Читать книгу Emotional Confidence: Simple Steps to Build Your Confidence - Gael Lindenfield, Gael Lindenfield - Страница 14

The reason which evolutionists have given for the origin of emotion is that, as animals grew in sophistication, their young needed a longer period of parenting to safeguard their survival. The emotional bond between mother and child ensures that both act in ways that will mean that the young are less likely to be abandoned until they are fully capable of surviving by themselves. Interestingly, scientists have found that the brains of the very earliest of animals, the reptiles, are totally devoid of emotional neurons. On birth, baby lizards, I am told, instinctively stay motionless to avoid being instantly eaten by Mum. In contrast, today’s young humans, with their sophisticated emotional brains, seem to know instinctively how to take actions which tug on Mum’s guilt strings to keep her hovering around for a lifetime!

But of course, emotions can do more for us than ensure we get protective bonding with a parent. They also help us to make decisions and act in ways which will sustain other key relationships. As life on earth has progressed, we humans have become faced with more and more choices concerning our means of survival. Emotions may have been designed in part to stop us becoming paralysed by an otherwise overwhelming array of options. For example, it is thought that love and jealousy are the ways nature devised to help us select and stay in a long-term, stable relationship to rear our young when social and geographical mobility greatly extended our choice of mates. Similarly, shame and guilt may have evolved to keep us tied to specific sets of people. Being bound by shared ‘restrictive’ values means that we are more likely to stay working co-operatively while we are completing the kind of complex tasks which modern civilization requires and which cannot be undertaken by lone individuals.

So, in short, the reason we have emotions is to motivate us to take actions which will be beneficial to the maintenance of our well-being and the survival of the human race.