Question

Describe the funtions of emotion and how the inability to experience emotion impairs these funtions.

Answer 1

• Emotions provide us with information about the world, and we can use that information to function effectively in it.
• Many negative emotions and behavior evolved, because they generate an endless supply of dominant behavioral displays, which play a key role, in our selection of mates.
• Emotions are rapid information-processing systems that help us act with minimal thinking.If we did not have emotions, we could not make rapid decisions concerning whether to attack, defend, flee, care for others, reject food, or approach something useful, all of which were functionally adaptive in our evolutionary history and helped us to survive.
• Emotions serve as the affective basis of many attitudes, values, and beliefs that we have about the world and the people around us; without emotions those attitudes, values, and beliefs would be just statements without meaning, and emotions give those statements meaning. Emotions influence our thinking processes, sometimes in constructive ways, sometimes not.
• Emotions are expressed both verbally through words and nonverbally through facial expressions, voices, gestures, body postures, and movements. We are constantly expressing emotions when interacting with others, and others can reliably judge those emotional expressions.
• Emotions and their expressions communicate information to others about our feelings, intentions, relationship with the target of the emotions, and the environment.
• The inability to express emotions makes person a detached personality and they are not able to communicate well their own feelings and even do not understand what others are feeling.Many people with Asperger's also have a seeming lack of feelings, or inability to express their feelings, which is called alexithymia. Alexithymia is the inability to express emotions or to understand others' emotions.
• Sometimes people do not want to express their negative emotions which makes them kind of detached and "not having emotions". Because of this their interpersonal relationships get affected.