Dr David McGrath

Spine Physician

MB BS (Hons) FAFOM, RACP, FAFMM
Master of Pain Medicine

All animals, including us have emotions, but what are they about? Why do we become angry,sad,fearful,anxious,hungry,thirsty,curious ? The simple answer,must be,that they are useful.
Let's look more closely at the maths.
Suppose we have 200 behaviors and only one emotion as a preporatory state for these behaviors. That is, we are either ready or not for the next behavior. Any one of 200 disturbances leaves us, either prepared or not prepared, for any one of the next 200 recursive possibilities.When prepared,we are 80% successful. When unprepared we are 20% successful. Further assume, that we are prepared 50% of the time. Here is the contingency table.

EmotionBehavior	Successful behavior	Unsuccessful Behavior
Prepared For Action	80	20
Not Prepared For Action	20	80

With these numbers, we are successful, 50% of the time.
If the environment is regular, where one disturbance is often followed by another, we would do better if we had more emotions, one for each coupled situation. Imagine 4 scenarios, where we could prepare for the likely incoming disturbance based upon the previous disturbance. Each emotion has the same success ratio as before.(80% for ready and 20% for not),but with four emotions, our preparedness is 80%.

EmotionBehavior	Successful Behavior	Unsucessful Behavior
Prepared For Action Set 1	32	8
Prepared For Action Set 2	32	8
Prepared For Action Set 3	32	8
Prepared For Action Set 4	32	8
Not Prepared For Action	8	32

Now the successful actions are 136/200=68% of the time.
What this illustrates,is the potential power of emotions as a prepatory state for the next likely disturbance in a regular environment.
In other words,it pays to be angry,because most likely, a situation is about to occur that requires an action supported by anger.
Is there a downside? Probably. What if the system become corrupted, with over dominance of anger,an emotion only appropriate to 20% of the time. Now the table looks like this.

EmotionBehavior	Successful Behavior	Unsucessful Behavior
Prepared For Action Set 1 (anger)	32	128
Prepared For Action Set 2	0	0
Prepared For Action Set 3	0	0
Prepared For Action Set 4	0	0
Not Prepared For Action	8	32

All of the actions,supported by other emotions,are now lumped into the anger camp. This reduces the overall success to 20%, a big reduction from 68% success,and even worse than the non differentiated emotional behavior at 50%. This occurs, because,being in the wrong emotion is worse than having no emotion. (0% success rather than 20%)

Although these considerations are only elementary, they do give an insight into the value and anti-value of emotions as a success strategy for life.
There has been a lot of effort put into exploring emotions in the pain context. Pain management counselling is the clinical outcome of this thinking.