Question: What makes you have feelings like jealousy, happiness and anger? Well done for staying in the competition.

Ian Stephenson answered on 25 Jun 2014:

Emotions like anger and jealousy are refinements of the basic flight/flee response:

Animal behaviourists talk about four basic behaviours that essential to survival (sometimes called the four F’s):
Fighting
Fleeing
Feeding
Having Babies

Making sure you have food is pretty obvious, and if an animal doesn’t produce babies, then there won’t be any animals around in the figure, so they’re pretty obvious.

When an animal is in a dangerous situation (for example about to be food for another animal) it has two choices: stay and fight, or run away. Your body reacts physically to a situation like that by unceasing your heartbeat, shutting down non-essential functions, and giving you a “power up” energy boost to deal with the situation.

These reactions are all sub-conscious reactions, taking place in your whole body, but your brain is just part of your body, and it gets the same treatment. At a conscious level this produces anger, fear, jealousy etc.

However there’s a real problem when you take an “animal” (I mean human!) out of the wild, and put them in a school or an office. Now when something happens to you, it still triggers the same physical response (because its millions of years of programming that’s built in to your body), but now your conscious brain is telling you that hitting someone and running out of the classroom isn’t the right thing to do – you should be sitting down and talking to someone to resolve the problem… but your body is screaming “hit them and run”…. this conflict is a big part of what we call stress, and refines the emotions we have, as our conscious brains try to manage the conflicting feelings.

Happyness is a bit simpler – its our body saying “well done – have treat” to our brains. When ever you do something that is good for you, your brain gives itself some chemicals which make it feel good. in turn your brain likes feeling good, so it does the good thing again. So for example when you work hard and succeed at something your brain gives its self a reward when you succeed, so next time you have to to something hard your brain will want to work hard at it to get the treat again.

Again this can also be “mal-adaptive” (when something we’ve learnt to do because we think it helps, or it used to help, but now it doesn’t). Some substances like chocolate trigger the happy feeling in your brain automatically just by eating them. That’s Ok if you just feel you need a treat now and then, but it explains why some people eat far too much chocolate, as they’re using it to “cheat”, and feel good without earning it.