The Origins of Human Emotions and Their Purpose 

A Maasai warrior standing with a spear, gazing at a lion in the wilderness on the left, and a close-up of a concerned man's face on the right, expressing anxiety or fear.
Illustration of the adaptation of fear responsive from our time on the African savannah



Emotions are pivotal in psychology and behavior, influencing everything from friendship to warfare, love to hatred, and permeating all aspects of human life. Once regarded as a marginal subject, emotions have now been acknowledged for their widespread presence and evolutionary importance, underscoring their critical role in understanding the human mind.

In the past two decades, there has been a surge in both theoretical and empirical studies on emotions, revealing profound insights into feelings like anger, disgust, pride, shame, sexual jealousy and romantic love. This research confirms that emotions are essential to psychological functioning, vital for survival and reproduction, and thus, prime targets for natural selection. Additionally, emotions are implicated in a spectrum of psychological disorders, from well-known conditions like depression and anxiety to less obvious ones such as schizoid and borderline personality disorders.


Table of Content


Why Do We Have Emotions

Emotions are adaptive and they serve a function even though they’re often maligned and regarded as irrational. There’s a long history in psychology and philosophy of regarding emotions as irrational forces that get us into trouble. However, each emotion have evolved for a reason and serve a function.

For example fear protects us from danger, while disgust protects us from pathogens and contamination. Anger helps us to negotiate with people who are not treating us well enough, or who are blocking our goals. Romantic love serves the function of having two people to pair bond. Envy is a useful emotion in navigating status hierarchies.

Each emotion has an evolved function tied to survival, reproduction or some other kind of goal that is required for survival and reproduction, such as repairing relationships, building friendships and alliances etc.


Why Emotions Have Been Misunderstood

Emotion Paradox

Part of the reason as to why emotions typically have been misunderstood is the emotion paradox.

  • On the one hand, emotions are adaptive, useful and functional. They help you do basic tasks such as survive, reproduce, raise your children, avoid illness and infection, etc.
  • On the other hand, emotions also cause people a great deal of distress. They can lead us astray, they are involved in a lot of psychological disorders, and a lot of people suffer (in various ways) because of their emotions.

We need to reconcile the fact that they are adaptive, useful and functional, while also causing distress and sometimes lead us to behave in shortsighted ways that don’t serve our interests.

More Than a Feeling

We tend to conflate emotions with just being the way that a certain state feels. Fear is usually thought of as what it feels like to be afraid, disgust as what it feels like to feel disgusted, but emotions are much more than just the feeling state. In other words, emotions are more than just the subjective phenomenology. There are a whole host of changes in our body, brain, mind and behavior.

Let’s consider the emotion fear. It makes you feel afraid which is the feeling state, but it also narrows your attention to the dangerous stimulus and your perception is heightened. Physiological aspects like digestion and reproduction are suppressed, because they’re not needed in that type of situation. Your hunger is overshadowed, and instead you focus on escape. Energy is directed towards the muscles to escape. Your memory is activated such that if you know the terrain, then escape routes will become more salient for you. Thus, you’re better at navigating when you’re afraid.

In the general public and in psychology, we have a tendency to overly identify an emotion with the feeling state, when in reality the feeling state is just one of several mechanisms that’s going on in the body and mind. Emotions are essentially not just affecting how you feel, they’re coordination and regulation mechanisms for many different systems in your body and mind affecting your psychology, physiology and your behavior all at once. This happens in an orchestrated and coordinated fashion in order to help you solve the adaptive problem at hand.

Emotion = feeling state + psychology + physiology + behavior

Happens in an orchestrated and coordinated fashion in order to help you solve the problem at hand.

