I believe that emotions can’t help you to learn. Emotions only distract you from studying. It becomes harder to focus on your work. As a result you have troubles learning new things. Although, sometimes emotions might help you to finish your work, you won’t be able to productively start something new. Emotions are useful for learning life lessons, but not class ones. It is due to the fact that books are not alive, they don’t have emotions, and the essential thing about emotion is that it is used in (live) communication. And there is no communication during studying (in general, of course you can communicate with your tutor, but it is not cause of you studying, but cause communication goes on!), that is why emotion do not support learning that much. I want to give an example that emotions for communication and logic is for learning: when you read a chemistry book, you don’t relate yourself with the author, but when communicating though text you use emojis, and it is easier to express your mood. So as I have said knowledge and emotions do not go along.

Unless it is intuition!? No! Some people argue that intuition can help you, even if you haven’t got logical explanation. However, I believe that it is an emotion as well as fear. And here three things you should consider, for my conclusion to be logical. First of all, we shouldn’t confuse intuition with paranoia, cause paranoia is not an emotion, but just our primary instinct, which saves you from wondering too much and then finding yourself in trouble. Next there are no people, who would say: well my intuition told me to jump, cause they are dead. We often do not see negative effects of our intuition as it can sometimes lead to things such as death. Additionally, we don’t often share our failures as we don’t like to shame ourselves, meaning that we wouldn’t tell others about failures of our intuition. So we can conclude that intuition is just a feeling/emotion we experience, which makes us decide on the things and have 50/50 success. It seems beneficial cause of paranoia, but in fact the same thing as feelings/emotions*.

Emotions are everywhere in our lives, which have many forms of expression and different meanings. I really interested in The James-Lange theory that represents that the emotions are essentially physical in nature and bodily changes come before, and cause, emotional changes. With the example of an exam situation, I just can clearly understand that if I remove the physical symptoms the corresponding emotions disappears. Likewise, this theory also includes that

If you mimic the appropriate physical symptoms you can generate the corresponding emotion. For example, if you smile you will feel happy.

I like this passage because I always have same experience just like that, like when I talk to someone who is feeling depressed, I just unconsciously mimic some of the physical expression of his mood. So I summarize that this is a mechanism through which we can come to know and empathize with other people’s feelings.

When we regard emotions as an obstacle to knowledge, we just can find out that emotions always influence our rationalizations.

When we are in the grip of strong emotions, we tend not to reason in an objective way but to rationalize our pre-existing prejudices.

Indeed, if we have a particular emotional attitude about something, we may manufacture bad reasons in order to justify it. At the same time, turbulent emotions can distort our ability to think clearly and behave intelligently. Moreover, we also regard emotions as a source of knowledge. There is the relation between reason and emotion. We can say reason and emotion are two completely different things, but also can say the two are mutually reinforcing.  Whatever it is, there is a more-or-less continuum of mental activity running from the very rational to very emotional. Despite emotions value, intuition do not have any magical authority and cannot always be trusted. So it is worth keeping in mind that having strong convictions about something does not in itself guarantee that it is true.

The three parts that I liked about the chapter “is a two way relationship between emotions and beliefs” [150], that emotions provide us with energy to “engage in intellectual activity” [150] and that emotions are an obstacle to knowledge. I liked these in particular as when I read them I thought and realized that in fact some of these things I have noticed before but only realized when I read the chapter.

The part that interested me the most in this chapter is on page 150. it states that emotions affect our beliefs and our beliefs affect our emotions. I think this is really interesting as it makes me think about what I believe and why I believe. It also means that if there is a change in our beliefs, then that could affect our emotions in both a positive of negative way. Emotions can be both physical and mental. This means that they can be affected by our bodies. For example if something hurts us physically then that could affect us in a negative way as we might have a bad day after that and that could greatly affect our mood. If something hurts us mentally then the same could happen and we could have a really bad day and not feel very good. Emotion can be changed but sometimes it can be extremely challenging.

emotion is one of the four ways of knowing, the others being language, reason and perception. an angry, frightened or infatuated person is not likely to be able to see clearly or reason well, and this is why we usually tell people to be reasonable, and not emotional. there are six basic emotions, also known as primary emotions, that are common everywhere. they are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.  when photographs of people showing these emotions are shown to people, they can identify without much thought the matching emotion, no matter where they are from. also, children who are born blind and deaf show these emotions, which means that people are born with them and not taught them. as well as primary emotions, we can experience social emotions like ambition, contempt, embarrassment, envy, gratitude and a lot more. because we have so much intelligence and imagination, we are able to anticipate and picture dangers far in the future. we worry about our final exams, or our basketball game a month from now, or our camping trip in the summer.

