A Look At Our Emotions?

I'll open my heart. Come and look.

Look at this too

Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. Specifically, these states are manifestations of non-verbally expressed feelings of agreement, amusement, anger, certainty, control, disagreement, disgust, disliking, embarrassment, fear, guilt, happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and uncertainty. Emotions are mammalian elaborations of vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures. In mammals, primates, and human beings, feelings are displayed as emotion cues.

The human emotion of love is believed to have evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulated gyrus) designed for the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring. Paleocircuits are neural platforms for bodily expression configured millions of years before the advent of cortical circuits for speech. They consist of pre-configured pathways or networks of nerve cells in the forebrain, brain stem and spinal cord. They evolved in the earliest mammalian ancestors, the jawless fishes, to control motor function.

Before the mammalian brain, life in the non-verbal world was automatic, preconscious, and predictable. Reptilian motor centers reacted to vision, sound, touch, chemical, gravity, and motion sensory cues with preset body movements and programmed postures. With the arrival of night-active mammals, circa 180 million years ago, smell replaced sight as the dominant sense, and a newer, more flexible way of responding — based on emotion and emotional memory — arose from the olfactory sense. In the Jurassic Period, the mammalian brain invested heavily in aroma circuits to succeed at night as reptiles slept. These odor pathways gradually formed the neural blueprint for what was later to become our limbic brain.

Primary (i.e., innate) emotions, such as fear, "depend on limbic system circuitry," with the amygdala and anterior cingulate gyrus being "key players".

Secondary emotions (i.e., feelings attached to objects [e.g., to dental drills], events, and situations through learning) require additional input from the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices. The stimulus may still be processed directly via the amygdala but is now also analyzed in the thought process. Thoughts and emotions are interwoven: every thought, however bland, almost always carries with it some emotional undertone, however subtle.

Smell carries directly to limbic areas of the mammalian brain via nerves running from the olfactory bulbs to the septum, amygdala, and hippocampus. In the acquatic brain, olfaction was critical for detecting food, foes, and mates from a distance in murky waters.

An emotional feeling, like an aroma, has a volatile or "thin-skinned" quality because sensory cells lie on the exposed exterior of the olfactory epithelium (i.e., on the bodily surface itself).

A sudden scent, like a whiff of smelling salts, may jolt the mind. The force of a mood is reminiscent of a smell's intensity (e.g., soft and gentle, pungent, or overpowering), and similarly permeates and fades as well. The design of emotion cues, in tandem with the forebrain's olfactory prehistory, suggests that the sense of smell is the neurological model for our emotions.

Like aromas, emotions are either positive or negative (i.e., pleasant or unpleasant) — and rarely neutral. Like odors, feelings come and go, defy logic, and clearly show upon our face in mood signs. It is likely that many emotions evolved from aroma paleocircuits a. in subcortical nuclei (e.g., the paleocortex of the amygdala), and b. in layers of nerve cells within the forebrain's outer covering of neocortex. The latter's stratified architecture resembles that of the olfactory bulb, which is organized in layers as well.

If you want more info go here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotions

and here

http://face-and-emotion.com/dataface/emotion/emoti...

I´ve thought alot about that myself, and you know im not sure...but maybe you could find something in some Sociology or Psychology books. The only book i was able to myself was this one called "Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions". Here´s a link where you can buy it from amazon, if you would like to:

http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Sociology-Emotions-...

Im sorry i cant be of much help. Hope you find the answer your looking for. :)

Yes...Dogs read a lot into our expressions. I know that mine does. Sometimes I will make a funny face at him and he will look at me and tilt his head from side to side trying to figure out what I mean. They do know our expressions and associate them with our emotions.

live your life and you will experience most of them!

go to your local library or try looking online - I am sure you will find loads of helpful info.

many people have spent their lives studying such things!

There are many great writers who have given us what you ask for. All you have to do is read their works. Shakespeare is one of them. He explored every known human emotion in his plays.