Our emotional reactions are a type of information. Just like vision, touch, and smell, emotions reveal what is going on around us, revealing information about ourselves and our reactions to situations, events, and people. Emotions communicate information in experiential terms through our feelings and moods, as well as through our intuitions and premonitions. When we engage with our emotions as information, we can learn how to decode the wisdom imbedded in our emotions, enhancing our ability to flourish.

Topics in the text below:
Emotions are information
Emotional information is the difference that makes a difference
Emotions as interpersonal communication
Emotions as healing adaptation

Emotions are information
Emotions are a psychobiological type of information. They provide us information about our needs and overall well-being in conscious and subconscious ways through our feelings, moods, and intuitions. Emotions provide information in three domains. First, emotions provide information and feedback about the states of our inner physiological processes. Second, emotions provide direct access to information about our emergent-need states. Third, emotions are systems of interpersonal communication that provide information about our relationships, as explained by Ross Buck in his book, The Communication of Emotions. Through utilizing our emotions as information, we can expand our understanding of a given situation and increase our response repertoire.

Emotional information is often non-linear and non-rational. It is not necessarily tied to objective fact and can arise without apparent cause or purpose. Although language can add value to emotion-information, emotion-information does not rely upon language and is often non-verbal and non-symbolic. In fact, when we create a verbal narrative too quickly, we can obscure the unfolding of our natural, emotional responses. When we move rapidly into the verbal associations triggered by emotion, we may be more aware of the story evoked than the emotion itself. However, by paying direct attention to what we are feeling, we gain access to a level of information about our circumstances that is often obscured by our highly-verbal thought processes. Trusting the non-verbal informational nature of emotion can create in us the capacity to let our emotions articulate themselves, ultimately revealing a depth of information that may not have been revealed had we created a linguistic narrative.

One form of emotional information is categorization. Emotional categorization organizes our diverse experiences along emotional values. This process helps us recognize similar experiences in the future while ultimately facilitating our understanding of the experience. When we pay attention to our patterns of emotions, we can learn to identify how our emotions organize and evaluate events. The most basic categorization is the dichotomization of pleasant or unpleasant; however, when we embrace our emotions as information, we can move beyond simple responses of avoiding discomfort or overly valuing pleasure. Rather than just treating our emotions as a pleasant or an un-pleasant byproduct of life, we can see the emotion as assisting us in identifying the type of situation confronting us. In order to extract the greatest amount of information from our emotional experiences, it is critical to move beyond focusing on comfort or discomfort and to reflect on the meaning of this emotional response, what preceded it, and what other contexts have evoked this feeling.

We can also enhance our utilization of emotion as information by paying attention to the changes in our emotional states. Noticing shifts in our feelings helps us sense changes in our inner and outer environments, providing information about what is unfolding in our current circumstances. In order to be able to detect shifting emotional states, we must enhance our capacity to discriminate between different emotions. This increased emotional discrimination helps us gain an insight into what is occurring in our inner and outer world, as well as between ourselves and the people around us. For example, when we have a shift in our emotions it can be a call to increase our arousal, and orient us to different aspect of the current situation. The change in emotion is an indication that some other constituent may be changing. By attending to how our emotions arise and change, one into the other, we can begin to utilize our emotional-information system.

Emotions do not arise out of thin air. Generally our feelings come into our awareness after a sequence of prior feelings. The feeling we are currently experiencing is the result of a prior sequence of feelings, which for the most part may have been outside of our awareness. For example, we may not be in touch with the subtle feelings that preceded a strong feeling of shame or guilt. Without treating emotions as information, we often take the current, most evocative feeling as defining all there is to the situation, and this is a gross miscalculation. For example, we may become aware of being anxious, but not accurately able to trace the prior emotions leading up to the threshold that triggered the anxiety. The elements of our emotional sequences carry a great deal of information about our unique emotional-conditioning history. The exploration of these emotional sequences is often accomplished through self-reflection or in psychotherapy.

Emotional Information is the Difference that makes a Difference
The information in the sequences of our emotional shifts is based in a fundamental principle of our nervous system. Our nervous system’s information processing is based on the idea that information is the difference that makes a difference. Detecting and responding to change is an essential aspect of how our entire nervous system works. All felt sensation is the experience of change—vision, hearing, physical touch, and temperature sensitivity are all systems that serve to detect change.

Since information is the difference that makes a difference and our nervous system is built to detect fluctuations against a current status quo, the nervous system filters out much of our experience through the process of homeostasis. Our nervous system establishes a homeostasis against which change can be noticed. We do not constantly sense everything all the time. For example, we can get very used to background noise to the point where we do not even notice it, until there is a change, and we then quickly attend to the new sound. The same is true for the feeling of the clothes on our body or the furniture upon which we sit. We may only become aware of sitting in the chair when there is a minor change from the homeostatic level—we have been sitting for too long in one position and it begins to hurt, so we move around a little. After the minor move around, there is a new homeostasis and we stop noticing that we are sitting.

