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Thoughts and Emotions
May. 21st, 2012 10:57 amA coworker was mentioning how his mother would correct him as a child when he said he hated something. "You don't 'hate' something. You 'dislike greatly'," is what she would tell him.
[Do I have the punctuation correct in that last sentence? Should that be a comma or a period after the word greatly? Oh the things my brain worries about.]
This spawned a conversation in which I stated my opinion regarding emotions and thoughts. Hate is an emotion. Disliking something is a thought. Hate and dislike are somewhat overlapping on a Venn diagram, meaning they are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive.
He told me that he was once told that you can only hate another person. I disagreed with this as well. Since hate is an emotion, it's internal, and while it typically is attached to an object of attention (or person, as the case may be), an outside object is not required in order to feel hate. Knowing about misattribution of arousal, people tend to misattribute their emotions to the wrong object/person on a regular basis anyway, because their thoughts get in the way. I may dislike something greatly, and I may be feeling hate in that moment, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the object of my dislike is the cause of my feeling of hatred.
I would be very interested in hearing any dissenting thoughts on this.
[Do I have the punctuation correct in that last sentence? Should that be a comma or a period after the word greatly? Oh the things my brain worries about.]
This spawned a conversation in which I stated my opinion regarding emotions and thoughts. Hate is an emotion. Disliking something is a thought. Hate and dislike are somewhat overlapping on a Venn diagram, meaning they are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive.
He told me that he was once told that you can only hate another person. I disagreed with this as well. Since hate is an emotion, it's internal, and while it typically is attached to an object of attention (or person, as the case may be), an outside object is not required in order to feel hate. Knowing about misattribution of arousal, people tend to misattribute their emotions to the wrong object/person on a regular basis anyway, because their thoughts get in the way. I may dislike something greatly, and I may be feeling hate in that moment, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the object of my dislike is the cause of my feeling of hatred.
I would be very interested in hearing any dissenting thoughts on this.
