A report on Emotion and Suffering

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Tragic mask on the façade of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden
Examples of basic emotions
Mahavira torch-bearer of ahimsa
The emotion wheel.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Brueghel the Elder
Two dimensions of emotions. Made accessible for practical use.
Two dimensions of emotion
Illustration from Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
Simplified graph of James-Lange Theory of Emotion
Timeline of some of the most prominent brain models of emotion in affective neuroscience.

Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure.

- Emotion

The word suffering is sometimes used in the narrow sense of physical pain, but more often it refers to psychological pain, or more often yet it refers to pain in the broad sense, i.e. to any unpleasant feeling, emotion or sensation.

- Suffering
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4 related topics with Alpha

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A mother and her child showing affect.

Affect (psychology)

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A mother and her child showing affect.

Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood.

In this view, such affective reactions as liking, disliking, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure each result from a different prior cognitive process that makes a variety of content discriminations and identifies features, examines them to find value, and weighs them according to their contributions (Brewin, 1989).

Valence (psychology)

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Valence, or hedonic tone, is the affective quality referring to the intrinsic attractiveness/"good"-ness (positive valence) or averseness/"bad"-ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation.

The term also characterizes and categorizes specific emotions.

Pleasure

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Pleasure refers to experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something.

Pleasure refers to experience that feels good, that involves the enjoyment of something.

It contrasts with pain or suffering, which are forms of feeling bad.

As such, pleasure is an affect and not an emotion, as it forms one component of several different emotions.

Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, in the Farnese collection, Naples – Photo by Paolo Monti, 1969

Stoicism

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School of Hellenistic religion founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. It is a philosophy of personal eudaemonic virtue ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world, asserting that the practice of virtue is both necessary and sufficient to achieve eudaimonia—flourishing by means of living an ethical life.

School of Hellenistic religion founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BC. It is a philosophy of personal eudaemonic virtue ethics informed by its system of logic and its views on the natural world, asserting that the practice of virtue is both necessary and sufficient to achieve eudaimonia—flourishing by means of living an ethical life.

Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, in the Farnese collection, Naples – Photo by Paolo Monti, 1969
Antisthenes, founder of the Cynic school of philosophy
Bust of Seneca
Chrysippus
Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Roman emperor
Justus Lipsius, founder of Neostoicism

Stoicism teaches the development of self-control and fortitude as a means of overcoming destructive emotions; the philosophy holds that becoming a clear and unbiased thinker allows one to understand the universal reason (logos).

The idea was to be free of suffering through apatheia (Greek: ἀπάθεια; literally, "without passion") or peace of mind, where peace of mind was understood in the ancient sense—being objective or having "clear judgment" and the maintenance of equanimity in the face of life's highs and lows.