What Are Emotions Anyways?

Emotions are defined as biologically-based patterns based on experience, education, culture, and they are essentially cognitive constructs that we create in our brains starting at about 18 months of age. We are not born with emotions. We have to create emotions, and that's part of the developmental process of growing up, and it starts at about the time we verbalize. We are born with affect, which are essentially the feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness that we experience. Emotions are the cognitive constructs that allow us to take affective experience and concretize it into something that we can do, we can work with. So for example, we can become— we can't be— we're not self-aware of affect, but we can become self-aware of emotions. Emotions allow us to look around and look at a cause and effect. Which has caused me to get so angry? If I didn't have an emotion, I wouldn't be able to determine what was making me angry. Emotions allow me to communicate to other people that I'm having an emotional experience, and that's very powerful. But if all I had was affect, then the only thing that can happen is I can— I just have to rely on program— automatic programming and I can't communicate anything about what I'm experiencing. And in fact, this is why people experience the idea, "I'm so mad I could put my fist through a wall," or "I'm so mad I could hit something," or "I'm so mad I wanna hit somebody." That is, that's really a lack of emotional self-awareness, and it's a reaction to a strong affective state where somebody's feeling an affect so strongly that they can't manage or understand or process all of the underlying emotions and the only way they can relieve themselves of the discomfort is by— is through a violent physical action, and that is the source of a lot of violence.