Nina Parks Adventures into Humanity: Exploring Emotions Part 1

When I was a youth (11-16) I cringed at the thought of dealing with my emotions. It was too much for me to process and confronting your pain head on is a difficult thing to do...especially when you lack a safe support system (ie, Family, friends, work environment). At any rate I thought I'd share my adventure into understanding emotions. Starting with Emotions as defined by Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) (Western Philosophy).

Aristotle's List of Emotions

Anger: An impulse to revenge that shall be evident, and caused by an obvious,

unjustified slight with respect to the individual or his friends. Slights have three

species: contempt, spite, and insolence.

Mildness: The settling down and quieting of anger.

Love: Wishing for a person those things which you consider to be good—wishing them

for his sake and not your own--and tending so far as you can to affect them.

Enmity (hatred): Whereas anger is excited by offences that concern the individual,

enmity may arise without regard to the individual as such. Anger is directed

against the individual, hatred is directed against the class as well.

Fear: A pain or disturbance arising from a mental image of impending evil of a painful

or destructive sort.

Confidence: The opposite of fear. Confidence is the hope (anticipation), accompanied

by a mental image, of things conducive to safety as being near at hand, while

causes of fear seem to be either non-existent or far away.

Shame: A pain or disturbance regarding that class of evils, in the present, past, or future,

which we think will tend to our discredit.

Shamelessness: A certain contempt or indifference regarding the said evils.

Benevolence: The emotion toward disinterested kindness in doing or returning good to

another or to all others; the same term represents the kind action as an action; or

the kind thing done considered as a result.

Pity: A sense of pain at what we take to be an evil of a destructive or painful kind, which

befalls one who does not deserve it, which we think we ourselves or some one

allied to us might likewise suffer, and when this possibility seems near at hand.

Indignation: A pain at the sight of undeserved good fortune.

Envy: A disturbing pain directed at the good fortune of an equal. The pain is felt not

because one desires something, but because the other persons have it.

Emulation: A pain at what we take to be the presence, in the case. of persons who are by

nature like us, of goods that are desirable and are possible for us to attain--a pain

felt, not because the other persons have these goods, but because we do not have them as well.

Contempt: The antithesis of emulation (Persons who are in a position to emulate or to be

emulated must tend to feel contempt for those who are subject to any evils [defects and

disadvantages] that are opposite to the goods arousing emulation, and to feel it with

respect to these evils).