What exactly are emotions?

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Although we all talk about 'emotions', it occurred to me that the deeper I think about them, the less I am sure that I know what they really are!

This may sound surprising, as I think we all assume we know what emotions are. If 'emotions' are separate to 'thoughts' then it is very odd that I am not aware of 2 chains of mentation - emotional and thought. I am only aware of 1 - and that is a more or less constant stream of thoughts.

I can guess that emotions are a kind of 'carrier wave' that carry the thoughts. Or that the emotions are the background canvas that the thoughts are painted onto. For example, if I'm 'Happy' and think about work, my thoughts wander and flitter around the interesting challenges I solved, the bonus I was awarded, the generally good atmosphere in the office etc etc. If I'm 'Unhappy' and think about work, then my thoughts wander and flitter around the boring, pointless meetings I have to attend, the lifelessness of being stuck in a drab office in front of a computer for the best 40 hours of my week,etc etc.

Or is it the other way around: that negative thoughts lead to an unhappy emotion?

Another analogy: sometimes it feels like my mind is a huge, complex city that has grown over centuries in a totally ad hoc way. My *attention* is like a person wandering around this city and it often finds itself trapped in a maze of back streets somewhere, going round and round the same streets, knowing that there are other districts, but unable to find the way to them. Knowing there is a park where cool water flows, birds sing and the sun shines, yet I am somehow trapped in this run down, gloomy neighbourhood, in continuous drizzle, going round and round the same menacing tenements (or bland suburbs...) unable to find the road, street or alley that leads to another district. Later, I may find my thoughts wandering around another district, unable to remember exactly how I got out of that unpleasant place and hoping I never get stuck there again. The point being that the 'districts' of my mind city also seem to equate with 'emotions'. There are angry and calm districts, happy and sad etc

The emotions do not seem to exist in any way 'separate' to the thoughts. There is only thought, albeit with different shades of colour. Are these 'shades' what we mean by emotions? Are emotions a slower moving wave underneath the high frequency jumble that is 'normal' thinking?

And what about 'feelings'? Are they something totally different to 'emotions'?

Any help, ideas and further clues appreciated!

Emotions and feelings are neurons and glands busy at their work.

ruveyn

To expand on what rueven said, emotions have more of a chemical component than thoughts. You feel them because they are conveyed by actual chemicals running through your bloodstream and between your neurons. Adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, serotonin, testosterone,oxytocin and so on. These are chemicals that cause you to feel in a certain way. The meaning that you attach to the physical feelings caused by those chemicals is called "emotion". Thoughts can cause emotions because thoughts can trigger the release of one or more of those chemicals.

Last edited by Janissy on 09 Jul 2009, 6:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

All I know is I don't feel much emotion until I menstruate then the hormones kick in, and cause me to get upset about things, get angry about things, and cry about things. I would not do this any other time. I have this feeling in my in my stomach that I cannot control. It is most definitely be caused by whatever hormones I have. Also when I have been in love I had a feeling in my stomach - this time a very very happy feeling. The emotion that I felt could not be coerced or controlled it just happened. I do believe some drugs can give you this feeling, and I think it maybe caused by serotonin.

Yes, so what's the difference between emotions and thoughts? Is is meaningful to separate them when I only directly experience thoughts - even though, as you say, underlying those is a vast chemical factory.

Emotions have a chemical underlay. Thoughts are different because they don't have that chemical underlay. But many thoughts can trigger the release of a chemical so a thought and the emotion caused by the thought can feel simultaneous. The thought "that guy has a gun and it's pointed at me" will trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol and you will attach the word "fear" to the resulting emotion. But lots of thoughts are neutral and won't trigger the release of chemicals- or at least not enough for you to be able to physically feel the chemical and call that feeling an emotion.

I assumed thoughts had a biochemical component too - are they purely electrical or something?

I'm fairly certain that thoughts have at least some chemical factor as well. I think for most people thoughts and emotions are more directly connected than they are in autistics. That's why therapy can sometimes work for "normal" people... by gaining information about themselves and how they think, they can change their feelings/feel better. This is why I spent years being told that if therapy wasn't helping me, it was because I wasn't trying hard enough.. because in someone without an autistic disorder, gaining insight will actually have some effect.

