“The Developing Mind”: The Locus of Our Emotion in Our Brain

In this book, the author articulates our emotions like this: “[E]motion is at the core of internal and interpersonal processes that create our subjective experience of the self” (p. 155). To tell you the truth, I have one coaching client right now, who wants to control emotions, so I’ve kept my antenna fully spread out toward “human emotions (trigger, process, mechanism, types of emotions, etc.).” 

This is my assumption, but there seems to be two types of emotions within us: The first is personal emotions, and the second is interpersonal emotions. The former emotions are for example joy, sadness, happiness, and so on. These emotions can be happened without others. On the other hand, the latter emotions are for instance anger, empathy, jealousy, love, and so forth. Generally speaking, these emotions arise from the relationship with others (in a word, these emotions are like psychological projections). Then I came up with the following questions. “Do both types of emotions happen in the same process in our brain? Do they activate the same parts in our brain? Why do we have different types of emotions?; some of them are not toward others, but some of them are toward others.” I’m still searching and thinking about this topic.   

Reference

The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience