An informal discussion about formalizing emotion

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Note: This is an informal discussion. While I mention several sources worthy to peruse, a lot of words written are my creative liberty and a method of exploration. I would rather my readers define by themselves what their emotions mean to themselves, but I do personally find some benefit in rationalising what I feel, and it may be useful to you too.

Here’s a very common notion that may be of interest if your city regularly sees birds, specifically crows: you must be nice to crows. Crows will remember those who wronged them and those who didn’t. If you didn’t, you’ll receive gifts in coins, ephemera, or trinkets.

This behaviour is readily accepted as the norm, yet it is strangely bizarre. What drives these animals to do such things? If we apply the common-man’s knowledge of survival of the fittest, it makes little sense for them to conduct these things. Why expend resources to reward a creature who was previously beneficial? You could argue that it makes complete sense they would do so, a beneficial ally could prove to be beneficial again in the future, hence increasing the fitness of these birds. But to assume that a beneficial ally will remain beneficial requires an underlying notion; that is, the notion of trust.

Trust is a little difficult to define. Dictionary-wise, it is the belief that something is safe and reliable. But where exactly did it come from? Are humans built with trust encoded in their DNAs, or is there no true “trust gene”? To delve into this, let’s take a look at a study from 1987, in which we look at a simpler organism.

A case study on trust

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The study on stickleback fish enlightened a very basic form of mutual cooperation strategy, known as tit-for-tat. (1) You start with both parties cooperating. Then, whatever your opponent decides to do, you mirror. If your opponent continues to cooperate, you do so as well. If your opponent decides not to, you do not. Tit-for-tat is evidence for the evolutionary origins of cooperation.

Crows operate on a different scale; they “assume” that there is continuity in benefit, ergo, trust, which elevates this interaction above tit-for-tat. There are elements present to affirm the presence of trust, which are (1) the memory of previous benefit and (2) the ability to predict future benefit, which requires a brain capable of identifying patterns. Could we, therefore, hypothesize that trust is a natural effect of the brain’s search for patterns? The hypothesis would fit well, and helps us understand trust as something more tangible. Instead of an abstract “a belief of goodness”, it is “an evolutionary by-product of pattern seeking, applied towards other sentient organisms”.

Trust is debatably not genetic; it seems to be influenced by social and environmental factors more than genes. (2) You are not born with trust, you develop trust. This fits our hypothesis. Provided you have memory of benefit, and sufficient information to develop the pattern-based understanding that benefit will continue, you will develop trust.

Crows and stickleback fishes are good model organisms, but let’s revisit humans. If you were to encounter a very distrustful person, you could reasonably assume they’ve had very bad experiences overall. You could extend this argument further, and say that trust is a biological response towards the environment they have had; similar to sweating on a hot sunny day, they are responding to stimuli reflexively.

Compare these two situations: (the “I” in this case refers to an abstract narrator)

1. I bought an ice cream, I tripped, the ice cream fell and I felt upset.
2. I’ve been scammed by an ice cream seller, so I don’t think I’ll trust people more easily from now on.

In both situations, the environment provided me with an “input” and an “output”. In the first situation, the cause is “ice cream on the ground”, and the result is “upset”. For the second situation, the input is “scammed by an ice cream seller” and the output is “more distrust”. The only difference between these is the complexity of the emotion. Being upset is temporary and mostly affects the current situation. Perhaps, because “I” was upset, “I” would cry a little, or perhaps buy another ice cream, or think of buying ice cream in cups from then on. The second situation is a little more complex. It could mean that all other decisions involving purchases in the future would be affected or it could mean that decisions relating to ice cream sellers only would be affected. However, the overall impact will be greater than that of being upset from dropping your ice cream. But if you take a step back, and look at the overall picture, they’re both responding to situations. Your response is not that different from that of a crow who has been treated terribly by an evil, devious human.

