# Why do humans have emotions?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [September 20, 2011, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999 "2011-09-20T23:25:33Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@CheeseDonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CheeseDonkey)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/1 "2011-09-20T23:25:33Z")
Question is in the title.
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### Author:  [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/2 "2011-09-20T23:31:44Z")
> [@CheeseDonkey](#):
>
> Question is in the title.
As an evolutionary tool to help humans in their decision making; to help them survive and reproduce.
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### Author:  [@CheeseDonkey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CheeseDonkey)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/3 "2011-09-20T23:33:34Z")
> [@jamiemcgarry](#):
>
> As an evolutionary tool to help humans in their decision making; to help them survive and reproduce.
Vague answer is vague.
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### Author:  [@Ambivalid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ambivalid)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/4 "2011-09-20T23:39:21Z")
> [@CheeseDonkey](#):
>
> Vague answer is vague.
Ok, let’s take fear for example. In early times, humans had nothing else to guide them, no society and it’s structure, rules and safety, other than themselves and their feelings. So in a situation that makes a human feel fear, that person (if they are smart enough) will avoid that situation or get out of it or do something to quell that fear.
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### Author:  [@Borzo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Borzo)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/5 "2011-09-20T23:44:03Z")
Emotions make quick decisions for you.
Sometimes thinking takes too long, or might lead to a result that might not be in your best interest.
Also: Vague question is vague.
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### Author:  [@dolphinboy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dolphinboy)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/6 "2011-09-20T23:45:20Z")
And an emotion, such as love, affection or tenderness means that humans stay together, form family groups, and nuture their offspring. Without emotions, humans would only take care of themselves.
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### Author:  [@Borzo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Borzo)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/7 "2011-09-20T23:48:15Z")
> [@dolphinboy](#):
>
> Without emotions, humans would only take care of themselves.
I’d argue against this, to be honest. Without emotions, humans would sit down and think about their family and community, and probably come to the conclusion that it’s in their best interests to continue taking care of them.
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### Author:  [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)
#### Post date: [September 20, 2011, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/8 "2011-09-20T23:51:42Z")
Consider the eye. There is a certain range of frequency of light which is both common and bounces off of objects. This makes it a handy detection tool for the world around us. Splitting that range into three chunks, red, green, and blue, rather than two (dichromatic vision) or one (greyscale) ended up being useful to our ancestors, and so evolution selected for it. For goats, who have dichromatic vision, it wasn’t useful and wasn’t selected for.
The take away point, though, is that vision is just a mix of signals. So far as our eyes are concerned, it’s like taking three numbers like:
1 - 37 - 54
And putting them into an LED display. You then tile thousands of those LED displays together, each with different numbers. In practical terms, that is what our eye sees the world as. It’s just a wall full of LED displays, each with its own set of three numbers.
As human beings, **we** interpret this as something far more meaningful. I consider various colors and shapes to be pretty and others to be ugly. But really, it’s all just numbers, and anything more than that is just me telling myself a good bit of fiction.
Let’s move on to pain. This is just the same. Pain is just a signal sent to my brain to inform it that something is wrong in that location. If you had a ship or an airplane with various sensors scattered about to inform you of problems with the mechanics, that is no different in any way from our pain receptors. “Pain” is just a fancy word for “signal receipt”.
Getting to your answer then, emotions are again, just chemical reactions. When we are happy, this is not “happy” it’s the recognition that a signal (dopamine release in the brain) has been sent by our body.
In this case, we aren’t sensing something from outside. Instead we are sensing a change in our own body. This change is a signal that we have done something which is considered useful by evolution. Breeding (e.g. orgasm) is considered to be very useful by evolution, and hence it is a very strong signal (a large release of dopamine). The desire to get away from something which can kill you (e.g. fear) is also a strong signal (epinephrine and norepinephrine). These are evolution’s carrot and stick to get you to behave according to a predefined morality and social code which has been selected for by evolution as being useful for our race. For instance, it has been evolutionarily advantageous for us to care for and raise our own children. Thus, the presence of our own children causes our body to release dopamine. In practical terms, dopamine does nothing. But like our pain receptors or our eyes, the way that we interpret it adds a layer of inherent meaning that helps us to survive. Dopamine makes us feel happy, in love, or in bliss. If you are a crocodile, you do not get a release of dopamine when you are near your children, nor near your own eggs. And thus crocodiles abandon them to fare for themselves. The evolution of crocodile morality and social code took a different turn than ours.
Basically, emotions are what we call the physical perception of instinct.
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### Author:  [@Foggy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Foggy)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/9 "2011-09-21T00:10:25Z")
So that we can sob quietly in the middle of the night.
foreveralone.jpg
😛
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### Author:  [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 12:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/10 "2011-09-21T00:26:44Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#):
>
> Consider the eye. There is a certain range of frequency of light which is both common and bounces off of objects. This makes it a handy detection tool for the world around us. Splitting that range into three chunks, red, green, and blue, rather than two (dichromatic vision) or one (greyscale) ended up being useful to our ancestors, and so evolution selected for it. For goats, who have dichromatic vision, it wasn’t useful and wasn’t selected for.
