• Question: What do you think are the point of emotions and feelings?

    Asked by anon-215376 to Ian, Chris, Bogdana, Alex on 20 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Chris Fullwood

      Chris Fullwood answered on 20 Jun 2019:


      This really isn’t my area of expertise, but I suspect that emotions have an adaptive function in our evolution. For example, positive emotions like love help us to bond with others and this is useful in terms of ensuring that couples are invested in each other and look after their offspring. Negative emotions like anger on the other hand might be useful in terms of defending territory or seeing off rivals.

    • Photo: Alex Lloyd

      Alex Lloyd answered on 21 Jun 2019:


      I agree with Chris’ answer – emotions like fear developed to help keep us away from things that could harm us, like spiders. Over time, we evolved this emotional reaction because many of our ancestors would die from not avoiding things that could harm them. Those of us who developed the emotional reaction when we saw spiders would live for longer to pass on their genes, so over time we evolved emotional reactions to certain things that we saw/experienced.

Comments