Observations placeholder
Damasio, Professor Antonio - Emotion
Identifier
006057
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Professor Antonio Damasio – The Feeling of What Happens
We ……….. cannot control emotions wilfully. ……………Once a particular sensory representation is formed, …………., whether or not it is actually part of our conscious thought flow, we do not have much to say on the mechanism of inducing an emotion.
If the psychological and physiological context is right, an emotion will ensue. The non-conscious triggering of emotions also explains why they are not easy to mimic voluntarily…… a spontaneous smile that comes from genuine delight or the spontaneous sobbing that is caused by grief …. Causal voluntary mimicking of expressions of emotion is easily detected as fake – something always fails, whether in the configuration of the facial muscles or in the tone of voice.
The result of this state of affairs is that in most of us who are not actors, emotions are a fairly good index of how conducive the environment is to our well-being, or at least, how conducive it is to our minds.