Is there a limit to human emotion?

I had an emotional reunion/separation from a significant personality in my life the other day, who broke my heart and spent the 13 months since being disappointing to a level I couldn’t have imagined. See my previous posts for some of the details.
During our discussion, which took place on a beautiful beach, at the base of a cliff overlooking a lighthouse, he described me as “biggest person he knew – with never-ending warmth, and untold bubbling depths of anger.” He was referring to how deeply I feel my emotions and, in truth, I can’t disagree with him.

His comments prompted lots of thoughts about myself which led on to thoughts about the wider world and concept of emotions and emotional depth – the factors that influence them and the question Is there a limit to how deeply someone can feel something? Is an emotion finite?

Happiness – can you only feel so much before it stops? Sadness? Anger?

Supposedly humans have six base emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust. All of the other, more complex, emotions are made up of combinations of these six. But if you’re feeling one in its pure form – is there a limit to it? Or can you feel it to untold intensities? The theory of the six base emotions describes that these emotions evolved to allow humans to face the ecological threats we came up against during the most challenging time for our species, they are hardwired into us with each emotion having a distinct neurological circuit in our brain.
Babies and young children do not experience complex emotions as far as we know, they appear to be something we learn to do as we grow, presumably as we learn how to make connections between the different base circuits. If people learn it differently, or at different rates, will they experience base and complex emotions in different proportions?

It is well documented that learning or remembering something is achieved by repetitively stimulating the electrical circuit of that memory or fact in your brain: going over and over it will make it stick. The analogy of walking over a field of long grass to make a path – the more times you walk over the grass the more permanent the path becomes. Is this true of emotions as well? If we experience an emotion frequently, do we get better at experiencing it? Does it become easier to achieve that emotion? Do we default to it more readily? Does it become almost like a reflex? In the way a piano players hands will automatically play a song with which they are familiar if the player isn’t concentrating on the song she is playing?
Following along this line of thought, is frequency of emotional experience something that influences depth of emotional experience? There is the obvious confounding factor in this that frequency of actual experience will cause an emotional response of its own: the response to constant disappointment is more than the sum of the response to the individual disappointments.

Is depth of emotional experience related to anything else? Does someone who has unlimited capacity for understanding facts or complex concepts more likely to have unlimited capacity for experiencing emotions, base or complex? It would be silly to try and argue that the most intelligent people are those with the most emotional scope, as that is very obviously not universally true. But is there a similar concept for emotional experience? Intelligence and brain capacity is dictated largely by the brain’s capacity for making electrical connections between different parts of itself. If the base emotional circuits of the brain is highly wired, that must mean that emotions are felt more deeply, than a less wired emotional brain.

(This is different to EQ, the emotional quotient, which pertains more to understanding of other people’s emotions. I think. I’m not an EQ expert. Although I assume I have a good one.)

People’s brains are wired differently. That’s why some people are generally intelligent, and some are really good at one thing. It’s obviously not quite as simple as being good at maths of your brain has lots of connections, but that’s an easy way to think of it without getting too bogged down in the neuroscience of the situation. So are people with a generally well-wired brain (read: those with the potential for huge learning and knowledge) more likely to have a well-wired emotional centre, and therefore a greater depth of emotion, and a greater capacity for complex emotion? The development of the brain, with regard to intelligence is dictated by antenatal factors (including genetics, antenatal environment and stress felt in the womb, as well as antenatal toxins and infections), perinatal factors (how much stress is felt by the baby during the labour and birthing process) and post-natal factors (mainly the environment and stimulation over the first few years of life, when the brain is growing and laying down its main connections). If a person with excellent genetics has a completely lovely pregnancy, a stress-free birth, and a delightfully relaxed and stimulating first few years they are in a great position, neurally-speaking.
I personally think that there’s potentially no end to how far a person can understand facts and the complexities of, say, engineering, or computing, or something else very clever… and I guess that I think there must not be an end to how deeply a person can feel a base emotion, in the right circumstances.

The right circumstances must include no competing emotions. I know that I’ve had times when I’m really really happy with one aspect of my life, but the depth to which I feel that happiness (the height to which I feel that happiness?) is marred slightly by a dissatisfaction about some other aspect of my life. That is different to being very happy about one aspect of a situation, and having that feeling be marred by a dissatisfaction about some aspect of the same situation – that would lead to a complex emotion, rather than just limiting the base emotion.
If there are no competing emotions, I think a base emotion could probably be felt to uncharted depths in an optimally-wired brain (the lucky person described above with the clever genetics, nice pregnancy and stimulating infancy). Maybe that’s why ‘getting your mind of it’ is so effective. If you’ve got nothing to distract you from your sadness, or your happiness, or your anger, you just keep going into it.

 

I suppose it’s a similar concept to boredom…

The psychology phrase “mood is to affect as whether is to climate” describes quite nicely what the word affect means. As far as I can figure it, it’s sort of the default emotion of your brain, which is base in childhood and becomes more complex with age – as the ability to form complex emotions grows. If you have no current situations that are leading to engagement of your emotional centre, your affect circuit just fires up. Maybe that explains why some people – those with happy affects – are happy when they haven’t got much going on, happy just plodding along; and some people are glum, or melancholy, or something else poetic.

 

And what about those people with emotional centres that aren’t well wired… either those with brains that have a generally lower capacity for making connections, or those who have an under-wiring of just their emotional circuits.
Perhaps the emotional centre has an impact on the rest of the brain. Could it be that we take in information in such a way as to achieve the emotion we have the capability of? If it is that the base emotions evolved and are hard-wired into us, then they are more primal than the some of the other functions of our brains. People with limited comprehension, say someone with a learning disability due to a brain defect, will often see things as more ‘black and white’ than someone with a greater cognitive ability, and may have a narrower, less deep, emotional range. Which bit came first? Does the limited understanding mean that they don’t grasp the complexities of things and therefore their emotional centres are being triggered by more simple stimuli, which is convenient because their emotional centres are less able to deal with more challenging stimuli; or is it that their emotional centres dictate how the information they’re taking in is processed by their cognitive centres? Does our brain limit its intake to what it can handle emotionally?

 

Lots of questions in this post. Answers on a postcard please.