When you disgust people, they don’t just feel disgusted, but they also actually mount an immune response involving the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines and they have an increase in basil body temperature, which is part of the immune response. People also report feeling less extroverted, and less open to experience. This makes total sense, because if there is a pathogen threat, this is not a good time to be hugging, affiliating and touching people, nor to try new things and new foods. People also behaviorally avoid the source of contamination, which have been observed in lab settings. We do know from research that if you experimentally disgust participants, their interest in short-term mating, interest in new partners, desire for sexual variety and novelty goes down, and sexual arousal becomes more difficult to achieve. Subjects become less willing to engage in risks, especially pathogenic risks.

Thus, it’s not just a feeling chain, or an arbitrary set of irrational changes. Emotions triggers a set of adaptive changes that functionally cohere, fit together and serve a function. In the case of disgust, this manifests itself in avoiding infection.

Why We Overemphasize the Feeling Aspect of an Emotion

We pay so much attention to how it feels simply because it’s the most salient part of the emotion. We can’t experience our increased basil temperature, the cytokine response, etc. Feelings is the main, and in some cases the only, part of our emotions that we have conscious access to. It’s basically a cognitive bias, on our part.

Read more about cognitive biases here.


Secondly, the feeling state is the most valanced. Meaning the emotional affect (intrinsic appeal or repulsion) leads us to hyperfocus on the feeling state, as we care about how it feels (more on that in the next section).

Emotions Did Not Evolve to Make Us Feel Good

Another reason emotions have been regarded as maladaptive is that some of the emotions feel bad. We just don’t like feeling bad. There’s this emphasis in some areas of psychology, and in the general public, on feeling good. We have sort of a cult of positivity in a lot of Western cultures. Fear feels bad. Disgust feels bad, etc. But, they all serve a function. It’s kind of like pain. Pain feels bad, but pain is not a problem itself. It’s a signal to you that there’s an external problem that’s happening such as tissue damage, and it’s important for the organism to avoid that problem. The negative or reversive emotions are just as functional, adaptive and useful as the positive emotions. They evolved to help us survive and reproduce, not to make us feel good.

Emotions evolved to help us survive and reproduce, not to make us feel good.

Emotions are Required for Survival

There this notion that: “If only we could be free of emotions, we’d be so intelligent and so rational.” But, organisms without emotions would be less capable of intelligent action than us, not smarter. They wouldn’t avoid infection. They wouldn’t advocate for their interest in diegetic relationships (interactions or elements that living beings perceive as part of their world). They wouldn’t be able to avoid the actions of the moment, and build long-term relationships. They wouldn’t repair things with others, when they had hurt them. They wouldn’t escape predators. They would be careless and take on too much risk (e.g. not properly perceiving the risk of going off a cliff).

To further drive this point home, some people are born without pain congenitally, and they’re usually dead by about 30 years of age. If taking a rat or mouse, lesioning the part of its brain that’s involved in fear, it will no longer be afraid of the smell of cat piss, and it’ll go right up to cats and get eaten. Creatures without emotions would be less capable of intelligent action in the world, not more.

Furthermore, patients with brain damage to parts of their brain that are involved in emotion, like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, have trouble making even very simple decisions like where to sit in an auditorium, or where to go to dinner. They will typically start to list all the the pros and cons of each, and be unable to decide on which one. You can still be intelligent, lucid and rational, but be incapable of making a simple decision because sometimes emotional inputs like a slight preference for that seat over that seat is what helps us make the decision.

Without emotions, we sort of have a brain damage, and we find ourselves unable sometimes to make even trivial and mundane decisions.


Are Some Emotions More Fundamental Than Others

It’s a bit of a historical accident that goes back to some seminal findings in the 60s and 70s where researchers discovered that some emotions had universal facial expressions, and these facial expressions were universally recognizable. You could take a picture of somebody expressing an emotion from one culture to another culture, and they knew exactly what they were looking at. Then, the authors went beyond that and said that in order to count as a basic emotion it must have a universal facial expression and that facial expression must be universally recognizable. However, there’s no real reason to stipulate that. It’s an arbitrary stipulation. Whether or not an emotion comes along with a facial expression depends on the costs and benefits of signaling that emotion to others.

