Happiness and other emotions

[EgotisticalRaven]

Happniess is seen as one of the few only positive emotions. The rest of the emotions, hate, anger, sorrow, etc are seen as negitive. Everyone wants to be happy and they connect happiness to having a good life.

Anyone who wants to feel 'negitive' emotions are labeled as 'Emo', 'Uncontrolled', 'paranoid', 'sulk' amongst other things, but anyone who wants to just be happy are labeled as 'normal'.

Are these 'negitive' emotions underrated?
Should people feel only one emotion and not expose themselves to other emotions?

I have many arguments, but I want to hear other opinions.

[Dragon Mage]

Are you talking about the emoticons on here or just the main ones cos theres alot of positive and funny ones here on the forums

[EgotisticalRaven]

Happy encompassing anything that makes you happy.

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Love is not an emotion, it is an event that can trigger an emotion. Being funny or amused is an event to trigger an emotion. Etc. Or in other words, I am talking about the reaction, not the situation.

I am talking about the emotions in general,

Happy/Funny/Shiny 

Sorrow/Sad/Pining   

Anger/Furstration/Stress 

Fear/Shock/Surprise   

They are devided into four catagories, depending on the feeling of them, eg. Fear feels like Surprise, Anger feels like Stress. They are the same emotions, but the situation differs.

[Merlandese]

It's an interesting topic. I haven't given it a lot of thought, but I'm going to.

The one idea that immediately struck me is that Cowardice as an action is usually frowned upon, which is brought on by Fear. But Fear, like any "tool," can be positive in certain contexts and negative in others. Positively, it could save your life. Negatively, it could ruin it.

It's possible these other emotions are context-sensitive, but in the form of conversation, they are each linked to what form they are useful in for the act of conversing. When you and I discuss this in a forum setting, for example, the "negative" emotions all have adverse effects on the discussion, so maybe the act of discussion presumes the negativity and positivity of emotions by simultaneously forming the context in which they can be described that way.

Man, that sentence is hard to decipher.

[Dragon Mage]

Oops sorry i read this topic as 'emoticons' not 'emotions' I'll just leave now...

[A Fat Kid]

If anything, I find happiness overrated.

Not everyone wants to be happy. I don't. Happiness is great, sure, but these days I take happiness as more of a bonus rather than an end goal. Living a happy life isn't a primary objective in my life, and isn't necessary for me to conclude my life as having been worth living.

I think happiness is the least interesting emotion to ponder about. Things like hate, regret, sorrow have more complex causes and implications.

And I think human culture is overly obsessed with the attainment of happiness.

[EgotisticalRaven]

If anything, I find happiness overrated.

Not everyone wants to be happy. I don't. Happiness is great, sure, but these days I take happiness as more of a bonus rather than an end goal. Living a happy life isn't a primary objective in my life, and isn't necessary for me to conclude my life as having been worth living.

I think happiness is the least interesting emotion to ponder about. Things like hate, regret, sorrow have more complex causes and implications.

And I think human culture is overly obsessed with the attainment of happiness.

I agree fully, happiness is often overrated. There was an interesting book, I forgot that title, but it had a part in it about how parents only want their children to be happy. It said that instead of wanting your children to only be happy, you should want them to experince a rage of emotions, not only to give them life experience, but to also expose them to other feelings and thoughts.

Happiness, not only being a very boring and simple emtoion, is also a very weak one, in terms of endurence and impact. Say for example, the more you do something that makes you happy, the less it makes you happy, thus you have to do it more to get the amount of happiness, or it will fade into routine. But with other 'negitive' emotions, such as sorrow and anger, the more you feel those emotions, the stronger they become. This is not always the case, it can happen diffrently, some people are desensitised to sorrow and anger the more they feel it, and some find commen happiness is stronger, but it is commen for happiness to be weaker and the 'negitive' emotions to be stronger.

[Merlandese]

It's interesting that you find the sole qualifying value of an emotion in its strength.

It's also interesting that that book would say people only want their kids to be happy. In my experiences, the most important thing parents want for children--or what anyone wants for everyone they love--is security. When it comes down to it, the emotions are pointless, and people will often squander a person's happiness to effectively keep them alive or safe.  Security is an emotionless state (although the person providing the security is often driven by Fear), so saying they want their children to be Happy is more of an idealistic approach to the reality of, "I don't care what my child feels so long as they survive and make more children," which is very natural.

I think if Happiness were listed as our negative emotion and Fear as our positive emotion, the situation would remain much the same but the words would swap.

[Oink]

Erm, I'm bored, so I'd just leave my piece.

