Human emotion is a topic that many find too complex to fully understand. Humans experience such a variety of different emotions, and it can be difficult to explain the reasoning and purpose of each. The research question that will be discussed is: how has evolution introduced the emotional factor into the human lifestyle? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayThe first approach to the idea of ​​evolutionary emotion was made by Charles Darwin himself. Darwin wrote a book titled “Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals” and in it he provided the first evolutionary theory of emotion. Darwin talked about how emotions were hereditary in humans and not just learned as we grew up in society. According to him, the two main purposes of emotions were to aid survival and communication with other creatures. An example of aiding survival is how fear pushes the human body to become more precise with certain senses to help escape. The idea that emotions help in communication is based on the observation that humans can recognize different emotions in each other and in other animals, and the same is true for other living creatures. Darwin described emotions with three different principles. The first is that beneficial habits are strengthened over time like the emotion disgust. Disgust helps you avoid things that might be poisonous or harmful to your body. The second explains that situations opposite to those around which a habit has already been formed will cause opposite reactions. The third is that there can be a buildup of energy in the nervous system that is released as a certain behavior. This happens involuntarily and Darwin called it “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 infants born blind still show the same vital emotions, including the behavioral response to seeing an individual. The second example is based on the idea that different creatures can instinctively recognize certain emotions in others. The process by which emotions manifest themselves 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 the basic survival functions related to nutrition, defense and procreation were handled by fairly undifferentiated (weakly laminated) cortical regions (primitive cortex, including the hippocampus and cingulate cortex) and related subcortical areas (such as the amygdala) which were closely linked to the olfactory system. Later mammals added highly new laminated cortical regions (neocortex) that made possible improved non-olfactory sensory processing and cognitive functions (including learning and memory, reasoning and planning abilities, and, in humans, the language)." An example used many times to explain how emotions work is fear, and an explanation of how fear manifests in the brain is provided by LeDoux. “As already mentioned, Pavlovian conditioning is the initial phase of avoidance conditioning. After subjects are rapidly subjected to Pavlovian conditioning, they slowly learn to perform avoidance responses using the CS as a warning signal... In Pavlovian fear conditioning, the subject receives a stimulusconditioned neutral (CS), usually a tone, followed by an unconditioned aversive stimulus (US), typically footshock. After one or at most a few matings, the CS comes to elicit innate emotional responses that occur naturally in the presence of threatening stimuli, such as predators. ] is the statistical composite of the selective pressures that cause the genes underlying the design of an adaptation to increase in frequency until they become species-typical or stably persistent. and “how all the different mechanisms work or orchestrate; turn some off, turn some on, in particular situations, which are particularly well designed to meet the challenges of a given situation. They describe how emotions are like programs that help in solving 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 is intended 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 some senses. Almost all characteristics of psychology can be altered by different emotional states. These states slightly modify some psychological characteristics to access a mode of that characteristic which, through evolutionary adaptation, is the “best bet” to be able to help resolve the situation. The conditions or situations relevant to emotions are those that (1) occurred ancestrally; (2) could not be successfully negotiated unless there was a superordinate level of program coordination (i.e., circumstances in which independent operation of programs caused no conflict would not select for an emotional program and would lead to emotionally neutral mental states ) ; (3) had a rich and reliable repeating structure; (4) they had recognizable signs signaling their presence; and (5) where an error would have resulted in large 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, i.e. functional machinery built by selection (usually species-typical), (2) by-products of adaptations, which are present in the design of organisms because they are causally coupled to traits for which they were selected (usually species-typical), and (3) random noise, injected by mutation and other random processes (often not species-typical). In a lecture given by June Gruber of Yale University, she describes the EEA, or the Evolutionary Adaptive Environment, which is what helps us understand the real reasons why emotions were necessary and why they appeared in the lives of early hominids . Hunter and gatherer societies that still exist today were studied to help understand why humans needed to evolve emotions, and the properties of EEA were revealed. Five properties that Gruber talks about are: the vulnerability of offspring, monogamous bonds, the emergence of care and compassion, the flattening of social hierarchies and the need for collective action. Vulnerability of offspring is common to most animals; However, the offspring of humans are much more vulnerable. It can take years for the human brain to develop enough to start understanding things, whereas most other animals leave their mothers alone before that. Because human offspring are so vulnerable, we have developed a need for emotions such as nurturance, love, and compassion for.