When someone gets animated others often describe them as emotional:
“John is acting so emotional”
“Jane got so emotional when Ryan said …”
and things like that.
I’d like to suggest an alternative perspective I think you’ll find more precise and useful:
Everybody feels emotions all the time.
What’s the difference?
When someone sits quietly reading, they aren’t acting or feeling unemotional. I suggest the are feeling and acting on emotions as much as anyone. They may feel calmness, relaxation, satisfaction, or something like that, but those are emotions. They aren’t feeling no emotion.
Emotions motivate you. If you got out of bed this morning, something motivated you and you felt some emotion. No emotion means lying in your bed until you die.
An animated or excited person may feel more intense emotions, but not more emotions.
Losing control of your emotions or being unaware of them is different than not feeling any emotions. Both of those situations can be problems, but they don’t imply having more emotions.
Likewise, people often say women show or feel more emotions than men. The mainstream view suggests that men show less emotions
I disagree. I say women and men feel and show emotions in equal amounts all the time. I understand the mainstream view to suggest more precisely that men show less intensity of emotion (I’ll leave it for another post whether that’s accurate). I’ll grant that men feel and express a different range of emotions than women, such as anger, competition, ambition, dominance, and so on. I doubt any father anywhere would hesitate to acknowledge how much he loves his children. Likewise, women feel and express different emotions than men.
Women may show more of other emotions, but neither sex shows more emotions, just different intensities of some emotions and a different range of emotions overall.
The mainstream way people say it suggests greater differences between sexes or people of different ages. It suggests some people shouldn’t show emotion when they do all the time. It suggests you have a problem if you show more or less than others. It suggests people have less common ground than they do.
I expect you’ll have an easier time communicating and understanding someone who feels different emotions than you, but emotions nonetheless, compared to someone who felt no or less emotion overall.
The common belief that men don’t feel or show emotions as much as women must emotionally debilitate a lot of men and create rifts between couples.
I find no basis for that perspective and hope today’s perspective undermines and crowds it out.
I cannot accept this analysis at all. If it is to be claimed that all aspects of life are emotional, and that all of life is a flow of emotionality, including emotions associated with calmness, relaxation, drinking a beer, opening a gate and so on, then one would need to demonstrate how these (presumably) 1000s of emotions are encoded and produced physiologically. I can accept the existence of a handful of emotional states that it might be possible to describe mechanistically, but the rest of the claims about emotions are surely just explanations and literary rationalisations of particular scenarios. For example, just because somebody says “I experienced the emotion of losing a loved pet”, does not prove that the feelings involved require a different emotional state than that associated with any episode of grief or intense dissapointment. Secondly, if emotional states are present at all times and actually drive behaviours (“emotions motivate you”), then would that not imply that these perpetually active mechanistic physiological systems are constantly producing the hormones and other ingredients required for emotionality without becoming depleted or producing habituation responses? Thirdly, saying that women may show or feel a “different intensity…and different range of emotions overall” than men, seems to me to be reasonably compatible with the suggestion that women are more emotional than men. Surely, that could easily be interpreted as meaning much the same thing, albeit said in a somewhat different way – simply the trickery of words. Fourthly, it would seem an almost insurmountable problem to provide evidence that men and women experience “equal amounts of emotionality all the time”. It is not clear to me what scientific protocol would yield evidence for that claim. Fifthly, having read countless variations of these types of arguments trying to establish the idea that women are not more emotional than men, I’m minded to believe that these are not really scientific arguments, but socio-political ones, more often economic ones. Women wish to obtain the same economic rewards and the associated perceived higher status that successful men apparently enjoy, hence it is not currently politically correct to say that women are more emotional than men. A key reason for this is that being rational is often given as the opposite of being emotional, and being rational is linked to better decision-making and better leadership etc in roles that carry greater responsibility. Hence being described as ’emotional’ might get in the way of ambition. Because I do not fully embrace the political-economic and apparently democratic framework of society around us, I do not really care that much if women are more emotional than men or vice-versa. Since I have no particularly strong attachment to the notion of individuality and to the idea of competition between individuals as a means to share basic resources (food, shelter, stable families etc), it does not matter that much to me if people vary emotionally and if one gender is different from the other in some ways.
I’m not sure how to respond, except that it appears we have different concepts of emotions. I appreciate your sharing your views. If they work better for you, I won’t try to influence you otherwise, but the view I posted works for me.