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.Sometimes we respond emotionally to matters that were impor-tant to us earlier in our lives but that are no longer relevant.Thevariations on each theme that add and provide detail to what is iden-tified through automatic appraising begin to be learned very early inlife—some in infancy, others in childhood.We may find ourselvesresponding inappropriately to things that angered, frightened, ordisgusted us earlier, reactions that we now deem inappropriate toour adult life.There is a greater likelihood that we will make mis-takes in our early learning of emotional triggers simply because ourlearning mechanisms are less well developed.Yet what we learn earlyin life may have greater potency, greater resistance to unlearning,than what we learn later in life.(This assumption is common tomany forms of psychotherapy and is supported by some research.)Our autoappraisers are powerful, scanning continuously, out ofour conscious awareness, watching out for the themes and variationsof the events that have been relevant to our survival.To use a com-puter metaphor, the automatic appraising mechanisms are searchingour environment for anything that resembles what is stored in ouremotion alert database, which is written in part by our biology,through natural selection, and in part by our individual experience.15Remember that what is written by natural selection may not betriggers themselves, but preparations that allow some triggers tobecome quickly established in the database.Many psychologistshave focused on a related but different set of issues, how the auto-matic appraisers evaluate a new event to determine, in my terms,whether it fits an item already in the emotional appraisal database.Ihave some doubts about the validity of what they have suggested, asit is based on what people tell them, and none of us is aware of whatour mind is doing at the moment it is doing it in the automaticappraisal process.This research has provided good models toaccount for how people explain what makes them emotional.In anycase, their suggestions are not directly relevant to the theory I suggestin the rest of this chapter about what we become emotional about.This database is open, not closed; information gets added to it allthe time.16 Throughout life we encounter new events that may beinterpreted by automatic appraising as similar to a theme or varia-tion stored in the database, and when that happens an emotion istriggered.Psychologist Nico Frijda importantly emphasized thatwhat I am calling the variations are not just the result of prior directexperience, but often are new stimuli we encounter that seem rele-vant to matters we care about, what he called our concerns}7Since we don't need to divert our conscious attention to watch forthe events that have become emotional triggers, we can use our con-scious processes to do other things.(It is a sign of mental disorder,as I will explain later, if our conscious mind is preoccupied with thepossibility that emotional events may be about to occur.) Once wehave learned to drive a car, we do so automatically, free to focus ourawareness on a conversation, listen to the radio, think about someupcoming event, and so forth.When we make a left turn, we don'thave to stop listening to the radio to go to the correct lane after theturn.And yet, if danger occurs, we will still do the right thing.Thisis one of the great strengths of emotions, why they are functional.Unfortunately, what we respond to may not always be appropri-ate to our current environment.If we visit a country where theydrive on the other side of the road, our automatic processing can killus, for we can easily do the wrong thing when we come to a trafficcircle or make a turn.We can't have a conversation or listen to theradio.We must consciously guard against the automatic decisionsthat we would otherwise make.Sometimes we may find that emo-tionally we are living in another "country," another environmentthan the one to which our automatic appraising mechanisms aresensitive.Then our emotional reactions may be inappropriate towhat is happening.That would not be much of a problem if it were not for the factthat our emotional appraising mechanisms operate incredibly quickly.If they were slower, they wouldn't be as useful, but there would betime for us to become conscious of what was making us become emo-tional.Our conscious evaluations could allow us to interrupt the pro-cess when we think it inappropriate or not useful to us, before anemotion begins.Nature did not give us that choice.If on odds it hadbeen more often useful to have slow- rather than fast-appraisingmechanisms, more useful over the history of our species, then wewould not have such rapid, out-of-awareness, automatic-appraisingmechanisms.While emotions are most often triggered by automatic appraisers,that is not the only way in which they can begin.Let's turn now toconsider eight more pathways that generate emotion [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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