10 unnecessary backward facts about emotions

Welcome to Amusement Park Emotisia! Ready for a ride on the roller coaster? Let’s talk about the 5 B’s: being scared, angry, sad, ashamed, and happy.

1. Every emotion lasts a maximum of 90 seconds. At least, if you can feel the emotion without attaching thoughts that try to explain why you feel that way. So do nothing! Just feel how the emotion flows through your body and don’t judge it. Gone within a minute and a half. Whew.

2. Despite the fact that others are often involved, emotions are always about YOU. The other person is nothing more or less than a trigger for your emotion. Sounds rough, right? But it is true.

3. People have more than 10,000 subtle facial expressions that can express their emotions.

4. What’s even more impressive is that most people can pick up on these subtle changes. We have evolved to recognize emotions through miiiiini- mini changes in the other person's facial expression.

5. The way emotions are displayed is the same all over the world.
A smile is a smile everywhere, a tear is a tear. The basic emotions like happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, disgust, and fear are more or less the same all over the world. No matter which remote tribes you look at, we’re all the same.

6. Even if you fall asleep feeling very sad or angry, there’s a good chance you’ll wake up in a better mood the next morning. This is because your brain releases chemicals during REM sleep that alleviate the mental pain of traumatic experiences. Aha.

7. All humans are born with basic emotions, so they don’t necessarily need to be ‘learned’ from your parents. Even children who are born blind will still have the same facial expressions as everyone else, smiling when they are happy or frowning when they are sad.

8. It seems that emotional intelligence often yields more than cognitive intelligence when it comes to a successful life. Society often seems to value cognitive and academic successes more, but multiple behavioral studies show that success is actually better predicted by looking at emotional intelligence.

9. Emotion comes from the Latin word ‘emovere’, which means ‘to move’. Emotions are actually a kind of guides that want to prompt you to move. If someone stirs a lot in you, ask yourself: why does this affect me so much?

10. Sometimes, when you are about to cry, your lip starts to tremble. This is because your brain causes the muscles in your face to contract to create that movement. The sad side of the brain fights at such a moment with the logical side that tries to hide the emotion.