Emotions are cognitive, not innate, researchers conclude

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I find it interesting to read that upon a survey of the literature, these researchers seem to say that they're concluding that people's emotions are not in fact 'hardwired,' but emerge as a spontaneous experience resulting from the structure of their minds.

Emotions are not innately programmed into our brains, but, in fact, are cognitive states resulting from the gathering of information, New York University Professor Joseph LeDoux and Richard Brown, a professor at the City University of New York, conclude in the latest issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

Existing work posits that emotions are innately programmed in the brain's subcortical circuits. As a result, emotions are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. In other words, emotions aren't a response to what our brain takes in from our observations, but, rather, are intrinsic to our makeup.

However, after taking into account existing scholarship on both cognition and emotion, LeDoux and Brown see a quite different architecture for emotions—one more centered on process than on composition. They conclude that emotions are "higher-order states" embedded in cortical circuits. Therefore, unlike present theories, they see emotional states as similar to other states of consciousness.

(full article) https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-02- ... nnate.html

This research may have very interesting implications for an individual who is blazing a path through life for their own identity and spirituality. And I think that maybe the best hope I see in all of this is that it bolsters the idea that living in a state of love is an acquired and acquirable skill for individuals and as well for collective culture. Somewhere in all that would be the whispered warning: "so is hate..."