What I found most interesting about chapter 6 was the James-Lange theory. this theory says that emotions are pretty much physical in nature, and bodily changes come before, and cause, emotional changes. for examples, if you are feeling nervous for a baseball or basketball game, or an exam, your mouth will feel dry, you will have butterflies in your stomach, and your hands will be sweaty. if you remove all of these physical signs of being nervous, then you will not feel nervous anymore because there will be no physical sings that you are.

I agree that emotion is essentially physical because I always have a sinking or negative feeling when I hurt somewhere in my body. This emotion, that connected to bodies, applies to the James-Lange theory. The James-Lange theory also suggests emotion which comes from other people’s feeling. Imagine when a person next you are depressed, you will try to cheer the person up in order to make a better atmosphere around you and the person. At the same time, you also are something close to depressed and you forgot what had you thinking when you noticed. You unconsciously empathizing with the person’s feelings.

Emotion is a very important source of knowledge. Positive emotion such as happy, love encourages us to do activities. Also, negative emotions can be your reason for knowing.

In my opinion, we cannot distinguish clearly between we make up a reason to explain our emotions, so it’s difficult to just think of a reason.

In my point of view, expert intuition is more reliable than people who are ignorant. These people are studying in one or two specific fields so they have advance knowledge of those fields, and the intuition is based on their endeavour and doesn’t occur naturally.

Primary Emotions are the emotions we can immediately distinguish by facial expressions, everyone can tell these emotions and it is a second nature to do them when you feel those emotions. Whats really cool is even people that are born blind can feel these emotions so it is thought that we learn these before birth instead of learnt by seeing. I don’t agree with the concept of smoking and rationalizations. If you accept that smoking is bad, you can’t always just stop because you accept that it is bad. You can start trying to but a lot of smokers know its bad they just are un able to quit.

I want to look in detail about two parts that go hand and hand. We use emotion to know things but Emotion its also an obstacle to knowledge. We use emotions to tell if we are hurting someone or if we are making them happy. The primary emotions are the easiest to tell whether we are doing something good or bad. If our actions cause them to be sad or mad we know that that isn’t something we should do in the future and we should apologize. If we know it makes them happy or excited we know that this is a good thing we can do and we don’t have to apologize. If we can use emotions as a way of knowledge then how come it’s also an obstacle. If we look at the previous example that is observing other peoples emotions and deciding if we have done something good or bad, but that has nothing to do with our emotions. If we are mad and we get mad at someone else we might say oh its not  my fault. for example maybe I am having a bad day and my friend cancels plans for the next day, I might get mad at him because I am already mad but I dot know why he is cancelling and it might be something important. He may now get mad at me and this stared a fight. In this case we let our emotions take over and we didn’t ask the other person why or see how they are feeling. Sometimes it is very hard to control emotions and we end up letting that happen even though we don’t mean to.  In this case, our emotions are preventing us from learning or knowing something.

Emotions affect our daily life without us even knowing. They can create irrational behavior that could lead to poor decisions, but at the same time they are a source of knowledge. What I found the most interesting about chapter 6 was The James-Lange theory. 

The fact that primary emotions have typical facial expression associated with them suggests that there is a close connection between our emotions and our bodies.

I liked this part of the chapter because I believe that we all have some type of physical reaction to all six primary emotions. I think that it would be really interesting if we could identify these reactions as universal.

The James-Langue Theory suggests that our emotions are closely connected to our bodies. I found this interesting, as in my understanding it means if we remove physical symptoms the corresponding emotion disappears, and the author provides an example of being nervous. Your mouth is dry, you have sweaty palms and you have a stomachache. As you remove all the physical symptoms, nothing is left. When you remove all physical symptoms of nervousness, nervousness disappears. I found it interesting, as there is no right answer if you can apply this theory to different situations.

