Do we have control over our emotions?

Emotions are what makes us human. Many people believe showing your emotions make you weak, but I have come to realize that showing your emotions does quite the opposite of that. In the voice thread, we learned that emotions are something we construct. By constructing an emotion, we learn how were feeling. Emotions are not something that happens to us, they are something we do. They are created by the experience of our body and context of the situation. Emotions begin in our conceptual system from there we begin to have bodily sensations and then culture plays a role on where we would categorize this emotion.

In the movie, Inside out we see Riley learning all the emotions of life starting right when she is born to being an adult. All the different emotions come into her life at the different stages of her life. First, we start with joy as when she is born, and then sad appears 33 seconds after joy arrived.  Of course, emotions are a little more complicated on how they are created but “inside out” creates a good children’s movie to give them an understanding of what different emotions that they are feeling. Showing them that emotions are normal and safe to show and have. When the sad character is glitching and not working correctly, it made me feel that it was a stress was being created from Riley body and in our culture, we can put stress as us being sad.

I feel like most people have had an emotion of loss of words or no emotions to really describe something. On Riley first day or school, her “brain” aka headquarters with all her emotions get distracted leaving joy and sad to get sucked away and Riley cannot feel the two important core emotions. Which than she becomes confused and different. When we are confused, we feel a bunch of emotions at the same time. One second were mad, the next were scared.  We create ideas of what we’re feeling. At the end of the film, we learn that it’s okay to be confused about your feelings and feel happy and sad at the same time. We believe that there are multiple feelings, and we construct ourselves to feel more than one emotion.  By using Riley’s conceptual system of old memories, then her bodily sensations starts kicking in and she is crying. By crying and being the way, she was raised headquarters finds a memory ball of sad and joy mixed in one and riley personalities return.

In the episode “Man of the people”, we see that Deanna- half human and half Betazoid and has the psionic ability to sense emotions. One scene in the episode that had a lot of emotions was when Deanna was trying to get Riker jealous. Deanna keeps insisting that Riker must be upset and jealous. He finally leaves gets upset and says when she is ready to work, to let him know. I feel at this point he thinks something is wrong and she is not her normal self.Deanna has the capability of emotional concept. By predicting what he is feeling because of her actions. Emotions are built, they just don’t happen. Deanna made Riker angry but trying to poke him and make him feel new emotions. Riker and Deanna have a strong connection for each other has been built over time. Since she is an empath, she can investigate the person and watch their body reactions and categorize the behavior they are feeling. Alkar is the reason that poor Deanna is seen like this.  It seems as Alkar has no emotions and does not care. He is using Deanna and does not care if she dies. Throughout the entire episode there is a rollercoaster of emotions.

Looking back at the episode, I believe that they chose Deanna because she is an empath but also because she is a female. It seems as if they use gender roles when creating this episode. One scene Deanna is using her sexual figure to seduce men, then she becomes angry and scratched Riker face.  She constructed the feeling of anger because she got denied. Showing how emotions can change so quickly.