Homeostasis is also how we detect change in our emotions. Just as the body stops attending to the feeling of sitting in a chair, our emotional consciousness will stop attending to continuous, emotional arousal. The nervous system establishes an emotional homeostasis when we are exposed to a situation that engenders a consistent, emotional response for a period of time. That is, we get used to a certain emotional condition and stop noticing it; or, we certainly notice it much less. Eventually, our attention is brought back to our emotional state when there is a sense of change in that emotional homeostasis. For instance, we may start out feeling quite content sitting and reading a book. Our contentment may shift, perhaps because a passage evokes a new emotion perturbing our prior homeostatic contentment. If we notice this sequence, we can attend to the shifting emotion and incorporate it into the newly-developing homeostasis. By attending to the subtle shifts in our emotions, we can access information that might be missed otherwise. The contrast between the contentment and the perturbing feeling is information. By bringing our awareness to the shift, we may apprehend whatever meaning underlies the move from contentment to perturbed.

Generally, the detection of emotional change against background homeostasis is adaptive. The detection of an emotional shift is how our nervous system provides us with valuable information, according to Anthony Damasio. For example, a dangerous situation is likely to trigger our anxiety. This deviation from emotional homeostasis will arouse and alert us to the situation. After assessing the situation, we will establish a new homeostasis based on the demands of the situation.

Our tendency of establishing an emotional homeostasis is not always adaptive. For example, maintaining homeostasis is maladaptive when we are under stress. The hyper-arousal that accompanies stress can become an enduring homeostasis. We can get so habituated to the hyper-arousal that we fail to notice and change the stressful situation. Enduring our unmitigated levels of stress can result in long-term degradation of general health and well-being.

In addition to stress-related hyper-arousal, emotions such as fear, anger and anxiety can also result in enduring emotional homeostasis. The heightened arousal that accompanies fear and anxiety may preclude our ability to attend to emotional shifts that would under other circumstances result in a shift in homeostasis. Furthermore, fear, anger, and anxiety narrow the focus of our attention, limiting our ability to experience other feelings. An individual who is constantly in a state of heightened, emotional arousal may remain unaware of other emotions. Without access to new and different emotional information, we will continue to respond with the existing, heightened emotional response.

Just as being unable to shift out of an enduring emotional state is maladaptive, it is also maladaptive if we fail in establishing an appropriate level of emotional homeostasis. The inability to establish homeostasis exposes us to chaotic and rapidly-shifting emotional states. One of the functions of homeostasis is to filter out extraneous and redundant information. Without this filter, we will be bombarded by possibly-irrelevant fluctuations of emotion. Under normal conditions, a new emotion is contrasted with the existing homeostasis, and if sufficiently pressing or novel, it shifts our current awareness. Measuring change against a current homeostasis is a way to manage the amount of information that the nervous system considers relevant. However, without such an enduring background filter, there is no ready appraisal mechanism and each emotional moment will press into our attention. If we are continually shifting between emotional states, the utility and meaning of emotional shifts is lost. Under these conditions, there is no difference that makes a difference and all our emotions become noise.

Being able to establish appropriate, coherent, and flexible emotional homeostasis allows us to use our emotional responses as accurate information about what is happening in our inner and outer world. Such emotional wisdom can be used to shape our thoughts, actions, and values in a way that leads to flourishing.

Emotions as interpersonal communication
We are all continually exchanging emotion information. Emotional communication is essential to human survival and social-group functioning. The adaptive advantage of being able to communicate emotions reflects its psycho-evolutionary development. Emotional communication is seen in many animals, and all mammals. It is a relatively instantaneous non-linguistic way of communicating danger, aggression, or reproductive readiness.

Many of our basic human needs can only be meet interpersonally, and emotional expression serves to help us satisfy those needs. For example, basic needs of attachment and affiliation are needs that require social involvement. Physical soothing and sexual gratification require expressions of tenderness, longing, and love in order to elicit in others a desire to provide that needed intimacy and contact. Our expressions of grief and loss can evoke empathy. Expressions of fear and anger can mediate interpersonal distress and conflict.

Emotions are communicated to others both verbally and nonverbally. An essential nonverbal form of emotional communication is through facial expression. The mechanics of emotional communication through facial expression is a complex process that includes two distinct phases. The first stage is an autonomic, nearly instantaneous, facial response to an emotional stimulus. This autonomic response in our face is based on the response of our limbic system to emotional triggers. This first stage is followed by a second, more socially-conditioned, normative facial display that is mediated through the somatosensory areas of the neocortex. This neocortical brain activity shapes our facial expressions to reflect what is appropriate for our culture. These facial expressions are not usually fully conscious and result from learning and social conditioning of our emotional expressions.