Interestingly, the theory also suggests that if you mimic the appropriate physical symptoms you can generate the corresponding emotion. For example, if you smile you will feel happy, and if you scowl you will feel angry. You might like to test this idea out on yourself!
I don’t quite agree with this,imagine you just had a bad day and you still have to go to class tomorrow, you don’t want to mess with others
mood with your sad face, so you pretend to looked happy and fake smiled but it doesn’t help me feel any better or worse.
This story suggests that if we have a particular emotional attitude about something we may manufacture bad reasons in order to justify it. According to psychologists, this kind of behaviour is quite common. We tend to rationalise when there is a conflict between two or more of our beliefs
It seems like people are more tend to be objective when talking about some irrelevant things, but being subjective when the thing is related to himself. It’s kind of like double-standard, being critical to others but not himself.
Paul’s problem is that he shows too much emotion, Judy’s that she shows too little. If a friend arrives two minutes late for an appointment, you might reasonably show mild annoyance, but it is inappropriate to lose your temper. On the other hand, if you only show mild annoyance on learning that a loved one has been assaulted, then there is surely something wrong with your emotional responses; in this situation, you surely ought to feel shock, concern and anger. This suggests that showing too little emotion is as irrational as showing too much emotion. We need to find a balance between the two.
some may say that showing too much emotion is irrational, but this paragraph showed that it’s as irrational to show too much emotion as too little depend on the situation.

I cant quote, bc it   automatically select the whole article.

Emotions sometimes refer to different processes  like humor, emotions, feelings and emotional states, that allow us to value, give our own meaning  and drive us to respond to certain realities. All the time people are in an emotional state, either: happy, sad, angry, etc., this influences the way we see the world and understanding it, since all new information that comes to us , most of the time, it is interpreted according to our disposition at the moment we approach them. Something i found very interesting about the text was  “The James-Lange theory” because it explains that our expressions are related to our emotions, they can be expressed through body language and facial expressions, for example, if you are nervous you might start shaking your leg because it is the way your body reacts to this feeling and releases the stress. Emotions are also related with our personality and way of being, attitude, reasoning, etc., they also  bring to our knowledge new ways of seeing things since for each emotion we have a new point of view on everything that surround us.

In TOK, emotion are usually treated as one of the four ways of knowing, with language, reason and perception. Emotion can be defined as good emotion or bad emotion. According to the text, psychologist believe there are six primary emotion: happiness, surprise, sadness, fear, anger and disgust. Most of them are bad emotions. Emotion can provide a big amount of energy in our daily life. And most of the time, the energy that provided by bad emotion are way bigger than the energy provided by good emotion. Many people have done many horrible things under the control of the bad emotion. But sometimes, emotion also play a more positive role in our mental lives, so it also been defined as a way of knowing. It can be an obstacle to knowledge, a source of knowledge and intuition. According to the passage, Aristotle suggest that emotion can be more rational or less rational. So emotion are no longer being in the opposite place of reason.

Emotion is a general term for various subjective cognitive experiences. It is a psychological and physiological state resulting from the synthesis of multiple feelings, thoughts and behaviors. The most common, popular emotions are joy, anger, sorrow, surprise, fear, and love, etc. There are also some delicate and subtle emotions such as jealousy, shame, and proud. Emotion often interacts with mood, personality, temper, and purpose, and is also affected by hormones and neurotransmitters. Will motivate people to act. Even some emotion-induced behaviors do not seem to be thought, but in fact awareness and thinking are an important part of generating emotions. Emotions are not only a variety of internal feelings, we can also speculate on a person’s emotions through his external behavior. An imaginary question on page 148 fits what I said:

Imagine the following situation. you are about to sit an exam and you are feeling very nervous. your mouth is dry, you have a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, the palms of your hands are sweaty, and you want to go to the washroom. Now remove each of thesephysical symptoms one by one. What is left of your exam nervous?

If I only observe this person, I can see that his mouth is very dry, his stomach is sinking, his palms are sweating, and he want to go to the washroom to see that this person is very nervous. Because in response to emergency stress, the body’s sympathetic nerves are activated, creating a “fight or flight response.” This reaction can cause a variety of changes in the body, such as faster breathing, muscle tension, reduced digestive system movements, and so on. At the same time, this response may cause stimulation of the large intestine; including increased movement of the large intestine, causing us to want to run to the washroom.

Another thing that interests me is the power of emotions, which refers to our strong emotions about a thing. For example, scientists have a strong feeling for their cause. The famous scientist Thomas Edison once said:

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

After 13 months of hard work, he tried more than 6,000 materials and tried more than 7,000 times before finally lighting the world’s first electric lamp. What caused him to persist for so long? It is his passion for science. This emotion can empower us and allow us to persist in doing what we like. No one can easily get the Nobel Prize, and the effort behind them is beyond our imagination. It is their passion, this emotion that keeps them going.