There might be some emotions that are positively harmful to signal to others like envy, which is a covert emotion that you wouldn’t want to signal to others. Regret might be an internal re-calibrational emotion that helps us make better decisions in the future, when we’ve messed up in the past. You wouldn’t need to wear that on your face.

A more modern way of thinking about emotions, from an evolutionary perspective, suggests that some of them may have universal facial expressions, while some of them may have no facial expression at all. Some emotions may have facial expressions that are only deployed in certain contexts, depending on the costs and benefits.


An Evolutionary Lens to Emotions

The evolutionary frame allows us to see emotions more clearly. An evolutionary perspective helps us understand how to resolve the emotion paradox. Emotions evolved to promote adaptive action, not to help us feel good. That’s an important distinction, because we start to understand why aversive emotions could be functional based on their utility and adaptiveness. They’re just as functional as the “positive” emotions

The evolutionary lens to emotions not only broadens our conceptualization of emotions, so that we stop thinking of it as just the feeling state / phenomenological state, but it shows us how the other components like the changes in psychology, physiology and behavior form a functionally coherent set that are solving a certain problem. They’re not arbitrary.

Universal Emotions

It also offers a different perspective on emotions being universal. For instance Germans have the word “Schadenfreude“, “Skadefryd” in Norwegian. Such a word does not exist in English, so some people will say that means that we lack that emotion, or that we can’t feel those emotions. Whereas an evolutionary perspective suggests that those superficial linguistic differences are underlain by cross-cultural uniformity in the psychology. We still have those emotions, we just don’t have a single word for it. When you share the German word “Schadenfreude” with an English speaker, they don’t say: “What is this concept? I couldn’t possibly imagine it.” Instead, they say: “Oh, you mean there’s a word for it! Cool.“

Smoke Detector Principle

Emotions evolved for adaptive action, but not to be maximally accurate or maximally veridical (truthful). Anxiety is hypersensitive/overreactive, and is explained by what psychiatrist Randolph M. Nesse calls the “smoke detector principle“, or what some have called “error management theory“. It’s basically the idea that a smoke alarm can make two kinds of errors:

  • Either, fail to detect a real fire (which would be catastrophic and deadly), or
  • Detect a fire when there isn’t one (sounding the alarm when we’re just cooking, which is just a minor nuisance).

We actually build smoke alarms on purpose not to be maximally accurate. We build them to be biased toward false alarms, to avoid a catastrophic error.

The idea is that this underlying logic doesn’t just apply to humanly engineered systems like smoke alarms, it applies to both animal and human brains when it comes to anxiety. Anxiety is like a vigilance system that detects threats in the environment. It can also make one of two kinds of errors. It can fail to detect a real threat, which could be deadly, or it could detect a threat when there isn’t one. The latter mounts the anxiety response in a defensive fashion that isn’t actually needed, and so the insight is that our brains have evolved to be adaptively biased in the direction of the safer error. That’s why our anxiety has so many false alarms. That’s why it’s so overreactive.

The healthy and helpful insight is that it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s not our brains going haywire, there’s nothing pathological about us. Emotions evolved not to be maximally accurate, but rather to be maximally safe (serve our survival), and serve our reproductive interests. This helps us understand for instance why anxiety is so hyperactive. That could take some of the sting out of anxiety, because it helps people realize there’s nothing wrong with you.

Emotions evolved for adaptive action, not to be maximally accurate or truthful.
Rather, they evolved to be maximally safe to serve our survival and reproductive interests.

Ancestrally Adaptive, but not Currently Adaptive

We evolved in a very different environment than the one we inhabit today. Thus, we might have emotions that were ancestrally adaptive, but may not be currently adaptive in some of the situations that we face. We may face conditions now that heighten our anxiety, or our depression relative to ancestral conditions. For example, many of us live without close kin and friends around us in these modern anonymous cities. We get less exercise and live sedentary lifestyles. We eat unhealthy and processed food, etc. We’re being exposed to people on social media, and in regular media like movies and so, who are unrealistically attractive, unrealistically successful and unrealistically good at what they do.

