Quotes About Emotions

If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

He doesn't answer. The lady pretends not to be listening, but her motionlessness reveals that she is. We walk toward the motorcycle, and I try to think of something, but nothing comes. I see he's crying a little and now looks away to prevent me from seeing it.

Irrational optimism can be great; it's why only about 15 percent instead of 99 percent of humans get clinically depressed.

The childhood capacity for empathy progresses from feeling someone's pain because you are them, to feeling for the other person, to feeling as them.

Someone does something lousy and selfish to you in a game, and the extent of insular and amygdaloid activation predicts how much outrage you feel and how much revenge you take.

Thus there's dopaminergic activation during schadenfreude—gloating over an envied person's fall from grace.

the average level of happiness increases in old age; fewer negative emotions occur and, when they do, they don't persist as long. Connected to this, brain-imaging studies show that negative images have less of an impact, and positive images have more of an impact on brain metabolism in older people, as compared to young.

The contrast between rapid, automatic moral intuitionism and conscious, deliberative moral reasoning plays out in another crucial realm and is the subject of Greene's superb 2014 book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

Did destruction of the human amygdala lessen aggression? Pretty clearly so, when violence was a reflexive, inchoate outburst preceding a seizure.

It is the ambiguity of violence, that we can pull a trigger as an act of hideous aggression or of self-sacrificing love, that is so challenging.

As Beck and other cognitive therapists have emphasized, much of what constitutes a depression is centered around responding to one awful thing and overgeneralizing from it—cognitively distorting how the world works.

Feeling someone else's pain can be more effective for learning than just knowing that they're in pain. At its core the ACC is about self-interest, with caring about that other person in pain as an add-on.

The biologies of strong love and strong hate are similar in many ways, as we'll see.

The most convincing data concern rare humans with damage restricted to the amygdala, either due to a type of encephalitis or a congenital disorder called Urbach-Wiethe disease, or where the amygdala was surgically destroyed to control severe, drug-resistant seizures originating there.5 Such individuals are impaired in detecting angry facial expressions (while being fine at recognizing other emotional states—stay tuned).

If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.

We don't passively forget that something is scary. We actively learn that it isn't anymore.

Suppose a major traumatic stressor occurs, of a sufficient magnitude to disrupt hippocampal function while enhancing amygdaloid function. At some later point, in a similar setting, you have an anxious, autonomic state, agitated and fearful, and you haven't a clue why—this is because you never consolidated memories of the event via your hippocampus while your amygdala-mediated autonomic pathways sure as hell remember. This is a version of free-floating anxiety.

If their heart rate increases a lot (a peripheral indicator of anxious, amygdaloid arousal), they are unlikely to act prosocially in the situation. The prosocial ones are those whose heart rates decrease; they can hear the sound of someone else's need instead of the distressed pounding in their own chests.fn9,48

Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It's cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory cortex in the triangle player in the orchestra. But at the other end, it's disastrous that trauma enlarges the amygdala and atrophies the hippocampus, crippling those with PTSD. Similarly, expanding the amount of motor cortex devoted to finger dexterity is great in neurosurgeons but

The authors first replicated this effect, showing that watching a short film clip of something physically disgusting made subjects more morally judgmental—unless they had washed their hands after watching the film. Another study suggests that the washing decreases emotional arousal, as it decreased the diameter of subjects' pupils.

During sustained stress, the amygdala processes emotional sensory information more rapidly and less accurately, dominates hippocampal function, and disrupts frontocortical function; we're more fearful, our thinking is muddled, and we assess risks poorly and act impulsively out of habit, rather than incorporating new data.

Over the course of minutes to hours, hormonal effects are predominantly contingent and facilitative. Hormones don't determine, command, cause, or invent behaviors. Instead they make us more sensitive to the social triggers of emotionally laden behaviors and exaggerate our preexisting tendencies in those domains.

All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.

when women are ovulating, their fusiform face areas respond more to faces, with the ("emotional") vmPFCs responding more to men's faces in particular.