While trust is a complex behavioural trait, we have divorced it from its poetic undertones to its most basal understanding. Trust is a response to multiple stimuli, compounded into one complex emotion. It could be argued that a lot of deep, emotional responses are this: responses to various stimuli that when compounded together can manifest as an emotion. We cannot say exactly that it is a cause-effect relationship and identify causation without statistical proof but we can, with a lot of hand-waving, somewhat identify a binary relation, in which the relation is “A makes you feel B”.

Anger, for instance, occurs when a violation occurs, whether it is the safety of a certain individual or their boundaries which is used to define their sense of safety. You can observe territorial behaviour prevalent in many animals manifest in anger, because they feel like their physical boundaries, a territory they feel the safest in, is violated. This has evolutionary benefits. Assume that the anger from territorial behaviour is acted upon, and the borders of territory are maintained. Access to resources is retained and survival is guaranteed another day.

Even more complex emotions can be broken down to evolutionary responses - grief is a response to losing a person close to you, and losing such a person means the individual loses an ally or a person capable of providing emotional comfort. Other individuals observe the behaviour of those undergoing grief, and the collective understanding is to prevent the death of another individual and prevent grief.

A more concrete example is visible in depression: it appears that depressive symptoms can manifest when a person is ill. (3) Illness itself becomes the trigger that causes depression to occur. This is also beneficial evolutionary-wise, causing a person to self-isolate, preventing further infections to spread into the community, and to rest, which allows a person to gradually recover.

Gendered perspectives on emotion

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Women are from Venus, men are from Mars. Women are emotional, men are logical. Such is a pervasive thought. But it is an interesting thought; it assumes a strict dichotomy, not only between men and women, but between “emotional” and “logical”. Previously, we argued that trust is a by-product of responding to stimuli, and so is being upset. A stimulus resulting in a particular emotion simulates a binary relation of this-to-that.

This argument of a dichotomy falls flat once we dissect the origins of emotion as a logical response, moreso with an underlying complexity that fails to be factored in when defining what is logical and what is emotional. To begin with, you shouldn’t take statements like “men are logical” definitively. Men are certainly emotional, it comes with being an intelligent mammal. Emotion is a manifestation of social intelligence. It is the capacity to react and understand intent and implication.

Statements that pit women and men through an emotional/logical lens are just symptomatic of a patriarchal system that affirms the myth of female hysteria. Hysteria, by itself, is uniquely diagnosed to women, as a method of oppression. Hysteria often manifests in great expressions of emotion, such as irritability and anxiety. This stigmatises female emotion as a disease and limits their movement. Additionally, the definition of emotion can be adjusted according to need. One of the top 5 movies in IMDb (as of 2026) is literally titled 12 Angry Men, yet men do not face the stereotypical view of being an emotional type. The common stereotype does typically exclude anger as an emotion, or otherwise consider it to be a masculine emotion.

But at its core, what is wrong with being emotional? Being emotional may mean being more perceptive to stimuli, and being unconsciously more receptive to patterns. There is nothing wrong with feeling. In fact, there should be no moral weight towards feeling. You could be feeling angry, but decide to calm yourself down with a cup of coffee or tea, or you could be angry and start slamming doors and banging tables. These are actions resulted by feelings, but while the motive that informs the action is there, the decision still lies on the person. This is where the moral weight lies. To stigmatise emotion is the lack of rationality that accompanies patriarchal behaviour. If we keep stigmatising emotion in a patriarchal environment, we affirm that men should have less of it, and this alienates genders from one another to detrimental effects.

The body plays a part

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Emotions may fit into the realms of poetry and fantasy. Trying to define it in a logical sense may seem antithetical. But I would urge you to view coexistence of emotions and logic to be supporting each other instead of existing as a dichotomy.

While complex behavioural traits are heavily influenced by social and environmental factors, there are genetic and hormonal factors playing a part in emotional responses. Variation in the CD38 genes cause an individual to be more prone to being stressed or anxious when faced with a problem related to relationships, whether it is platonic or romantic. (4) This means that some aspect of emotional response could be inherited from your parents as genes are inherited from parents.

