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An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world… In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion. (Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain)
Emotion functions as a messenger from the self, an agent that gives us an instant report on the connection between what we are seeing and what we had expected to see, and tells us what we feel ready to do about it… Emotions signal the secret hopes, fears, and expectations with which we actively greet any news, any occurrence. (Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart)
Reason and emotion are intertwined
While Plato and Spock 🖖 would have you believe that reason and emotion are opposites, contemporary neuroscience shows them to be deeply intertwined.
Emotional Labor
Emotional labor is the act of suppressing one’s own emotions or the physical manifestations thereof for the sake of protecting another’s emotions. It is labor because it is psychologically costly.
Emotional labor… requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others… This kind of labor calls for a coordination of mind and feeling, and it sometimes draws on a source of self that we honor as deep and integral to our individuality. (Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart)