Robert Levy's Aspects Of Feelings Are Not Necessarily Emotions

2555 Words6 Pages

ROBERT LEVY
Robert Levy argued that feelings are not necessarily emotions. It all depends on the relationship between the person and something else. A feeling tends to provoke some sense of action. In addition, feeling is the physiological state of an individual, or something inside of that person. The example used in class is the statement, “I am wet.” We explained this by saying that the feeling is what happens when some part of a person’s body enters conscious awareness. Another example could be breathing. We do not spend our time consciously taking each breath. We just breathe without ever really noticing it, unless something happens, such as breathing harder than normal after running.
A feeling becomes an emotion if you understand it …show more content…

He looked at the difference between hypercognized emotions and hypocognized emotions. Hypercognized emotions are emotions that are surrounded with cognition. In other words, there are more words to describe it, more schemas associated with the emotion, etc. An example of this would be anger. There are a lot of different words to describe anger within the English language, such as rage, irritation, or frustration. Levy said that the Tahitians talk about anger a lot. In fact, the Tahitians fear anger, because it is considered destructive and hurtful. Anger must be controlled. This does not mean that they are angry more often. Instead, they just talk about it a lot. This is a good example of a hypercognized …show more content…

Affectless emotions are emotions without any physiological reaction. For example, if you are around a bunch of people that are acting a certain way, it may cause a display of emotions without the actual feeling. Or in Samoan culture, someone may show respect by bowing or obeying a person, but that does not mean that they feel any sort of respect for that person. Emotionless affect is when a person has a physiological response without emotion. This may go back to display rules; an individual can feel those feelings, but cannot show the emotion because of what is expected of them. For example, a Samoan cannot be angry with their parents. I am sure that they still feel angry, but they must not express it. Interestingly enough, there is a way of expressing this, without really expressing the anger. In Samoa, the term often used is musu, or “I don’t want to.” There is no need for an explanation so no one has to admit that the reason they don’t want to do something like wash the dishes is because they are angry. If you can’t acknowledge that you are angry with a person, it may come out in other ways. This suggests that culture can control but not entirely eliminate. Again we are seeing that biology may play a larger role than

Open Document