The gene itself plays a part in the oxytocin signalling system, also known as the “love hormone”. While typically released in sex and childbirth, levels of this hormone have had influences in bonding, relationships, and community. It is a little difficult to define what the hormone does and how it affects how you act, but it appears it is not completely hands-off influencing people’s feelings and actions. For example, if you give a person a dose of oxytocin, they are more likely to be able to give you eye contact, and are also more likely to trust people. (5,6)

Recall our definition of trust, coined before. Now we add a layer of complexity to it. Our pattern-seeking brain tends toward a more positive outlook in predicting goodness when loaded with oxytocin. Does this mean that our emotions are hard-coded in us, that we aren’t in control of ourselves? Well, maybe not to the point of losing control of ourselves. Of course, there is some physiological basis to why you feel what you feel. But what you feel isn’t who you are, it is what you do. Your decisions are based on who you are, and who you are is based on what you’ve been through. I believe in free will, that you can with your own power, break free from the inclinations of your birth.

Being overwhelmed and what comes out of it

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When we talk about our emotions overwhelming us, sometimes it manifests into physical actions that may or may not be beneficial to us. When your environment, as a stimulus, continuously provides you with scenarios that trigger your distrust, you can become a mistrustful person. When your environment continues to give you stress, you could react to it with anger or depression. A recent discovery found that when infected with disease, ant larvae will signal other ants to kill it. (7) This absurdly drastic response can prove an evolutionary benefit. It prevents other ants from being infected with disease, and the larvae can die knowing it did its colony good.

In humans, this sort of suicidal behaviour has no benefit. No, not even Canada’s MAID. We have treatment for illness and there is no urgency to prevent spread of infection through dying. Anything “untreatable” will be treatable in the future. No suicidal behaviour in humans is beneficial. It is an overly extreme emotional reaction to the very understandable struggles of modern life.

It is truly a difficult time to live. It is the modern era and humans have had little time to adapt. Within a few millennia we have ditched the fletched arrows and started typing in plastic keyboards. The thrill of hunting a deer barely exists, now people stare at stock markets, waiting for the numbers to go up and down, just to emulate how it used to feel when your spear landed on a herbivore’s neck. Stimuli have changed too - you don’t fear being stalked by a light-footed jaguar, you fear your manager calling you for a layoff. The screen is blue while the sun is white. This isn’t enough time for your body to physiologically evolve with time. This makes things so different, and emotions change so much. Especially since new stressors like the job market and economic instability are lurking in the horizon.

It’s easy for your brain to trip up and feel like something is wrong, but it probably helps that we have things to help us rationalise. So far, we know that we are responding to the environment, and some things hard-coded into us will drive our response. It’s often hard to think clearly when you are extremely emotional (though you can argue that thinking clearly is thinking with emotion). But once you are stuck in a spiral, it really does help to take a step back and use what we know to figure out why we feel what we feel, and what we can do about it.

graph TD;
A[I feel intensely sad/angry/impulsive and I don't know why] --> B[I might have a psychological predisposition to feeling that way]
A --> C[There's a recent stressor that is really affecting me]
A --> D[I have a need that isn't being met]
B --> E[I need to be careful when taking care of myself]
C --> F[I need to do something about this stressor]
D --> G[I need to find ways to fulfill this need. Maybe a partial fulfillment is fine.]

Let’s say you are feeling intensely sad. It’s possible that you are physiologically at a higher risk of being so; this means that you should take more care with yourself. Be kind to yourself, and give yourself things to focus on. If you feel sad about a recent death, you should be equally kind to yourself, and give yourself the space to heal. If you feel sad because you feel trapped, try to think of practical ways to get out of your situation.

Remember that your body is responding, and that your emotions don’t define who you are. It is how you react, informed by your emotion, that defines who you are. If you are angry all the time and take your time to sit and knit quietly until your anger simmers, nobody will remember you as an angry person. You’ll simply be remembered as the person who knits.

It feels useful for me to rationalise how I feel and use the conventions of logic to stop from drowning in a certain emotion. If you look at it from a different perspective, we are just mammals trying our best after all.