Article Title: United by feelings

Article Summary

In the article at hand, the authors attempt to explain the true nature of humankind’s emotional functioning, and draw attention to man’s emotions in contrast to his often-praised rationality. The authors start by detailing that human emotions are never studied as elaborately as they should be, and focus has gone towards ‘scientific’ acts like artificial intelligence, ignoring the ancient psychological profiling of humans by Charles Darwin. Along with their attention-redirection attempts, they attempt to make the point that the affective bottom-up and not the constructionist top-down method is the way to go when understanding human emotion. The second professes that real emotion does not exist, and emotions are only high intellectual responses to situations, based on a person’s socio-cultural background. There are several defects with this theory, namely that science has identified basic emotions in all kinds of people, without which true social development and exchange would never have been possible. Also, the theory would ignore creatures, like babies or animals, that do not have high cognitive processing or knowledge, from the ambit of having emotions, and the theory also has less research supporting it compared to the affective view, because it has not been around for as long. The dual purposes of establishing ground for both human emotion and the affective view of it are accomplished by the authors by the end of the article.