As far as I know, thoughts are neuronal activity, which is I suppose essentially electrical, but all electrical activity in the human body is underpinned by biochemical reactions, so I guess the best description would be that thoughts are electro-biochemical.

I reckon thoughts happen exclusively in the brain, whereas quite a lot of the body is involved in the production of feelings and emotions. But I remember some spooky experimental surgery they did on a woman who kept having dangerously violent episodes....it was getting so bad that she was willing to undergo an experimental operation - they put some electrodes into her brain and stimulated various regions until they found one that caused her to feel very scared. Then they blasted that area with a high current in an attempt to (very selectively) destroy that part of her brain. The idea was that violence is caused initially by fear, so that by reducing her fear response, they were hoping her violent episodes would stop. The experiment seemed to have just that effect for a while, though her friends reckoned she seemed to have become kind of cabbage-like in a subtle kind of way, anyway eventually she started getting the violent episodes again, so I guess her brain must have compensated for the damage. I suppose it shows that fear and anger are initiated in the brain, though obviously the rest of the body is soon affected too.

Emotions are difficult things even for neurotypicals to see clearly.

My own feelings are never quite what I expect - when I was told that my father had died, I initially felt annoyed that I'd been told when I had other things on my mind, then after a while everything seemed very hopeless, and the whole world went kind of bleak. If I'm expecting to feel sad then I don't feel sad. I don't know what happens - maybe I anticipate painful feelings and repress them, or maybe it's just the Aspie brain that has trouble knowing what the hell it does feel.

I'm usually not bad at recognising stress, anger, and elation, but they're pretty much the only feelings that I can see anything like clearly. I first noticed stress clearly when I was trying to do something complicated and it just wasn't working. I felt my whole body getting hotter and I suddenly thought "this must be stress." So I stopped and took a rest, and felt a lot better when I went back to the task. Often I'm better at recognising emotions some time after the event. If I'm tired and feeling negative, I might realise that a few days later, but at the time it often feels like my negative thoughts and talking is just the way things are and that it's the world that's turned nasty, when really it's me that's just got the blues.

When I was a child, I remember bursting into tears, but while being comforted, although I was still crying, I realised that I didn't feel sad any more, and was actually humming a happy little tune in my head. I was quite ready to move on except that the physical crying reflex had to be given time to subside.

I suppose we just have to get used to the idea that emotions are not very objective things that can be easily defined, isolated and recognised. It's very annoying to have to work with such a high level of uncertainty.

I would say emotions are a neurological process that happens on a largely autonomous and subconscious level which generate physiological sensations that an individual associates with particular states of mind.

I suspect your therapist(s) was/were not very skilled, and that was their excuse to blame you when their methods weren't working. Freud himself appears to have done this, e.g. in his dream "Irma's injection" he tells Irma: "if you still get pain, it's your own fault." There are a lot of inadequate therapists around.

I think Apies can respond to therapy if it's properly tailored to the Aspie mindset. Sometimes I think that neurotypicals just can't grasp what it's like to have AS, in the same way as a white person can study black history and black politics, but because they're white, they'll never really know how it feels to be on the inside. So they can have valuable insights, perhaps they can even show things that we ourselves wouldn't see without their help, but they shouldn't be trusted as a complete authority on the matter.

Thought is electrochemical in nature. It is neurons popping.

