NATURE+OF+EMOTION

Back to HOME > IB TOK > EMOTION > WHAT THE GUIDE SAYS ABOUT EMOTION =THE NATURE OF EMOTION (IBO, 2006)= • Can we ever know anything purely through emotions? How do emotions interact with reason, sense perception and language? • To what degree is emotion biological or “hard-wired”, and hence universal to all human beings? To what extent is it shaped by culture and hence displayed differently in different societies? • What sorts of things count as emotions? Are emotions and feelings the same thing? • Can feelings have a rational basis? Is “emotional intelligence” an oxymoron? Robert Solomon says that emotions are “systems of judgments”, and that “virtually all of our experience is to some degree ‘affective’, and even our most dispassionate judgments…can be adequately understood only within some larger emotional context”. Is he correct in claiming that virtually all sense perception, and reasoning, must involve emotion? • Is it possible to experience an emotion, a feeling, an attitude or sensibility that cannot be expressed in language? Can an emotion, such as love or grief, have its origins in, or be shaped by, language? • Can emotions be trained? To what extent can we control our emotions, not in terms of how we act on them, but what we actually feel? Do cultures select emotions to foster and use? • Are concepts such as solidarity, patriotism and racism examples of collective emotions? • Is faith an emotion, a feeling, or neither?