>
> The take away point, though, is that vision is just a mix of signals. So far as our eyes are concerned, it’s like taking three numbers like:
>
> 1 - 37 - 54
>
> And putting them into an LED display. You then tile thousands of those LED displays together, each with different numbers. In practical terms, that is what our eye sees the world as. It’s just a wall full of LED displays, each with its own set of three numbers.
>
> As human beings, **we** interpret this as something far more meaningful. I consider various colors and shapes to be pretty and others to be ugly. But really, it’s all just numbers, and anything more than that is just me telling myself a good bit of fiction.
>
> Let’s move on to pain. This is just the same. Pain is just a signal sent to my brain to inform it that something is wrong in that location. If you had a ship or an airplane with various sensors scattered about to inform you of problems with the mechanics, that is no different in any way from our pain receptors. “Pain” is just a fancy word for “signal receipt”.
>
> Getting to your answer then, emotions are again, just chemical reactions. When we are happy, this is not “happy” it’s the recognition that a signal (dopamine release in the brain) has been sent by our body.
>
> In this case, we aren’t sensing something from outside. Instead we are sensing a change in our own body. This change is a signal that we have done something which is considered useful by evolution. Breeding (e.g. orgasm) is considered to be very useful by evolution, and hence it is a very strong signal (a large release of dopamine). The desire to get away from something which can kill you (e.g. fear) is also a strong signal (epinephrine and norepinephrine). These are evolution’s carrot and stick to get you to behave according to a predefined morality and social code which has been selected for by evolution as being useful for our race. For instance, it has been evolutionarily advantageous for us to care for and raise our own children. Thus, the presence of our own children causes our body to release dopamine. In practical terms, dopamine does nothing. But like our pain receptors or our eyes, the way that we interpret it adds a layer of inherent meaning that helps us to survive. Dopamine makes us feel happy, in love, or in bliss. If you are a crocodile, you do not get a release of dopamine when you are near your children, nor near your own eggs. And thus crocodiles abandon them to fare for themselves. The evolution of crocodile morality and social code took a different turn than ours.
I think you got it about as well as anyone can.
But I must protest in defense of our crocodilian brethren. They do, in fact, watch their nests, help their young hatch from the eggs, and help them get to water.
Sea turtles, OTOH… don’t even get me started about those heartless bastards! 🙂
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### Author:  [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/11 "2011-09-21T00:36:04Z")
To add to Sage Rat, human emotions came from our pre-human animal ancestors. Back when we lived in trees, our ancestors had fear, love, anger, sorrow, and so on, and these ape ancestors got their emotions from their monkey ancestors, and they got it from their treeshrewish ancestors back in the Cretaceous Era, and on and on. Our emotions are more elaborate than a fish’s emotions, or a squirrel’s, or a monkey’s, but they are along the same lines.
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### Author:  [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/12 "2011-09-21T00:39:14Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> But I must protest in defense of our crocodilian brethren. They do, in fact, watch their nests, help their young hatch from the eggs, and help them get to water.
Yes, so one answer to the OP’s question is, Because the animals that humans descended from had emotions – they felt emotions such as fear, pain and affection in much the same way as humans do, and for basically the same reasons, involving survival of the individual and of the species.
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### Author:  [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/13 "2011-09-21T02:28:25Z")
> [@Borzo](#):
>
> I’d argue against this, to be honest. Without emotions, humans would sit down and think about their family and community, and probably come to the conclusion that it’s in their best interests to continue taking care of them.
Nope. There are people who suffer the loss of one or all emotions due to brain damage or birth defects and that isn’t what happens. For one thing, they don’t care about their own best self interest; that too is an emotional impulse. Without emotion they care about gratifying their senses since that’s all they have left as a motivation; and they don’t care about the future consequences to themselves or anything else. They’ll spend all the money they have on food, liquor, drugs & prostitutes because those things feel good _right now_, even if they know that they are going to run out of money in the future, since they aren’t capable of caring about the future. They can’t even win a game; they can tell _you_ how to win if asked, but they themselves will just fiddle around aimlessly since they don’t care if they win or lose. Interestingly, they also tend to get stuck in “loops” oscillating between several choices; unlike a normal person they just keep going round and round until hunger or some external influence breaks them out of the loop since they don’t get frustrated.
Now, a high functioning psychopath might act like you describe; but they still have some emotions, they are just all self interested ones.
Human minds ultimately are built with the “design assumption” that emotions are part of the reasoning process; without emotions our minds are crippled. Some artificial intelligence built from scratch might be able to get by on pure intellect, with the functions we use emotions for replaced by some form of reasoning; but we can’t.
