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Should you listen to your emotions?

The brain of humans is not the result of improvement towards the rationality of a single brain function, but rather the addition of new functions next to the existing functions.

Our genetic heritage: the cognitivo-affective system

This heritage is shared with large primates, probably all mammals and many other species.

This Cognitivo-affective system ₍₁₎ is governed by dichotomy seeking pleasure (or reward) - avoidance of suffering (or punishment).

It consists of four elements:

When childhood is going well, that parents can understand and provide satisfactory answers to the problems of their child, it associates positive emotions with a whole series of circumstances, especially those where it needs external help. This results in attachment, and altruism, because when he meets other people in difficulty, these positive emotions go up and allow him to find pleasure in action.

On the other hand, children who have experienced assaults tend to reproduce them, but this time playing the role of the attacker. They gradually transform the content of their associated memory.

Finally, note that major traumatic events can be obscured by memory, so that the victim is not aware of their presence.

Our cultural heritage: problem solving

Unlike the Cognitivo-Affective System which is shared with many animal species, only humans are able to practice 'Problem solving'which requires complex language. It is an eminently cultural function which requires years of learning in favorable conditions. Also, the majority of current adult humans have more or less serious deficiencies in terms of their ability to practice problem solving, and still work mainly on the basis of their cognitivo-affective system. In particular, rhetoric is a verbal confrontation based on the cognitivo-affective system.

Let us simply recall here that problem solving is what we consider as optimum cognitive functioning accessible to humans, as well as the solution to contain La social violence resulting from social ambition. Conversely, as long as humans work mainly on the basis of the cognitive-affective system, they live in social violence produced by social ambition. See the paragraph 'Alliance strategies' to the question'What are the consequences of social ambition? The notion of generalized nepotism.', to understand that violence in a group does not result from the fact that the chief reigns by terror and not by benevolence, but results from the fact that he does not practice problem solving and thus leaves the field free to the game of alliances.

The overall cognitive functioning of humans

The effective cognitive functioning of humans is the superpositions of the cognitive-affective system and the reason that supervises it ... possibly.

In particular, even when a human tries to practice problem solving, his emotions related to memory can, on the one hand, harm his motivation, and on the other hand disturbing his rationality, in the same way as his beliefs.
In the extreme case, but however frequent, the person gives pre -eminence to emotion, draws a conclusion which explains in his eyes his emotion, then possibly constructed biased reasoning to justify the others his conclusion. By giving pre -eminence to emotion on the facts, the person acts in a manner which is generally contrary to the general interest ; Supervisation did not take place.

THE psychotherapy largely aim to alleviate the imperative negative emotions associated with certain situations. This can be done in two ways:
By becoming aware of our tendency to generalize. For example, a certain number of failures can lead to a generalization in the form of an absolute of the type 'I will never succeed' or even 'I am zero', that is to say a forgetting to take into account the particularities of the circumstances in which these failures occurred.
By managing the flow of our emotions instead of simply undergoing it or trying to stop it, and especially by becoming aware of the nature of the emotions (notion of ACT defusion).
Finally, obtaining different results in neighboring circumstances, we can gradually modify the emotion linked to these situations.

Somatization

The somatization corresponds to the attempt to reason not to take into account the negative emotions linked to the memory which arise and come to contradict the line of conduct that we chose following a rational reasoning.
Consequently, these emotions will tend to express themselves at the body level.

Driving

We all have to lead to substantive work to identify the situations that generate negative emotions produced by memory in us, for on the one hand, to avoid generalization which can lead us to lose confidence in us, and on the other hand prevent these emotions from taking over the objective reasoning in terms of interactions with others and of the decisions that we make.

This work can be seen as a significant part of the second recommendation mentioned in the question 'How to succeed in life?': The reason - Krishnamurti - live in reality.
This can be done by personal work, or with the help of a therapist.
It is also the basis of a Buddhist spiritual approach, of which mediation is a key element.

Populism or the exploitation of collective emotions

Populism is the technique of conquering power based on the exploitation of emotions linked to collective beliefs or difficulties encountered by large strata of the population, such as for example the fear of social downgrading.
Technically, we serve a discourse that easily carries the support of reason, via deceptive evidence, often simplistic, while actually targeting emotions. As a result, populism generates adhesion, fervor, impulse, a capacity for action, much greater than that produced by a coherent rational discourse.

Deepen

See question 'Following the abusive use of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapies'Who explains the dangerous current trend to substitute psychotherapy for the fight against injustice, and presents two serious therapeutic methods. In particular, ACT psychotherapy specifies how to listen to your emotions.

Au niveau de la validation scientifique maintenant, différentes variantes de modèles duaux de la cognition ont été proposés et testés. Dans celui proposé par Keith E. Stanovich, type 1 correspond à ce que nous dénommons ici le système cognitivo-affectif, et type 2 correspond à ce que nous dénommons ici raison.
The following article makes a point on attempts to validate these models:

↣ Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition: Advancing the Debate

(1) We use the same terminology 'Cognitivo-affective system' as the CAPS system described in the article 'A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Conceptualizing Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure' of Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda (1995), but do not attribute the same content.
We have reused this term to clearly emphasize that the innate cognitive system of humans is governed by emotions.