Question

What are the components (biological, cognitive, behavioral) of a specific emotion like love or fear?  Describe two emotions that could easily be confused by the person feeling them. Why are some emotions confused and not others?  What are the advantages of an emotion like love or fear? Cockroaches may lack emotions yet they manage to reproduce and escape threats pretty well.

Answer 1

Taking the example of love in this case, the biological component of love is believed to emerge from the universality of the emotion. Love is, hence, seen as an emotion central to human existence, and important to fulfilling one's needs for belongingness and connection with others. The cognitive component of love is related to thoughts. It involves how we think of the other person and the attraction, liking, and intense need to be with them that we experience. The behavioral component focuses on the actual acts, such as physical touch, buying them presents, listening to their concerns and looking out after them.

Two emotions that can be easily confused by people feeling them are envy and hate. Both involve negative emotion states; while envy is disliking based on someone else achieving what we desired or expected, hatred can be defined as an overall disliking of the other person- this could even be a person who is more disadvantaged than us. As such, the two emotions have a different root cause, however, are often confused. It is more common for envy to be misinterpreted as hatred rather than vice versa. This is because both the emotions have commonality of expression-the behavioral component and sometimes even the cognitive component of both can end up being the same. For instance, I would not be happy to hear of the success of the person I am envious of or whom I hate; similarly, I would probably not help out a person whom I am envious of or hate. As such, when the emotion is not correctly identified by introspecting upon it, it can lead to confusion.

Confusion in emotions is likely to result when the two emotions share cognitive/behavioral aspects. For example, love and admiration can be confused with each-other; but love and fear are unlikely to be, because their cognitive and behavioral components are widely different.

The advantage of both love and fear, from a primal, biological viewpoint is that it helps the human race survive (love leading to reproduction) and look out for anticipated or actual threats (in the case of fear). However, as stated in the question, this answer does not really explain why human would have emotions when cockroaches can do the same without the responsibility of having and managing emotions. Hence, one needs to delve deeper, and understand that emotions also provide aesthetic value to the nature of human beings- they allow humans to make their lives more pleasurable and more intellectually and behaviorally diverse. In this sense, emotions are good when they can be regulated by the person to whom they belong. However, in case the emotions take over, they can also wreck destruction. Emotions are, hence, a precious gift, and they need to be taken care of as such.