In small hunter gatherer groups there was a fair chance that you were the best at something e.g. weaving, hunting, speaking or healing, etc. There just simply wasn’t enough people for everybody to try their hand at weaving, hunting, speaking or healing. If your whole world was 150 people (see Dunbar’s Number), you have a fairly good shot at being the best, or close to the best, at something.

But, now you can watch Olympians, X-games contestants, TED speakers, famous actors, etc. and immediately know for a fact that you’re not the best basketball player, snowboarder, speaker or actor. The broadened exposure to the best of the best and the curated facade that people portray on social media, where you compare their facade with your real life makes us feel like we are not good enough. This can lead to anxiety, sadness and depression. However, keep in mind that even in the best of times, we would still have anxiety in some because it’s a functional emotion for us to inhibit.

Some practices may seem maladaptive, but actually be super adaptive. Consider foster birds. They basically have brood parasite chicks deposited in their nest. Other birds posit their eggs in someone else’s nest, so that this foster parent can unwittingly raise these parasite chicks. It’s raising this offspring that has been foisted upon it. We typically think about the individual behavior of tolerating this chick as strange or perhaps even stupid, rather than think about the neurocognitive mechanisms that exist in this bird brain when it has to deal with parasite chicks. There’s two kinds of errors it could make. It could be overly tolerant, and tolerate the occasional parasite chick. Or, it could make a mistake and push one of its offspring out the nest and kill it. Often the safer error is to over-tolerate, rather than risk killing your own offspring.

You may look at the behavior of raising the parasite chick and think that behavior is individually maladaptive, but the system that produced it is super adaptive. The neurocognitive mechanism in the bird’s brain that produced this behavior is super adaptive because by making that error occasionally, it doesn’t do the more catastrophic error.


Emotions and Their Meaning

Note: the below is not a complete list of all human emotions, but merely a selection.

Social Emotions

Some emotions appear to be more social than others. For example, guilt seems to be about repairing relationships where we’ve harmed somebody that we are supposed to be valuing. Anger seems to be about demanding better treatment from those who aren’t valuing us enough, or not placing enough emphasis on our welfare. These are very social emotions.

Shame feels bad, but it helps you to avoid status loss, reputational loss and engaging in the behaviors that would cause that status loss.

Disgust on the other hand, especially pathogen disgust, is geared toward avoiding infection and avoiding contamination. You could still think of it as serving your interests in terms of avoiding infection. Fear is still serving your interests in terms of avoiding falling off a cliff, or avoiding being harmed by an assault.

Some emotions are a bit more interpersonal than others. In that lies the notion of serving our interests.

Love

Some emotional functions are clearer than others, while some are perhaps more useful when they’re harder to discern.

There’s a famous view on love, which is that love helps you to solve the commitment problem. It helps you to pair bond with another person, when in the absence of love it might be in your interest to always remain open to other options.

If you were to cheat on your partner, you would obtain the benefits now and you would pay the costs later. As humans, we tend to pay a lot of attention to the present, while discounting future costs. If you experience love, then you will feel guilt right now even at just the notion of cheating. You feel compelled not to, because you’re pair bonded and emotionally glued to your partner. Through love, the costs of cheating from the future are pulled into the present, so that you feel the costs right now. That alters your calculus, and you’re more likely to hold back, stick with your partner, and cement the pair bond.

Another key point that the author Robert Frank is making (in his book Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions), is that you don’t really want to be with someone who can give you a very rational explanation for why they love you. Why? Because if they list all of these reasons, they might just meet somebody in the future who does better on all of those (plus they can play the guitar). As a result, you want somebody who doesn’t love you for rational reasons. You want someone who’s emotionally glued to you without a rational list of criteria.

