Why do many researchers believe that emotions are biologically based?

Question

Perhaps the question needs to be amended but I think the answer they are looking for has to do with the evolutionary necessity of emotions

Answer 1

The instincts, repressed for some reason or other have a tendency to carry energy over onto the symptoms that we identify as emotions. To say that emotions are biologically based only and that there is no other objective determination to the exclusion of the more intrinsic activity is to under-simplify it. There is both the lower nervous activity related to the depression associated as an emotion also in that it is what works to obtain the attention that will bring us those precious strokes of stimulation.

Answer 2

Um...

Because everything has a physical construct. If you are spiritual, I'll bet you that even the spiritual world is based in some kind of palpable material. We do not have magical things appear, anywhere. At one point scientists did believe that life grew from nothing, until they discovered the microscopic world. And it was Einstein that formulated that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. So the concept of basing emotions from an invisible source is naive, imo.

We take examples like women feeling overly emotional during their cycle, right? haha...it's the hormones, that's biology dude. There are so many other example, like in mental illness, mood disorders...where emotions are greatly impacted because of the physical defects of the brain. As a nurse, I've taken care of people who've had traumatic brain injury...they are prone to bouts of anger, emotionality because of the injuries. I know it's a hard concept to grasp, because we do not actually 'see' the components of our emotions...but remember, that is a sticking point for our rationale as people. In history, when people could not visualize things on a microscopic scale, or what happened within our bodies, we used myth to fill in the blanks.

Answer 3

Because of serotonin. It is a biological chemical in the brain that reacts to certain stimulae and often affected by nutrients ingested. Some people's emotions are relegated by substances that can trigger certain emotional responses. Alcohol, for example can trigger anger, depression, euphoria depending on the base personality of the person taking it. It affects the serotonin levels, as can chocolate. There have been studies on the effects of chocolate with emotionally abused people (predominantly women). There is something in it that these people use to quell the fluctuating levels of serotonin that seems to help adjust the imbalance. Drugs, sunlight, whatever. Biological or chemical. It works out to be the same.

Answer 4

Because they've been demonstrated in the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and limbic system.

"The neural encoding of emotions is complex, but although different emotions involve different brain areas, in each case the underlying structure fits with a model in which the significance of incoming sensory information is processed by mid-brain structures & those stimuli which have motivational significance (that is require action) lead to physiological changes associated with arousal, expressions of the relevant emotion & the experience of emotion (through cortical activation)."

Martin Yeomans, October 2002

Answer 5

We're biological organisms with our nervous systems being electro-chemical in nature. It makes sense that emotions are biologically based.

Answer 6

Chemically based. Because when you put chemicals in people, they change moods.