We may sing in choirs and bridle our rages behind a placid countenance, but we patrol the world under the auspice of an affect system sculpted over millennia of evolutionary forces. Individuals often are revered for cultivated tastes and seemingly dispassionate responses to life's challenges, but emotions, archaic in origins, saturate human existence throughout the life span. Emotions promote behaviors that protect life, form the basis for the continuity in life, and compel the termination of life. They can be an essential ingredient for and an overwhelming obstacle to optimizing human potential. Given their evolutionary heritage and daily currency, there is little wonder that emotions have preoccupied humankind throughout recorded history, and there is little doubt that emotions are both biologically rooted and culturally molded.
Emotions represent in part a primitive past, the bubbling influences of a reptilian heritage.
Indeed, the classic assumption is that emotion wreaks havoc on human rationality, that dispassionate analysis optimizes decision-making. Accordingly, the emphasis in our society has been on cognition and rationality and on ways of diminishing the influence of subjectivity and emotion in decision-making and behavior. The notion that an individual's emotions were a disruptive force in rational thought, adaptive action, and a fulfilling life also has been shown to be a gross oversimplification. Emotions are much more than reptilian reflexes. Although the obstacles of a civilized world still occasionally call forth blind rages, emotions are increasingly recognized for the critical role they play in higher forms of human experience.