Monday, December 5, 2016

Can there be ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ emotional responses? Is it ‘correct’ to be horrified by accounts of torture?

In life, there is no such thing as ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’; everything can be correct and incorrect at the same time. Everyone is different, that is said a lot, however it can be proven that everyone is different (internally and externally); therefore there is no way to say that we feel the same way as someone else- many people tend to do this when they express that they “know how you feel”; this is very ‘incorrect’, as there is no way that they could possibly know exactly how you feel, unless they have a program that gives them access to your brain’s activity.
Moreover, one person’s feelings may differ form another, this is because there s no way of ‘explaining’ how we feel to someone else, there are only a limited amount of words to use when describing how we are feeling.

This image is a picture of Plutchik's wheel of emotions. As viewed, we can tell that many emotions are linked to other emotions, therefore the way we describe how we feel may differ to the way someone else understands it. For example, if we tell someone that we are ‘amazed’ about something, they may change that into thinking that we mean that we are ‘surprised’ by a certain situation- this reinforces the idea of language not being able to explain/describe how we feel.