Fear

We got it to protect us from dangers such as falling off cliffs, being assaulted by hostile humans, being attacked by predators. It heightens your perception and narrows your attention to e.g. the predator you need to run away from. It shuts down other things, like digestion, that you don’t really need right now and mobilizes resources for running away. It shunts energy toward the muscles. It affects even the way that you conceptually perceive the world. You would no longer consider this table as aesthetically pleasing or useful. You would start to scan everything you see around you in terms of being useful, for escaping the dangerous situation. You’re only looking at things from a binary perspective. It’s changing the way you feel, think, remember, conceptually perceive the world and the way you behave. All these things at once, in service of solving one goal, which is escaping a danger.

We might think of emotions as coordinating mechanisms (as mentioned previously). Systems that coordinate a lot of changes in the body and mind. Another term for emotions is modes of operation, by which we mean that the whole body and mind go into a different mode of operation. When you’re in fear mode, you’re in a different mode than in disgust mode, etc.

Shame

Shame seems to function to prevent you from engaging in behaviors that would cause you status loss and reputation loss in your society. If you have engaged in those things, it also tries to avoid information from getting out and to mitigate the damage, to prevent loss of status. Shame is all about reducing the likelihood of social devaluation.

Reputation management may seem superficial, or not that important, but really reputation and acceptance by your peers would have meant the difference between surviving and not surviving. Keep in mind that we evolved in closely knit hunter gatherer communities. We were, and to some extent still are, very interdependent. We needed each other to survive. If you were cast out of the group, would not be able to hunt, build shelters, fires and fend off predators alone in those environments in which we evolved. It would have meant death. Falling in the eyes of one’s peers can be extremely painful. Some of the worst punishments that we have to offer are kicking a person out of the group. Ostracism, exile, revoking citizenship, dishonorable discharge, etc. is a huge adaptive problem. In prison the worst thing is solitary confinement. These kinds of things are some of the most painful things that can happen to us.

What we feel shame about, closely tracks what others would devalue us for. There’s an extremely strong correlation between the amount of shame you would feel and the amount of social devaluation that others would engage in of you for those things. The degree of shame tracks the degree of 3rd party social devaluation. This is even true across cultures, and has been shown in a 16-culture study. In each culture, shame closely tracks the degree of social devaluation that would occur for that bad trait, or that bad behavior.

There was a set of experiments where researchers teased apart whether or not participants had actually done anything wrong from whether or not audience members thought they had done something wrong. The researchers were able to show very clearly that participants felt shame even when they were innocent, and they knew they were innocent, as long as audience members thought they were guilty. What’s so fascinating about that is that it really shows that shame is not about being culpable (about having done something wrong) necessarily, it’s about falling in status in the eyes of your peers. It’s about being rejected, ostracized or devalued by your peers.

You can absolutely feel shame when you’re innocent, and you know you’re innocent, as long as you think correctly, or erroneously, that others are devaluing you. That’s a major insight.

Guilt

There is an important distinction between shame and guilt, which is that guilt is thought of as functioning to repair a relationship with a valued other when you have hurt them, wronged them, transgressed against them or failed to place enough value on their welfare. So, it’s about fixing that bond that you’ve messed up.

Whereas, shame is about preventing you from falling in the eyes of your peers.

You may feel both guilt and shame because they’re distinct. We might be feeling guilt toward the person we harmed, and we’re trying to fix that. We’re feeling shame that other people found out about it, and we have fallen in status. You can feel either one, or both, but they are solving different problems.

Pride

The flip side of shame seems to be pride. Pride is about engaging in behaviors and traits that bring you social valuation and respect from your peers. Then advertising those traits and the fact that you have those traits and skills to your peers, so that you can benefit from that rise in status.

Studies on pride show that similarly within a culture the degree of pride that you feel at those traits or behaviors closely tracks the degree of valuation others would give you for those. Even between cultures, there’s quite a strong positive correlation in terms of what people value and thus what people would receive, or feel pride for.

