How The Emotions And Feelings Are Related To Acquiring Knowledge

Introduction

The term emotion indicates various enjoyable or distressing mental states. Emotions can be regarded as the indispensable faculty for acquiring knowledge. Through this paper I am trying to analyze how the emotions and feelings are related to acquiring knowledge. Emotions will expand our ideas. and they clearly play an important role in everyday challenges such as responding to threads and building relationships. But emotions also aid in other, more intellectual challenges for humans. Emotions motivates us to engage in new things that strain our knowledge of the world and how it works. According to functionalist theories of emotions, emotions help people to manage their important tasks.

Emotions and acquiring knowledge happen in the brain. Acquiring knowledge needs thinking. our thoughts influence how we feel, how we feel influences how we think. The connection between emotion and acquiring knowledge are complex. When we think about a happy incident our mood improves. When we think about an angry incident, we are likely to feel angry. Also, being in a happy mood leads us to think happy thoughts. The process of abstract thinking is treated as incompatible with emotional response. Emotion promotes rational decision making and in unregulated emotion are impediments to the rational life. each emotion makes a contribution to motivation. So emotions have an important factor to make rational decisions.

Philosophical concern about the emotions are often part of some layer epistemological ideas for eg: descartes wrote his treatise on the passions of soul , that emotions plays an awkward, between centre role in his two substance view of mind and body. A growing body of research findings indicates that a positive affects encourage us to adopt flexible style of things of images. While negative affect lead us to engage in systematic learning process.

The effect of moods have now been found using methods other than hypnosis, and now a wide range of evidences on this issues collected in many different type of experiences, moods, affects attention, problem solving imaginary , free association, social practices.

Emotion and reason, operate in tight harmony for the most part, intertwining their very different ways of knowing to guide us through the world. Ordinarily there is a balance between emotion and reason. With emotion feeding into and informing the operations of the reason and the reason refining. The emotion and reason are semi-independent faculties, each, as we shall see, reflecting the operations of distinct, but inter connected curiosity in the brain.

David Hume questioned the capacities and limitation of reason. He was uncompromising in its defence against any attempt to replace reason by irrational faith or to round ethics of universal and necessary dialectics of reason.

The emotion and feeling

Emotion is an affecting mental state of the animal organism, following the situation, characterized strong feeling by an impulse to action and by physiological change in bodily function.

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Feelings are basically a part of emotion that breaks through into our awareness. A feeling is the sensation or bodily state that accompanies the experience of emotion. What we feel depends on our interest and attention at the moment of experiencing the emotion. If we are not attending to our emotion, we may not feel anything, but the emotion is still there. On the other hand, emotion refers deeper, underlying state that stirs or agitates us, whether or not we are aware of feeling. The term emotion, therefore, refers to the state of or being .feeling is hoe we experience that state and Feeling is an elementary affective state characterized by pleasantness.

It is unfortunate that we have also come to use the term feel to describe activities other than emotion. We “feel” with our hands. We even feels with our intellect as when we say “I feel that you have as much right to sit by the windows as he does.” It is not surprising to find that this multiple use of the word feel has contaminated our understanding of how to experience feeling. We often shortage ourselves because we don’t really understand the difference between the true feeling of an emotion and the many other things we “feel”. This many cause some people, especially men, to engage in intellectualizing or rationalizing and yet think they are” feeling”.

Plato and emotions

Plato also shows the importance of emotion to acquiring knowledge. In Phaedrus Plato portrayed emotions as the two horses of charoite. The charioteer is the controller,which is the reason . Here the emotions are not suppressed but directed by the reason. Actually, the horses have the prime role in the process of acquiring knowledge with the control of reason. Without the horses the charoite does not move further so without the horses the skill of charioteer is useless. so, without the emotions no reason can acquire knowledge.

The emotion Curiosity or interest and acquiring knowledge

Without the emotional curiosity /interest we would not have discovered many new knowledge in this world. Curiosity is an emotion which stimulates us to gain knowledge. It is a fact that many discoveries have been made that were actually accidently discovered. Most of the research is the result of interest/curiosity. If we would not to feel emotions as happiness, anger or curiosity we would not have any motivation to explore new things in the world. Interest involves appraisals of novelty: things that are unexpected, unfamiliar, novel and complex can evoke interest.

The function of the interest is to engage the people in to unfamiliar things. If they are not interested to the unfamiliar thing which remain as unfamiliar always. If they are interested it would make unfamiliar things appealing, motivate people to experience and think about new things. As a result, interest is an intrinsically motivated form of learning. Interest promotes faster, deeper and better learning. When people find the thing more interesting then they will engage with it more deeply and learn it. Interest makes learning process easy. When we are interested in a topic in a book the sentence and paragraphs are easier to remember. For example if we, the students, are interested in the science subjects we would choose science subjects to study in a degree course. And the interest toward the subject will lead us to acquiring further knowledge regarding the subject.

Confusion and acquiring knowledge

Confusion happens when people are learning something that is both unfamiliar and hard to understand. Confusion also promotes learning. It will lead them to know more about the unfamiliar thing. Confusion in learning needs to be about some educational material attempting to be understood by students.two students can experience the exact same educational conditions and interpret them in vastly different ways, leading one to be confused while the other experience no such response. The interaction between subjective experience and content knowledge has led to confusion being defined as' 'epistemic emotion''. When defined as epistemic emotion, confusion is considered to have both cognitive and affective components. confusion has both cognitive and affective components, what is less obvious is whether difficulties in learning that result in confusion are productive or unproductive in learning.

LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE AQUIRING

In platonic point of view love is considered as eros. which is erotic love . he says that eros is an educational agent. according to soctates he considered love or eros as a cosmic strenth that involves all beings. love desires somthing. the love relationship turn to lack somthimg, there for soctates /plato love is desire and desire is the need of what we lacks. inthe story of porus and penia the love knoledge relationship is depicted. porus is rich while penia is poor and beutyfull they mariied together when they are get together penia became pregnant of porus’s child eros. eros is the son of wealth and poverty. erose inherited the charecteristics of both .eron is neither beatiful nor ugly, eros is neither poor nor rich, neither wise (they have already wisdom) nor ignorant (they have not any wisdom) erose is in between them. so eros is lover of knowledge and eros searches the knowledge.eros knows what he ignore for being aware of his ignorance he desies knowledge. So eros/love also help to aquire knowledge.

Conclusion

Emotion has a substantial influence on the cognitive processes in humans, including perception, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving.Emotions has been regarded as the indispensable faculty for acquiring knowledge. mainly the emotions love, confusion interest and curiosity. They are the main source of acquiring knowledge. interest is one of the commonly experienced emotion in everyday life interest involves appraisals of novelty: things that are unexpected, unfamiliar, novel and complex can evoke interest.through the emotion of love we can learn more because if only we love a thing can learn more about the thing.so the role of emotions in acquiring knowledge is crucial.