Seven Basic Emotional Systems
We all have basic emotional behavioural patterns which are driving forces and can be aroused to provoke emotional state changes. We can turn them on and we can turn them off. The seven systems are; seeking or desire, fear or anxiety, rage or anger, lust or sexual, care or nurturance, panic or distress, and play or creative. All necessary brain systems that lead our emotional behaviours and feelings and are important to consider in regards to our underlying need to eat. Lets start with the seeking or desire system. This is a highly generalized emotional system, and it is involved in all of the other motivational processes. It is also known as the brain reward system that we talked about earlier. When the seeking system is aroused it feels good in a very special way, not necessarily as a reward but as an excitement of living in pursuit of a reward. When we think of our history as nomads were and still are active explorers, finding new recourses and making new discoveries. This seeking or desire system mediates our appetite, our appetite is based in the urge to find, to consume, and to hoard. This is to do with the dopamine system that arrises from the ventral tegumental area (VTA), encompassing the nucleus accumbens and our olfactory system as well (our sense of smell). These regions of the brain is the basis of the appetitive motivational system, which energizes our engagement with the world. Seeking out our desires from our environment as well as providing us a sense of meaning from our everyday occurrences of life. This system energizes our intentions and our desire to self-activate and self-stimulate and it does so in very addictive ways because when this system activates, we find it rewarding. The dopamine neurones of the VTA are based in the provision of one single message; to be appetitively aroused, to be goal directed, incrementally increasing in intensity by being activated by environmental cues, in order to be able to predict those rewards. This system can also be called the wellness system because it contributes substantially to our social bonding, our sexual bonding, loving feelings, and musical excitement. This system of basic emotion links up with our cognitive system so that we can gain in learning, process thoughts which increases into our self-awareness and reflective appraisals. Along with this system which incorporates all addictions whether they be drugs or behaviours, there are other basic affects as well. These basic affects are sensory, not emotional, and these affects cover feeling states from that of disgust to delight and from feeling states of hunger to that of thirst and go along with socially constructed emotions. Socially constructed emotions are also feeling states and they go from guilt and jealousy to shame. These feeling states happen when the basic emotional system interacts with your cognitive thought-reflective processes and learning. These feeling states come from your life-experiences rather than from your basic raw emotional integrative seeking/desire system. These emotional rudiments have the guiding principle of raw effects that arise from instinctual emotional behaviours rather than from higher self-related cognitive awareness of our existence. Our thoughts are intertwined with our emotional body dynamics and this leads us to seek pleasure from food.
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