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### Author:  [@ModernPrimate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ModernPrimate)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/14 "2011-09-21T04:12:05Z")
I agree with Borzo. Der Trihs… what you are describing is the person **most emotional of all** … ie. it gets in the way of their thinking and planning. A person without emotion would not have any personal desires. When your frontal lobes are damaged it affects your planning and thinking. You are describing a charicature that you consider is what a person with very little/no emotion would be like, and it’s far from it.
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### Author:  [@panache45](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/panache45)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/15 "2011-09-21T04:16:55Z")
The reason why we have emotions is that our ancestors with emotions lived long enough to reproduce, while our ancestors without emotions didn’t . . . or didn’t even want to reproduce.
Without emotions you wouldn’t be motivated to rush out of the way of a predator, and you also wouldn’t be attracted to someone for the purpose of mating.
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### Author:  [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 10:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/16 "2011-09-21T10:59:21Z")
> [@ModernPrimate](#):
>
> I agree with Borzo. Der Trihs… what you are describing is the person **most emotional of all** … ie. it gets in the way of their thinking and planning. A person without emotion would not have any personal desires. When your frontal lobes are damaged it affects your planning and thinking. You are describing a charicature that you consider is what a person with very little/no emotion would be like, and it’s far from it.
No, I’m describing how such people _actually are_, as I said. And a person without emotion still has physical sensation to motivate them. What they lack is emotion to give them more direction and moderation; without emotion they have no drives beyond the immediate gratification of sensation, and no worries about any consequences beyond those sensations. Their intact reasoning powers don’t do them much good because they have nothing to work with.
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### Author:  [@Borzo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Borzo)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 12:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/17 "2011-09-21T12:29:48Z")
> [@Der\_Trihs](#):
>
> Nope. There are people who suffer the loss of one or all emotions due to brain damage or birth defects and that isn’t what happens. For one thing, they don’t care about their own best self interest; that too is an emotional impulse. Without emotion they care about gratifying their senses since that’s all they have left as a motivation; and they don’t care about the future consequences to themselves or anything else. They’ll spend all the money they have on food, liquor, drugs & prostitutes because those things feel good _right now_, even if they know that they are going to run out of money in the future, since they aren’t capable of caring about the future. They can’t even win a game; they can tell _you_ how to win if asked, but they themselves will just fiddle around aimlessly since they don’t care if they win or lose. Interestingly, they also tend to get stuck in “loops” oscillating between several choices; unlike a normal person they just keep going round and round until hunger or some external influence breaks them out of the loop since they don’t get frustrated.
>
> Now, a high functioning psychopath might act like you describe; but they still have some emotions, they are just all self interested ones.
>
> Human minds ultimately are built with the “design assumption” that emotions are part of the reasoning process; without emotions our minds are crippled. Some artificial intelligence built from scratch might be able to get by on pure intellect, with the functions we use emotions for replaced by some form of reasoning; but we can’t.
Depends on your definition of “emotion”. Is _self-interest_ an emotion? Is the desire for self-preservation an emotion? And I’m not talking about \*reflexes \*or things like fight/flight. I’m talking about long-term planning for the purposes of continued existence.
Also, there is no way for injury or birth defects to selectively remove emotions without hugely impacting other aspects of brain function. Like you said, emotions are strongly interwoven with other aspects of brain function. My comment that you quoted was meant to be more theoretical: If humans lost all emotions without “breaking” brain functioning, you’d get people using logic and reason to make their decisions instead. Logic and reason would lead them to making choices that would support their family, friends, and communities.
It might be a strange way of thinking about it, but I view emotions such as love or fear existing _because_ they are/were - evolutionarily - logical.
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### Author:  [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 1:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/18 "2011-09-21T13:06:53Z")
> [@Borzo](#):
>
> If humans lost all emotions without “breaking” brain functioning, you’d get people using logic and reason to make their decisions instead. Logic and reason would lead them to making choices that would support their family, friends, and communities.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? Right now I’m leaning toward **Der Trihs** ’s explanation, since the real-world evidence seems to be on his side.
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### Author:  [@Borzo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Borzo)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/19 "2011-09-21T13:32:05Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#):
>
> Do you have any evidence to back this up? Right now I’m leaning toward **Der Trihs** ’s explanation, since the real-world evidence seems to be on his side.
Since it’s a theoretical comment, it’s hard to have “real-world” evidence. It all depends on the definition of “emotion” that is being used.
[ol]
[li]Is it possible to have motivation without emotion? [/li]
[li]If yes, then if emotions were absent, then long-term decisions would be made based on reason and logic. [/li]
[li]If decisions were made based on reason and logic, then people would choose to support their friends, family, and communities.[/li][/ol]
Is “emotion” required to have motivation? Is emotion required to generate action?
More importantly, is emotion required to make long-term decisions.
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### Author:  [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)
#### Post date: [September 21, 2011, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-humans-have-emotions/596999/20 "2011-09-21T13:34:00Z")
We have emotions because our chimpanzee-like predecessors had emotions, and they had them because their mammalian ancestors had them, and so forth.
Why _any_ animals have emotions in the first place is one question, but why _humans specifically_ have them is “because we’re animals too.”
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