Our thoughts and the associated feelings may be nothing more than a series of chemical reactions and electrical impulses in the synapses of the brain neurons. From birth to around 6 years of age, the brain perform hard-wiring of the neurons to associate knowledge with experiences. It would take some severe trauma or experiences to alter these structures, but it is possible to suppress or induce certain behaviours by means of drugs and stimulants. Taking into account that emotions are in fact behavioural and exhibit certain habitual and instinctive characteristics, it may be surmised that the classifications of "positive" and "negative" emotions play a major part in the natural survival instincts evolved through the ages. For example, people would be drawn to perform activities that generate pleasure (i.e. child-making and eating) in favour of those that cause pain (physically or mentally). Of course, some activities tend to overlap pleasure with pain (your mileage may vary here...), and those are the areas where association between different emotions may conflict with the survival instinct or the interests of the body. It is therefore imperative that a proper balance be struck between "positive" and "negative" emotions because the existence of both is what allow humans to survive adequately.

... I'm still bored... may I go tsundere now?

[Kyo]

... I'm still bored... may I go tsundere now?

You already did. "I-it's not like I wanted to reply to this thread, I-I was just bored, b-baka!"

[Ferdk]

I find emotions to be usually rather useless to make decisions, but can be good to inform decisions. Knowing how you feel about something can give you extra data to make a logical decision. But in the end I always act rationally, no matter what I feel about anything. They're a good input but a terrible output.

The biggest problem I find with the concept of Happiness is when people chase it as an end-goal you can achieve and get forever. That's not how it works. You can feel happy sometimes for a while, then go all over the place. We've all been there. It serves no purpose to search for "ultimate happiness", such a thing does not exist. Furthermore, most people do chase it because they mistakenly define it by their need for "balance". Feeling secure, a sort of equilibrium in your life, no complications. The problem is because people do mistake it for that and call it happiness, they also add the happy-baggage on top of it, so when the few people who do manage to find some kind of balance realize they're not feeling "happy" all the time, then their life doesn't make any sense anymore. It's like they've been cheated.

I think all emotions are worth being explored in some form, but as I said before, I only take them as an input. I'll never make any decision emotionally, and if I accidentally do, I'll hate myself forever no matter the outcome.

So I guess I'm leaning forward to all emotions being sort of useless Take that you anti-happies! I'm above you in my void of nothingness >

[Thunderbird]

Happniess is seen as one of the few only positive emotions. The rest of the emotions, hate, anger, sorrow, etc are seen as negitive. Everyone wants to be happy and they connect happiness to having a good life.

I think you are mistaken.
Putting all positive emotions into "being happy" is the same as putting all negative ones into "feeling bad".
here are some different good emotions:
excitement, being amused/entertained, feeling comfortable, feeling proud of something, nostalgia, relief

By nature we aren't made to feel happy all the time, if we would do, we wouldn't strive for higher goals anymore.

[EgotisticalRaven]

Happniess is seen as one of the few only positive emotions. The rest of the emotions, hate, anger, sorrow, etc are seen as negitive. Everyone wants to be happy and they connect happiness to having a good life.

I think you are mistaken.
Putting all positive emotions into "being happy" is the same as putting all negative ones into "feeling bad".
here are some different good emotions:
excitement, being amused/entertained, feeling comfortable, feeling proud of something, nostalgia, relief

I still think that those other feelings are being happy. I think that they're not emotions as such, but rather events that can cause an emotion, except exceitment and relief (Which are the emotion happy). I take being amused/entertained as an event, you are entertained, and you become happy. You feel nostalgic, you become happy. You feel pride, you become happy. They're events, just as falling in love is an event, you can fall in love, you can get comfortable, you can be entertained, you can get nostalgic.

With excitement, it comes under the catergory of happiness, you can't feel sad when excited you can't feel anger when excited. Though excitement is a bit hard to label, considering the fact it has two definitions. There's the anger definition, "Don't get excited." and the happy definition, "I'm so excited!". Such as the same with relief. With pride, I haven't thought about pride, it's a bit of a grey area.

I am no master in emotions, but because I have Aspergers Syndrome, I've had an outside diffrent persepctive on emotions, instead of feeling and expressing them, I have mostly observed and identified them. I am a bit foreign to the emotions, but I have thought about them quite a lot.

I could be mistaken, it's good to have something to rebutt on this discussion.

[Merlandese]

One consideration is the volatility of emotions. You mentioned that people try too hard for that one emotion, and that if they had that one emotion all of the time it wouldn't be as sweet without the exploration of other emotions.

I think you're right, but I don't think a person who strives for Happiness somehow "cures" themselves of the other emotions simply through their journey. Emotions can be controlled after they start happening (I can choose to express my anger, or I can take a deep breath), but that doesn't mean the emotion never happens internally. The worry that people who put being Happy on a pedestal are somehow missing out on other emotions is unwarranted, I think. Even people who claim to be completely apathetic are usually just ignoring/controlling their emotions, which is different than not having them. It's like leashing a dog.

[Oink]

(yawn...) Can't we, like, talk bout things that make people happy or unhappy and draw comparisons from there instead? It's so hard to define the term. I can associate myself with positive thoughts and negative thoughts but never really define the all-encompassing term called "Happiness". It's like black and white - there are infinite shades of gray/grey in between.

I can live with pleasure and pain though (whip out the S&M gear). They do overlap.