Pride and hubris are different in the sense that pride as earned pride, and hubris as unearned pride. But for any emotion, even any functional adaptive emotion, it can still undershoot or overshoot. You might feel too much pride for a given thing, and advertise it too much. Or, an emotion can be triggered in the wrong context, or at the wrong time, and this could rub people the wrong way.

Sadness

Sadness seems to function to solicit aid from friends, loved ones and family. It communicates I’m in need, please support me. It also helps you withdraw, conserve resources and re-calibrate, because you’re stuck in something that isn’t working. A bad marriage, a bad job, a dead-end path. It’s helping you to recalibrate and figure out whether your resources and your energy might be better allocated elsewhere. You might want to quit this thing or adjust your strategy. Keep in mind that even in the best of times, we would still have the emotion of sadness because it’s functional.

Happiness

We have the hedonic treadmill, which is the notion that we accomplish something and then we feel happy and proud for a short period of time. But then, the pride quickly dissipates and the happiness melts away. We revert to our emotional baseline. We often feel angry or frustrated with ourselves about that. Why can’t I just remain happy, or proud?

If you think about our ancestors and imagine some of them achieved something, and then they rested on their laurels forever, that would not be a good outcome. Instead, it would be better if they achieved something and felt good for a brief period, and then began craving their next goal and their next accomplishment. The dissipation of happiness and pride in one group would lead them to outcompete those who rested on their laurels.

The reason our brains are subject to the hedonic treadmill is by evolutionary design. It helps explain why happiness is so elusive, especially long-lasting happiness. It takes some of the sting out of the hedonic treadmill. It helps to know that this is not a pathology. Your brain is like this for a reason. The apparent surface irrationality is undergirded by a deeper adaptive logic.

There’s other reasons that happiness is elusive too. There’s unavoidable competition between people for status, for jobs, for mates, for food, etc. As long as different people have different goals and don’t have perfectly overlapping fitness interests, there’s going to be some competition between people. As long as there’s some competition, there’s going to be some unhappiness because other people might be besting us. Or, we may not be able to attain our goals because there are obstacles in our way.

Also, the overexpression of negative emotions such as anxiety is another reason why it’s difficult to achieve lasting happiness. Evolutionary mismatch is a factor (some emotions may not be conducive to our success anymore). Also, emotions don’t evolve for our happiness, they evolve for our survival and reproduction. Thus, we should not be surprised when they don’t feel good, but they work to help us solve our problems.

Anger

Anger is one of the most vilified emotions because it can lead to a lot of problems. At the same time, it evolved for a reason. Anger can be thought of as a device for negotiating with others who haven’t placed enough value on our welfare. When we feel that we’re being mistreated, or we feel that a friend, a loved one, or similar is not placing enough emphasis on our well-being. We express anger in a way to bargain with them, or negotiate with them for better treatment in the future. What anger is basically saying is: “Treat me better, or I will impose costs on you.” Or, if you’re already in a collaborative relationship with that person: “Treat me better, or I will withhold benefits from you until you treat me better.“

Organisms without anger would not do very well. In these kind of diegetic relationships (interactions or elements that living beings perceive as part of their world), they would not advocate for their interests.

Envy vs. Jealousy

Jealousy for protecting your valued relationships is usually discussed in the context of romantic relationships, but there can be jealousy related to friendship as well. Protecting your valuable friendships from friendship poaches, or from loss.

Envy is about wanting something that somebody else has, that you don’t have. Maybe coveting that job position, salary, house, car, partner, increased status, etc.

Treating yourself like an ancestor that you should be helping, is a useful framing to understand and come to appreciate your emotions more through their intended utility/function.


Need for Cognition

If you’re the kind of person who likes explanations and understanding stuff, then understanding why something appears irrational, but is underlain by a deeper adaptive logic takes some of the chaos, confusion, frustration and pain out of it.