Everything about us is electrochemical. We are big bags of mostly water.

ruveyn

While that's true, I'm not sure that's the case for me. I'm still not diagnosed, and don't know if I ever will be, because I don't know if there's anyone who actually can make an AS diagnosis in an adult female. I've gotten lots and lots of BS diagnoses, but it should be fairly obvious to anyone that if you diagnose someone with more than, say, 6 or so "mental disorders," there's something behind all that that's being missed. Even before I started extensively researching autistic disorders, I'd started saying that my main, underlying problem was social. Diagnosing me with depression, anxiety, social phobia, agoraphobia, etc.. should make it obvious that there's something CAUSING all of those. But I studied psychology for a lot time, and I didn't really know anything about AS... unless someone is an autism specialist, they don't. Which is why I've now decided that I'm NOT asking my mom to pay $120 for me to drive an hour in each direction to see a therapist who doesn't know anything about what's actually wrong with me. .. and for some reason I feel guilty about this. But spending all that money and time driving and getting all stressed out by therapy that upsets me isn't going to change that anyways. Would just have the therapist dismiss things that actually bother me, insist that things that don't bother me do, and say I should come in more often.
(of course, at this point, I do have some trauma issues... but those center on problems in therapy, which no therapist is going to be comfortable dealing with.. unless perhaps I CAN find someone who specializes in AS and knows how to deal with someone who is traumatized by years of treatment for the wrong conditions...)

Emotions are all those chemical factors, that distort your usually logical thoughts.

Interesting insight. You may be onto something there. May explain why my therapist listens politely, but rarely offers much in the way of advice or counsel (except for the occasional pitch for meds, which I consistently ignore). Just as well, the one bit of advice I took led to disaster...



Keep looking - I have an adult fem relative who has been DX'd.

Emotion is the classification of mode, thought is the process by which the mode is carried out. They are both entirely biochemical. In the superficial sense of I think therefore I am, that part of you making the declarative statement and taking ownership of the biological system,that thought goes on in the head. In the deeper sense of the routing of biochemical messaging to coordinate the operation of specialized cells that is conducted through the central nervous system, thought emphatically does not occur only in the head.

Maggie, doll, forgive the bluntness but you have an incompetent therapist according to what you are describing. If what you want to talk about is that you think there is something larger behind this, they are being handed dollar dollar bills to sit there and listen to you talk about what YOU want to talk about, and then use their expertise to offer advice that YOU choose to accept or dismiss. A dismissive medical professional is no professional. It is your dime. It is your life. It is your issues to resolve and they are YOUR facilitator. This is YOUR process, they follow your lead or inform you that they no longer feel comfortable acting as your therapist.

It does not matter if they think it is a wild goose chase, they must make a sincere effort to do what is in their power to do to help you walk the path you want to walk, or inform you the relationship has come to an end and offer to refer you to other therapists they think might be better suited to the help you are asking for. Not, repeat NOT the help they think you need, but the help you are asking for.

If a therapist tells you you aren't trying hard enough, they are a poor therapist. Full stop.
They can actually think you are not trying hard enough, but you never ever ever ever ever say to the patient "Just try harder." in any way shape or form. Full stop.
If they think you are not trying hard enough, they are wrong, and I mean the indefinite you and the indefinite they, anybody who says to anybody "you just need to try harder" is wrong and will always be wrong. It is a cop out, oh they are not trying hard enough? Well, gee, why? Why don't they just try harder? Surely badgering them(which is abuse), especially when the badgering is coming from a therapist(whom is an authority), for long enough (which will result in psychological trauma, generating new mental distresses compounding the existing disorder) will lead them to see the light and make them try harder and be healed right? No. It never will. Full stop.

Assuming you recount an accurate portrayal of the relationship and interactions to something approaching accuracy, and I have no reason to assume you do not, you are describing a bully who is taking your mother's money so that they can torment you.

But that's just like, my opinion, man. Based on quite a bit of experience with these types of things both directly and indirectly, but I don't have any personal knowledge of your situation and am in no way licensed by any body for anything. Oh also, if you are practicing in the field of psychoanalysis in the year 2009 and you don't know what Autism is, you should be ashamed of your self for how poorly informed you are about your field and should not be allowed to continue practicing. If you don't know how to talk to somebody about autism and diagnose it you have no business claiming to be capable of performing psychoanalysis. I'm not even expecting them to be up on the cutting edge of understanding autism, but the guy who created the field managed to learn about autism from Kanner before he kicked even if he did blame it on refridgerator mothers, you damn well better know a little something about it yourself. There is no acceptable reason why somebody would not be familiar with autism at least to the extent of being able to diagnose it according to the DSM or IDC criteria.