Are emotions maladaptive from the human culture's perspective?
The proposal to analyze emotion, structured in the Limbic System and Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal axis, using the reference of "Adaptive External Events Protection System".
The "Adaptive External Events Protection System" is a definition that can be used as an alternative to the expression "Alert and Defense System". This expression describes the essentially adaptive role of the organism's response system in stress and danger situations.
The term "protection" emphasizes that the organism's response system has the main goal to preserve the organism's integrity and survival, acting as a defense system against possible threats. The word "adaptive" emphasizes that these responses are adjusted and adequate to the nature and intensity of the external stimulus, allowing the organism to survive and adapt to different situations to which it is exposed.
Inclusion of the expression "external events" emphasizes that the adaptive protection system is activated in response to environmental and external stimuli, including physical or psychological threats. Thus, this definition can be used to describe the complex and vital role of the organism's response system in preserving individuals' lives and well-being facing the environment's demands.
If we are looking at emotions from the perspective of organism physiology, they can be considered adaptive because they allow the organism to respond to external events to preserve its homeostasis and survival.
However, it is important to understand that the influence of human culture can affect how emotions are understood, expressed, and perceived, making them less adaptive in some cases.
When it comes to psychological disorders, we know that the activation of stress-associated physiological responses associated with the adaptive external events protection system can contribute to the genesis and maintenance of these disorders. This is because chronic exposure to stressful situations can lead to physiological alterations that affect the structure and functioning of the brain, affecting emotional regulation and decision-making.
In this sense, understanding the adaptive external events protection system can be very relevant to understanding and treating psychological disorders because it allows us to identify interventions aimed at regulating the organism's stress response and promoting homeostasis.
In summary, understanding the adaptive external events protection system can be an important way of understanding the physiological aspects of emotions and how they affect our mental health and well-being, independent of cultural context.
Preprint Emotions as part of the External Events Adaptive Protection ...
I concur somewhat with your assessment about emotions having an adaptive dimension, but I am looking at the general effect of Hypothalamic regulation ( i.e. applicable to negative valence defensive emotions as well as positive valence excitation emotions, eg. affection (love), joy, and embarrassment).
In particular the effect is to extend the feedback cycle between pairs of neurons of the thalamus and cerebral cortex for every signal from 3 loops to a higher number.
Please refer to my detailed descriptions of a model of consciousness that supports most of the accumulated data over the last century.
Experiment Findings EXPERIMENTAL PERCEPTION PROTOTYPE IMPLEMENTING ASSOCIATIVE M...
By implementing this model in JavaScript in such a way that anyone can examine the code, and alter it's performance, I demonstrate how associative memory can be formed and how it can be recalled via a perceptive reflex when triggered by similar cortical neural activation. If any part of it seems too arcane I will be happy to answer questions.
I am attaching a screen cap of how the system works when I reduce the trigger sample to 100 pixels from 150 pixels wide which makes the normal perception at 3 Thalamo-Cortical Feedback loop cycles produce a fairly weak image from the memory engram. I combined that screen cap with a screen cap from an emotional version of the same small sample trigger by retesting the whole thing after setting the Number of Thalamo-Cortical Feedback loop cycles to 6. This is what the limbic system can do to the Thalamus by releasing serotonin making the neurons more sensitive to the feedback from the cortex and able to continue feedback for more cycles.
The result is that perception becomes more progressively ramified, and that reactivated resting cortical neurons expand the total set of associated neurons that are reactivated.
If you access the test software which runs in any browser and play with it in this way (use the retest button to get the same sample going after any mods) you can see the animation that illustrates how ramification is achieved.
Therefore my contribution to your approach is that limbic effects upon the thalamo-cortical loop produces more impressive perceptive responses, but it also creates a kind of psychedelic layering or potential chimeric effect of exaggeration. This altered state of mind can help a creature resolve unusual solutions when influenced by emotion via threat or delight or other emotional shift.
Hi, Jerry. I greatly appreciate your comment and appreciate even more having access to your publication.