In our daily life we can experience multiple emotional or mood changes based on the events that happen over the course of our day. However, some emotions lay deeper then just day-by-day changes. Some emotions have a deeper connection to you personally because of past events. For example, sadness can lie deeper than just a surface level emotion. If you have experienced something traumatic, it may stick with you for years and cause you to be sad for a long time whereas if you are happy it may not last as long as other, stronger emotions.

When I saw the topic which is  Emotion be the obstacle of knowledge I was considering about the reason of that and the reason shows in the chapter is :

Reason Reason can also be negatively affected by our emotion, and if you hold your beliefs with too much passion, this ca prevent you being open-minded and lead to a ‘my theory right or wrong kind of attitude.

If there is too much passion it is going to hard to hold the belief. 

Despite the Stoic ideal, it is difficult to imagine a meaningful human life without any emotions. If you describe someone as being ‘cold and unemotional’,you do not literally mean that they have no emotion, but that they have few emotions compared with the average person. You might think that…..

Emotions as a source of knowledge  shows that it is impossible for a human that do not have a emotion because we have a proper running brain which means we can deal with these emotion properly.

Reason The laws of logic are the starting point for all our reasoning, but we cannot prove them in terms of any more fundamental laws. If asked to justify them, most people would say that they are intuitively obvious.

Intuition is just a kind of feeling which is always the first feeling from your brain.

When I read the emotions handout there were three things that stood out to me in the chapter because they gave me new insight or I disagreed with them. Firstly, on page 145, “the role of beliefs” the author say that dogs do not have as much range and complexity in emotions as we (humans) do. I disagree with this because just like a human can tell when another human is sad or happy, dogs can also sense that. The six basic emotions that we have are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust and dogs can show all of them. I do not think that is it fair to say that they can not have as complex emotions as we do when we can not even understand them. Secondly, on page 155, “emotions as a source of knowledge”, I found what the author said to be very interesting and changed what I previously thought.

“The phycologist Antonio Damasio cites the case of a patient called Elliot who suffered damage to the emotional centres in his brain. Elliot appeared normal un many respects and preformed last as well on IQ tests as he did before his accident. Nevertheless, he became a “rational fool”.”

I found this very interesting because I always thought that whenever someone was going through something, everything would be different, not only the way they perceived things and reacted. Finally, I  found that the author was talking about how we need to “debug” rather than follow our natural instinct and that we needed to unlearn our native intuitions so that we could acquire a more sophisticated understanding of the world.

Another point that I am going to talk in more depth about was that on page 158, the author talks about the relationship between intuition and emotion (feelings).

“Intuitions are, of course, very different from hot emotions, such as love and hate. But sine they are usually seen as being more a matter of feeling than of thinking, it makes sense to discuss them here”

when I read this, I started to wonder if our emotions were somehow based upon survival or as a way that we needed to get the things we want. When we are sad, we cry and look down, when others feel bad, they try and make us feel better and they give us help. When we are happy and in a good mood, other people like you more and want to be with you (being a leader). If we didn’t show our emotions, we would not be able to get any help and so we would always be stuck in that emotion until we would change it ourself. Even tho now it is not for survival so much as it is for getting what we need. I started to make a connection. Also reenforcing the survival fact, we have intuition about our surroundings and we get these senses when there could be possible “danger”.

“You may, for example, have an intuition that someone behind you is staring at you, and when you turn round you discover you are right!

If we think that someone is behind us and staring at us, we get scared or nervous and want to see if there is someone. We get lots of emotions and feeling as a result as our intuition, but maybe that is because our intuition is the root to expressing our emotions. It makes us worry, makes us scared, happy, nervous and grossed out without us even thinking about it. If we see a dead body, even if you are a surgeon and see dead people and blood all the time and are used to that, our intuition might make us feel queezy and lightheaded and we might faint or throw up. Even tho we are used to that, in that sudden moment, our natural instinct might be to feel grossed out and so our emotions come out that would normally not.

An Emotion is just another way of knowing as language, reason and perception. Also emotions are known as all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. Moreover most people think that emotions are bad because they make you do things by impulse and without reason.

So is the solution to ignore our feeling or emotions? In the modern society this is one huge problem, we try to avoid them, just to keep going and to don’t show people how are we doing. But that’s the worst we could do, beacuse then lots of problems appear like depression or anxiety  “Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.” (Oscar Wilde)  Also, we mustsn’t avoid our emotions but we cannot leave the emotions, control us. For example before reacting in bad way with someone you must know exactly what happened and that’s because “Anyone can be angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not easy.” Aristotle.

