The tension in the body has disappeared and the body is going to physically recuperate.

Q50. What is dissatisfaction?

Dissatisfaction is a feeling experienced when we expect anger.

  Dissatisfaction is an emotion derived from expecting to feel anger.
  Dissatisfaction is also called discontent.
  Dissatisfaction is an emotion in which a person's intellect predicts something that causes anger.
  Dissatisfaction occurs in situations in which we cannot avoid suppressing our anger. As a result, a dissatisfied person gives off a nervous energy which causes those around the person to start avoiding that person. The person's actions are strained, and they are tense both mentally and physically because dissatisfaction is not pleasant.
  This type of body that is tensed for fight or flight has no value because there is no object of anger. The mental excitement is also useless because it is used to make a quick decision. Dissatisfaction has little value in evolution. The only positive effect of dissatisfaction is that it encourages preparation to avoid it because it is unpleasant. We can also say dissatisfaction is a side effect of intellect.

Q55. What is fear?

Fear is a response to defend against dangers.

  The fifth basic emotion is fear.
  Fear is an emotion which branches out from interest depending on the situation. All fearful things are interesting. For example, herbivorous animals keep a reasonable distance from lions and cheetahs. Also chimpanzees or baboons sometimes surround a big python when they find it.
  Humans may feel fear when standing somewhere heigh or unstable, crossing a rope bridge, they are in front of a violent animal or a truck being driven recklessly, or seeing a snake like wiggling thing.
   It is thought that we feel fear when we can imagine the current situation causing pain. Therefore, horror stories are told like the object of horror is present at the time. Fear occurs when we must react immediately to the current situation.
  Fearful things don't have features in common with each other, therefore they evolved individually through natural selection. That is to say that there is not only one gene for fear.
  Children who are raised in a high-rise apartment building are sometimes not afraid of heights. This is because fear needs to be learned. Like with other emotions, only the foundation is hereditary.
  Fear has a special facial expression. For example, The eyebrows are raised, wrinkles are formed in the center of forehead, eyes are opened very wide, eyelids are pulled up, the white of the eye is increased, mouth is opened little and pulled backward. This expression has been confirmed to weaken an attack when the object of fear is a human.
  Actions of fear include crying or running away depending on the situation. If it's possible we will run away, if it's not possible we will cry and scream, and crouch down. We flee, call for help, defend ourselves, and panic when we feel fear.
  Thanks to these actions of fear, we can avoid danger and survive.