Psychology
The article "Why Humans bother with Emotions" by Meredith F. Small is quite edifying since it draws one to an issue that has often been ignored, yet quite important in people's daily life. This indifferent may be natural at the beginning but in the end, the emotions affect people in a profound way, and that is why care should be taken to examine them.
Some people told me that openly displaying my emotions is a sign of weakness. The author has answered my unspoken question adequately. She does this by use of rhetorical questions: "Why do we have emotions?" Wouldn't it be better to have a heart and soul of a lizard and feel nothing at all?" First the lizard symbol she uses is strong. She suggests that people who do not have emotions are just as good as the lizard. From this indirect castigation on the part of the author is a clear way to the author saying that as human beings who want to live meaningful lives people who are quite heartless and such people have no place calling themselves human. I feel that the author has explained the point of humanity clearly by use of the particular image.
On the other hand, there is the monster of "bad" emotions. It is true that one may ask why evolution allowed for such feelings. These emotions include fear, anxiety, anger and even hate, among others. This helps us to know that one cannot expect to be having good emotions always and that negative emotions have their place in life too. The author has succeeded in stating that every positive emotion has its corresponding counterpart. To even make her arguments more convincing, the author has used an authority Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary psychiatrist from the University of Michigan. According to the psychiatrist, emotions are there to help us cope with certain situations we face in life. Nesse likens the emotions to a kind of software. He says that when we are confronted with say a sad moment, the mind activates the "sadness program" to help us cope. This explanation is most interesting to me. I particularly find the analogy quite successful in driving the point home (Small, 1).
Nesse’s inclusion in the rendition is quite edifying to the reader. Meredith would not have succeeded in convincing me had she not included that interesting input from Nesse. All in all, the article has made me know the importance of emotions in my life. It has made me know that the absence of these emotions would mean that I am just like any other animal in the jungle!
Works Cited
Meredith, Small. Why Humans Bother with Emotions. www.livescience.com, 2003. Web. 3
