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Find out what goes on to create human perception and experiences of emotion -- and why?
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The Emotional Brain
May 2000
by Laura Arendal
Emotions as they are experienced can be broken into three categories: primary emotions, secondary emotions, and background emotions. Primary emotions are experienced as a byproduct of a stimulus-response chain of events; these emotional responses have, to some degree, been hardwired in our brains over the course of evolution. Fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy are the "chairs of the board" of primary emotions, and whether or not other board members exist remains under debate.
Secondary and background emotions are the product of an internal feedback loop. While the emotions involved in primary emotional reactions can also play a part in secondary and even as background emotions, nonprimary emotions are more likely to be some dues-paying subsidiary of a primary emotion. For instance, fear as a secondary emotion might feel more like anxiety, stress, or shyness; secondary emotions related to joy might be experienced as ecstasy, pleasure, or amusement.
Joseph LeDoux, a professor and researcher at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, maintains that the list of basic (primary) emotions is nothing other than a list of the adaptive behaviors crucial to survival. Fear, for instance, is obviously related to survival: fear helps you react instantaneously to a stimulus you perceive as dangerous (for instance, a snake slithering toward you) and survive the event. So how does it work?
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