Emotion Essay

Our emotions accompany us through every part of our lives and play a part in every decision we make so subconsciously that we are often oblivious to the fact that it is actually a way of knowing. Emotion is a subjective and a very personal way of knowing. There are no definite definitions for the word love or sadness. We can only estimate to an extent or roughly refer to our own experiences in order to understand other people's emotions. Such knowledge issues arise when we reflect upon the meaning of emotion. How do we define emotion? How do we know that our sadness is the same as our friend's sadness? This highlights the ambiguity of the meaning of emotion. To answer this, we must reflect upon the other ways of knowing as an explanation. The mere fact that I am writing this essay using language is an example of how language is interlinked with emotions. Language allows us to describe our emotions and provides us with a way of communicating our emotions with one another. Similarly, our ability to understand other people's sadness, anger, happiness, or even identify our own emotions shows us that reason is also often linked with emotions. Sense perception also plays a role in helping us identify other people's emotions. One example of this is reading other people's facial expressions. We are using our sensory perceptions, such as seeing to observe the other person's actions. This may include playing with hands to indicate that perhaps they are nervous or bored, turning red to indicate embarrassment. These sensory perceptions allow people to gain a "sense" of what they perceive someone's emotions to be. This comes to show us how emotions and the other ways of knowing, for example sense perception and reason, act together as ways of knowing.

People often judge reason to be a more concrete and more reliable way of knowing than emotions, as emotions are often very shifty and ambiguous as described in the opening paragraph. This however, is contradicted when the phrase "I don't know what came over me" is used. We often describe our reason being "clouded" by our emotions. The term "emotionally hijacked", is a state when an individual's cognition is overpowered by their emotions. (1) For example, when I was little, my teachers often told me repeatedly that if a bee landed on me, I should stay still. However, when this did happen, I was so fearful of the bee stinging on me, that I immediately began to violently shake my arm; as a result, the bee stung me. For some reason, I wasn't able to sit still and respond to the situation rationally, as my sense of fear and distress momentarily overtook me. This situation demonstrates our emotions can affect our ability to think rationally, and shows us how our different ways of knowing exist together in situations, and in this instance, emotions overpowered reason. However, reason certainly helps us evaluate emotions. Whether this be judging other people's emotions or by evaluating our own emotions, our reason can help us identify and evaluate potential consequences of responding to our emotions, which may serve to prevent us from reacting instinctively to something we may later regret. For example, we may often find ourselves angry or frustrated at our friends for something they made have said or done without knowing the full story. Our reason may help us to identify the roots of our anger and help us to rationally think and look for more information in order to subside our negative feelings.

Recent studies have also indicated that any of our normal decision making capabilities such as eating food to solving ethical issues are all affected by our emotional response. (2) Already, we have seen how emotions are intertwined with reason, sense perception and language as ways of knowing. However, emotions also prove to play a major role in many of our subjects as well as the other ways of knowing. Emotion in the humanity subjects geography and history will be further evaluated in this essay.

Firstly, in history, the involvements of emotions in sources and texts seem inevitable, and therefore can be said to have a level of unreliability in them. Emotions are interpreted differently depending on person to person. The whole basis of history is what people of the time recorded down. A knowledge issue which arises when discussing emotion in history is the reliability of recounts from sources as different emotions about a certain historic event can lead to different conclusions about the same event. This applies especially for historical diary entries, where strong emotion may result in biased perception, resulting in extremely emotive language, which may lead readers to grasp onto their prejudices, and thus jumping to the wrong conclusion. For example, last week, my history