Human emotion is a subject that many find too complex to fully understand. Humans experience such a variety of different emotions that it can be difficult to explain the reasoning and purpose of each one. The research question that will be addressed is: How did evolution introduce the emotion factor into the human way of life? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The first dive into the idea of ​​evolutionary emotion was by Charles Darwin himself. Darwin wrote a book called “The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals” in which he provided the first evolutionary theory of emotion. Darwin explained that emotions are hereditary in humans and are not just learned as we grow up in society. According to him, emotions had two main purposes: to aid survival and communication with other creatures. An example of survival aids is how fear causes the human body to become more precise with certain senses to help it escape. The idea of ​​emotions aiding communication is based on the observation that humans can recognize different emotions in each other and other animals, and the same is true for other living creatures. Darwin described emotion according to three different principles. The first is that beneficial habits are reinforced over time like the emotion disgust. Disgust helps you avoid things that may be toxic or harmful to the body. The second explains that situations opposite to those around which a habit has already formed will result in opposite reactions. The third is that there may be a buildup of energy in the nervous system that is released in a certain behavior. This happens involuntarily and Darwin called it a “nervous discharge.” Darwin supported his theory of evolutionary emotion through two main examples. The first is the example of newborns. At birth, newborns cry and express other vital emotions, and even in babies born blind, they still exhibit the same vital emotions, including the behavioral response related to seeing an individual. The second example is one based on the idea that different creatures can instinctively recognize certain emotions in others. The process by which emotions occur in our brain is difficult to explain. In an article written on the evolution of human emotions, Joseph E. LeDoux, an American neuroscientist, states: “First came the 'primitive' cortical regions in early mammals. In these organisms, basic survival functions related to feeding, defense, and procreation were carried out by fairly undifferentiated (weakly laminated) cortical regions (primitive cortex, including the hippocampus and cingulate cortex) and associated subcortical areas (such as the amygdala) that were closely linked to the olfactory system. Later mammals added very novel laminated cortical regions (neocortex) that enabled enhanced non-olfactory sensory processing and cognitive functions (including learning and memory abilities, reasoning and planning, and, in 'man, language). An example used repeatedly to explain how emotions work is fear, and LeDoux provides an explanation of how fear occurs in the brain. “As we have already mentioned, Pavlovian conditioning is the initial phase of avoidance conditioning. AAfter subjects have rapidly undergone Pavlovian conditioning, they then slowly learn to perform avoidance responses using the CS as a warning signal… In Pavlovian fear conditioning, the subject is presented with a neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) , usually a tone, followed by an unconditioned aversive stimulus. (United States), usually a shock to the foot. After one or at most a few pairings, the CS comes to elicit innate emotional responses that occur naturally in the presence of threatening stimuli, such as predators. » Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, pioneers of the idea of ​​evolutionary emotion, state that "[emotion] is the statistical composite of selection pressures that cause the genes underlying the design of an adaptation to increase in frequency until they become species typical or stably persistent. and “modes of operation or orchestration of all the different mechanisms; deactivate, activate some, in particular situations, which are particularly well designed to deal with the challenges of a given situation. They describe how emotions are like programs that help solve evolutionary problems. These programs are triggered by signals sent when different situations occur. Cosmides and Tooby also use the example of fear in their explanation. The situation of being in the presence of a predator will send a signal that activates the fear program in the brain. This program aims to help resolve the situation by changing the brain's current motivations, prioritizing the body's functions at a given time, and changing the sensitivity of certain senses. Almost all features of psychology can be altered by different emotional states. These states slightly modify certain psychological characteristics in order to access a mode of that characteristic which, through evolutionary adaptation, is the “best bet” to be able to help resolve the situation. Conditions or situations relevant to emotions are those that (1) recur in ancestral ways; (2) could not be successfully negotiated without a higher level of program coordination (i.e., circumstances in which independent operation of programs caused no conflict would not have selected for an emotional program and would lead to emotionally neutral states of mind); (3) had a rich and reliable repeat structure; (4) had recognizable clues indicating their presence; and (5) in which an error would have resulted in significant fitness costs. Due to the different roles played by chance and selection, the evolutionary process constructs three different types of outcomes in organisms: (1) adaptations, that is, functional machines built by selection (generally typical of l 'species), (2) by-products of adaptations, which are present in the design of organisms because they are causally coupled to traits that have been selected for (usually typical of the species), and (3) noise random, injected by mutation and other random processes (often not species-typical). In a talk given by June Gruber of Yale University, she describes EEA, or the evolutionary adaptive environment, which helps us understand the real reasons why emotions were necessary. and why they appeared in the lives of early hominids. Hunter-gatherer societies that still exist today were studied to help understand why humans needed to evolve emotions, and the properties of EEA were revealed. The five properties that Gruber talks about are: vulnerability of offspring, monogamous bonds,.