Theory of Emotion and Its Implications

For the past two years, I often feel like good feelings such as joy, happiness, excitement are not good in a sense there is always a recuperation as a result of them. I dislike the idea of the meaning of life is being happy. There are two reasons to me: one is that this idea is selfish, and second is that state of happiness is arbitary. The idea is generalized to any emotion that has a happiness-like characterics, which let’s call the “good feelings”. Of course, there is another side of coin to it, namely, the “bad feelings”.

The theory of emotion is about to how bad feelings and good feelings are formed. Good feeling and bad feeling are not state of our mind, instead it is dynamical. For example, there is not so called “happy” person or “sad” person in the world, because it is not a trait or object in a person. good and bad feeling are actually coming from changing state of a person’s mind, or difference of previous state and next state. Let’s say, the state of mind is modeled with a number $\alpha$, and next state of mind is $\beta$, then the effects of emotion is $\alpha - \beta$. what is more, the mind state will come closer to the $\beta$. In other words, our mind has reference point of who we are, and events happened to us will causes our mind to adjust our reference point. the difference between the reference point is the feeling. For example, we all have something that is evadable to us. if we lose it, that moment, our mind adjust from having it to lose it, which causes a bad feeling. However, while we have it, there is not effect of having good feelings, because of no difference reference points. Another example, People say, “cherish what you have”, is a way to simulating from not having it to having it, which results a good feeling.

The implication of this theory is vast. One thing is that, it justifies my dislike of the idea that “meaning of life is being happy”, because happy is not a state you can achieve, and anyway everyone have it already. What is more, Meaning of life should justify the existence. Another implication is that, good and bad feelings are complementary. like number, if the state of mind is too high, it is highly likely goes down, and big time. so getting good feeling causes bad feeling likely. What’s more, the dynamics goes for long time, constantly good to bad, and bad to good.