the title of this article is not “Emotions are always good.”
Good, because a lot of them are very much not. Even if in some sense they “make sense”, this doesn’t even mean they’re useful. Many emotions exist to perform social signaling that won’t actually do anything useful for you as an adult. And most negative-valence emotions are unnecessary except for very niche, specialized social signaling uses (such as dealing with being in captivity or under the control of an abuser or oppressive society).
On top of that, emotions are quite often learned behavior and subject to incentives, and may themselves be conditioned on the triggering of other emotions. It’s not uncommon for people to be taught to feel e.g. ashamed of being happy! Our brains trigger emotions on the basis of its predictions of what it believes will be beneficial to us on the whole, often making the decision that feeling bad is better than risking disconnection with caregivers or getting punished for noncompliance with their emotional directives. These decisions can then sit around basically forever making us feel bad for really stupid reasons. (Like needing to be stressed or anxious to show that one is working hard, doing somehting important, or “taking things seriously”.)
So even though emotions may have evolved for what might be sensible purposes before humans were able to “think things through”, they usually aren’t required for that purpose. For example, one can rationally decide on a policy of deterrence through “irrational” levels of revenge without needing to actually experience anger. Or decide that some behavior isn’t producing good results and decide to do somethig different, without needing to feel guilt or shame.
Good, because a lot of them are very much not. Even if in some sense they “make sense”, this doesn’t even mean they’re useful. Many emotions exist to perform social signaling that won’t actually do anything useful for you as an adult. And most negative-valence emotions are unnecessary except for very niche, specialized social signaling uses (such as dealing with being in captivity or under the control of an abuser or oppressive society).
On top of that, emotions are quite often learned behavior and subject to incentives, and may themselves be conditioned on the triggering of other emotions. It’s not uncommon for people to be taught to feel e.g. ashamed of being happy! Our brains trigger emotions on the basis of its predictions of what it believes will be beneficial to us on the whole, often making the decision that feeling bad is better than risking disconnection with caregivers or getting punished for noncompliance with their emotional directives. These decisions can then sit around basically forever making us feel bad for really stupid reasons. (Like needing to be stressed or anxious to show that one is working hard, doing somehting important, or “taking things seriously”.)
So even though emotions may have evolved for what might be sensible purposes before humans were able to “think things through”, they usually aren’t required for that purpose. For example, one can rationally decide on a policy of deterrence through “irrational” levels of revenge without needing to actually experience anger. Or decide that some behavior isn’t producing good results and decide to do somethig different, without needing to feel guilt or shame.