How The Mind Works

Emotions are likely ubiquitous among humans across the globe. There are many arguments that emotions are culturally specific, and yet what are specific are the actions or images that bring about the emotions, not the emotions themselves. People have surprisingly similar ways of expressing anger, sadness, happiness, and surprise. Even in cultures that have remained isolated from Western societies, we see similar emotional expression and full recognition of emotions expressed in pictures. Therefore, emotions are likely part of the core of being human. Why we have emotions is also a controversial question, and Pinker contends that emotions help us decide what to do next. If we want or need multiple things, we can’t partially go after all of them. We need to feel fear or urgency, thirst or hunger, a general desire to achieve a goal to motivate us to go after it. When there are multiple goals, more intense emotions help us decide what to do first, but then we are still feeling the lack of the other goals, so we don’t forget them.

Disgust is one of the emotions we see expressed the same way in cultures all over the world. However, we see it expressed toward very different objects or behaviors.