“Emotions as an obstacle to knowlege” , was really interesting topic to me, because I’m a really impulsive person, I do what I think and so on. They had always told me the positive things aboput acting that way, but I have never though too much about the negative ones. Being impulsive makes you comitt lots of mistakes as it could be, been angry with someone without let him explain you what happened.

Also about intuition I have discovered that they are not as good as we though, we must use our instict but we have to know that we could be wrong, because not always what we think or belive in, is the best option.

Hence, emotions are good, but we must control them instead of let them control us. Gaining control over your emotions will help you become mentally stronger.

An emotion is an instinctive or intuitive feeling as distinguished form reasoning or knowledge (oxford dictionary). Where usually consists of various internal feelings and external forms, which are 6 basic emotions in common to all cultures (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust). In this chapter there are many proposed theories about what does emotions mean. One of them stated that emotions are a result of the experiences around us and not the other way around, where basically primary emotions have typical facial expression where we find the close connection between our emotions and bodies. For example is you are walking in the forest and you encounter a bear, you sense it using your five senses, process it, and as a reflex we start running. Because of this we feel scared. This theory stated that “we feel sorry because we cry, and angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (James W).

The theory also suggests that if you mimic the appropriate physical symptoms you can generate the corresponding emotion, this also suggests a mechanism through which we can come to know and empathise with other people feelings.

Emotions can be considered as knowledge divided by perception, reason and language. if this theory is true it would mean that emotions can be influenced by our brain/reason. There is a part of the chapter that includes intuion is usually seem as being more a matter of feeling than of thinking.

Therefore social intuitions, with this we tend to trust more into our intuitions about other people and we pride ourselves on being good judgments of character.

When a read that bodily changes come before, and cause, emotional changes, I did not believe that. However, when I think deeply person who is in depression has a symptom to their body; even though that depression is cause by emotion. Thus I understood The James-Lange theory.

Indeed, according to the James-Lange theory(which is named after the psychologists who came up with it), the emotions are essentially physical in nature, and bodily changes come before, and cause, emotional changes.

I like the example of the snake in the part of the role of beliefs. If I could add something to the paragraph, I would add about the religion. Some christians believe that there will be a home in heaven that people can go after they die. That belief makes christian not afraid of death. However, people who do not believe this will be anxious about death because they do not know where are they going and what is going to happen after they die.

A change in your beliefs has led to a change in your emotions.

The story of Elliot who suffered damage to the emotional canters in his brain which is example of a source of knowledge was interesting. When a person fight with a another person, she  will decide whether or not the is going to say this to this person. However, it is going to hard to think and decide when she is really mad. She just want to say the thing what she think. Thus I understand that emotion is important for decision making.

Damasio speculates that emotions help us to make rational decisions about things by narrowing down our options so that we can choose between a manageable number of them.

Rationalisation is particularly interesting for me. This case usually happens to me and my mother when I try to convince her. For example, when my mother told me to go for a trip with her I told her that I don’t want to go because I want to study alone at home and told her to take your friends. However, my real reason was that I could have a party with my friends if my mother is gone.

We tend to rationalize when there is a conflict between two or more of our beliefs.

The first thing that I learned about emotions is what exactly emotions are. The usually consist of multiple different internal feelings and external behaviours. When our emotions are very strong or intense they are often described as “passionate” but when our emotions last for a longer period of time it is considered our mood. I also learned that our emotions can be effected by our beliefs and that our emotions have both physical and mental aspects. Another thing that I learned is about the James-Lange theory. This theory is that our emotional changes come from our bodily changes. It explains that when you get rid of the physical signs the corresponding emotion disappears. This also works with how the physical signs of an emotion can lead you to feeling and experiencing that emotion.

I have also learned that there is actually a close relationship between reason and emotion. Because emotion and reason are closely related and similar to each other it can be hard to see a clear distinction between them. They are closely related because most of the time you are having a mix of both thoughts and feelings inside your head. This relationship is also partially due to the fact that our emotions can be more or less rational depending on the situation we are in. An example of this is when we are afraid of something and we discover that it does not actually exist  that fear will most likely go away. There are also the cases where we experience irrational emotions when we react to different situations but it can sometimes be hard for us to control these emotions which I think causes us to question or doubt the things we know or think we know.