Actually, there is a personality trait, or an individual difference that describes the extent to which you enjoy thinking about challenging things like working on puzzles, understanding how things work, enjoy explanation and comprehension. These insights may help some of us take the edge off our negative emotions, especially those people who are higher in need for cognition (who feel a need to understand). They typically try to work out why they are, the way they are. Why humans are the way that we are. Every time that they get a new answer, they tend to feel a little more satisfied.

If you’re not just dealing with sadness, but you’re constantly asking yourself: “Why am I like this? Why do I have the hedonic treadmill?” Then, these insights help you understand why, and you can put it to rest. You’re not weird. Your brain’s not pathological. It’s working as intended and that might provide some solace, especially for those who like seeking answers.

Ultimately in life, happiness comes down to the decision between choosing to become aware of our mental afflictions, or the decision to be ruled by them. Becoming aware of your mental afflictions seems like the more satisfactory approach.


Emotions and Cognition

A lot of us tend to place emotions in this dichotomy with cognition, where it’s emotions vs. cognition. Emotions are irrational and cognition is rational. Emotions are impulsive, and cognition is reflective. That can lead us to thinking of emotions as something that need to be reigned in, or controlled.

It can be beneficial to reframe emotions or modify them when we experience them acting at the wrong times, or to a wrong degree, but we should drop the dichotomy. We should realize that emotions as well as cognition are complex information processing instantiated in the nervous system that evolved for a reason. It’s adaptively rational and the surface level irrationality actually has a deeper logic to it.

We can have a more nuanced approach, and on a case-by-case basis we can decide if the emotion is serving us or not. If it’s not, we can try to reframe, or use other tools. It’s important to realize both the good that they do, and the bad that they do, and be able to hold them both in mind at once.

When We Have Emotions About Our Emotions

We have second order emotions, when we’re, say, frustrated with ourselves for being anxious, or annoyed with ourselves for falling pray to the hedonic treadmill. Emotions are normally fairly short-lived, but you can renew them if you have a thought that triggers the emotion again.

Typically, when you’re angry about something, the initial episode of anger will be fairly short. A few seconds to a few minutes. The reason it can go on for much longer is that you’re re-experiencing the trigger of thinking about the thing that made you angry. In doing so, you’ve basically renewed the emotion. This is one of the reasons why cognitive reframing is important, as you can try to stop renewing the emotion.


Spandrels

Spandrels, sometimes referred to as byproducts, are elements in the human mind or body that are not adaptations evolved for a specific reason but rather side effects of other evolutionary processes. Examples include the whiteness of bones, which is a side effect of calcium, and the redness of blood, due to hemoglobin, neither of which evolved for their visual properties.

The term spandrel originates from architecture, where it describes a byproduct of two architectural features. When questioning whether a trait is an evolved feature with a specific function or merely a byproduct, the concept of a spandrel is invoked.


How to Apply the Learnings in Daily Life

The main thing is in issuing both dangers of an over-vilification of emotions, or an over-acceptance of the ancestral wisdom embedded in them. Replacing that with a case-by-case nuanced approach where you an look at each emotion and think why it’s there, what its function is, and whether or not it’s useful in this setting.

For most of us when we experience, say, sadness the tendency is to distract from it, run away from it or medicate it. Instead, sit with it for a minute. Examine what kind of rumination it’s throwing at you. See if it’s telling you to quit any paths you are on that are not working. Is it helping you to reallocate your resources elsewhere, and telling you that this thing isn’t working and you need to quit? If so, well then it’s useful.

If you can’t identify any trigger for it, and it’s persistent and interfering with your ability to do your job and love your loved ones, and it’s messing up my life, then it might me misfiring and you can try to reframe it cognitively. Or, meditate, exercise or consider taking medication.

For each emotion that crops up, you can begin by asking: “What’s the function and the purpose of it?” Is it serving a useful function in this instance, or is it misfiring? Is it actually helping me to recalibrate and solve a problem? Or, does it need to be interrogated, revised and reframed?




📚 Sources and References


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