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Text|Yin Chuanhong.
In fact, we can take control of our lives by pursuing certain pleasant emotions and avoiding unpleasant ones.
When the final exams were approaching, an elementary school student wrote to a newspaper he often read, asking a question: "I will be nervous when I take the exam, happy when I score 100 on the exam, and sad when I fail the exam......I want to ask, why do people have emotions? ”
Ben Bernstein, an American psychologist and educator, argues in his new book "The Psychology of Examinations: Psychological Fitness and Examination Room Performance" that the pressure caused by exams makes many people anxious and have a senseless competitive mentality. This pressure is devastating, forcing people to focus on results rather than processes, and causing pressure that discourages young people from learning.
This does create "emotional issues". The emotions that arise in the situations mentioned in the elementary school student's question are actually different emotional states. The so-called emotion usually refers to a state of physical and mental excitement produced by an individual after receiving a certain stimulus. It has long been noted that the expression of pleasure, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise through facial expressions is essentially the same in different cultural contexts. These are the 6 basic types of emotions and some common psychological phenomena. In other words, there are basic, universal human emotions. More than a century ago, Darwin believed that humans had evolved a limited set of basic emotional states, each with its own unique adaptive meaning and physiological expression. Modern science has further studied the neural mechanisms of different emotional states and moods, as well as the neural and developmental basis of facial expressions.
In the early 20th century, scientists discovered that the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure located on the inside of the temporal lobe of the brain and connected to the front of the hippocampus, is closely linked to emotions. In 1939, two more scientists confirmed that monkeys had abnormal emotional reactions after injuring the amygdala, which they called "mental blindness". A striking feature of this phenomenon is that animals lose their fear and no longer avoids objects that should trigger a fear response.
By the 50s of the 20th century, the amygdala was thought to play a key role in fear-related physiological and behavioral responses. Since then, the amygdala has become the focus of research on emotional processing in the brain. In the field of neurobiology, functional neuroimaging evidence developed in recent years also supports the claim that the amygdala is involved in the processing of fearful facial expressions. Further research has also shown that although the amygdala also responds to other expressions such as pleasure and anger, it responds significantly more strongly to fear.
In the view of evolutionary biologists, emotion is a first-class mechanism, part of the "device" of biological regulation, and most emotional responses are the result of evolution and fine-tuning over time. In contrast, negative (negative) emotions evolved in response to the threats faced by Stone Age ancestors: anger allows us to explode, rebel, and defend ourselves in the face of danger; Fear makes us curl up, retreat, and flee from risk; Disgust leads us to expel and avoid bad things.
Emotions are written on the face, but they are rooted in the heart. The biological "purpose" of emotions is obvious, and its "adaptation" is also part of the biological mechanism. We all experience it to a greater or lesser extent, but we can actually take control of our lives by pursuing certain pleasant emotions and avoiding unpleasant ones.
As Ben Bernstein admonished, life is made up of a series of trials that we all have to play a role in. Throughout our lives, we need to be behaving at all times. Every challenge, whether it's an exam at school or a test in our daily life, is an opportunity for us to strengthen ourselves, perform at our best, and grow. Exams can be effective in helping us become our highest level of self.
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This article was published in the early February 2024 issue of Xiaokang.