The first stage of facial expression is a psychobiological system of nearly-instantaneous, emotional communication that evolved well before the second stage, which involves the neocortex, according to Paul Ekman. The automaticity of the initial emotional expression assures that, at least initially, we will accurately and truly show others what each of us is experiencing emotionally. The emotional expressions that follow will be influenced by what we have been conditioned to feel and what we think we should express.

The relative congruence between the immediately-displayed emotion and the subsequent socially-normative emotional expression is a critical element to interpersonal emotional communication. Where the instantaneous emotional expression and the subsequent socially-normative emotion are congruent, the person observing the emotional expression will receive non-contradictory information, providing clear emotional communications. Clarity of emotional communication is lacking when there is no coherence between the two expressions. This happens where the instantaneous emotional expression and the socially-determined, or consciously-contrived, emotional expression are grossly disparate. The observer of the incongruent emotional expression will have to resolve the discrepancy. At the subliminal level, we will be processing the recognition of an emotional expression that is immediately followed by our conscious observation of disparate or contradictory expression. Such an incongruence would lead to confused, chaotic, and potentially-conflicted emotional communication between the individuals.

Emotional deceit is based on the capacity to rapidly mask the initial, autonomic emotional response. This masking of the instantaneous emotional expression affords adaptive advantage in some individuals, such as sociopaths. This is because such individuals do not strongly manifest the initial, instantaneous emotion, thereby reducing the contrast between it and the consciously-mediated emotional expression. Similarly, individuals who have learned to quickly shift their initial emotional expression in order to rapidly display a convincing incongruent expression would be likely to benefit from the capacity to be deceptive. Although these strategies enhance the capacity for deceit, they limit the expression of authentic, empathic, emotional exchanges with other individuals.

Understanding this two-stage process of nonverbal emotional expression can help us manage interpersonal emotional exchanges. For instance, we should acknowledge that our emotional reactions are invariably expressed facially, even where we believe they are not permissible. Even feelings that may be aversive to us may, nonetheless, be expressed at the instantaneous facial level. The resulting lack of consistency in emotional expression in others can evoke in us an odd feeling, or perhaps an intuitive sense of emotional miscommunication with others.
We can develop increased emotional concurrence. By understanding how our emotions are integrated into our body, mind, and brain, we can begin to alter our authentic emotional responses. By developing a trust in our emotional rhythms, we can allow for a full range of emotional expression. When we fully explore and elaborate our emotional expressions, we become able to access feelings that have been masked or avoided in the past. Through this process, we can become better at recognizing our own instantaneous emotional expressions as well as the instantaneous emotional expression by others.

Emotions as healing adaptation
Emotions are more than signals that something needs to be attended to—emotions are the way in which we process and experience change and self-righting healing. Accessing a wide range of emotional response does more than provide information about our inner and outer world. Emotions are mind-body events, complex mental and physiological events of the mind-body connection. In addition to conveying information about our needs and motivating us, emotions are also part of an unconscious physiological repair system. According to Ernest Rossi, emotions are a self-righting, mind-body system that functions like other biological systems, such as insulin, activating when there is a mind-body event that requires self-righting. In the case of insulin, it is to self-right blood-sugar levels. In the case of emotions, it is self-righting of complex psychosocial and physiological regulation. For example, self-righting healing is an aspect of the physiological sequelae of grief. The grief response includes strong painful feelings of sadness and loss, crying and sometimes physical pain. Following episodes of tearfulness and heartache, we often experience compassion and connection, or love. This is because grief, when fully expressed, involves a sequence of hormonal activation from arousal to distress to relief, according to C. Robert Cloninger. This sequence exemplifies the self-righting, mind-body connection of our emotions. Although it is possible to speculate as to what the healing process of an emotional event may be, there is not a fixed mapping for each emotion or associated healing process.

Appreciating emotions as a natural healing process magnifies the importance of having a wide range of emotions. When we are trapped in a fixed and dominating homeostasis that does not allow for shifts in emotions, we risk compromising our natural healing rhythms. A profound and well-researched example of this is the stress response. Under normal conditions, stress and anxiety are a call upon the individual to attend to the situation at hand and to respond appropriately. This appropriate response then reduces the stress response. However, when we are under a long-standing stress response, we will erode our immune system and overall health. Stress is a call to action seeking relief. When this natural activation is blocked, the self-righting mechanism is derailed and the stress response becomes maladaptive. Similar inhibition of the healing response occurs under situations of prolonged helplessness. Generally, feelings of helplessness result in in assistance-seeking action; however in situations that block any assistance-seeking behavior, the helplessness may endure, resulting in global, depressive depletion. This is profoundly manifested in infants, resulting in failure-to-thrive. The development of a baseline homeostasis, to which the mind-body response can return after being stimulated, is one way to facilitate the capacity to shift into and out of hyper= or hypo=aroused emotional states.

We can maximize the benefits of our natural emotional rhythm by developing a characterological emotional homeostasis. These emotional states would be familiar conditions that would anchor our emotional shifts. Emotional actors of compassion, self-efficacy, and trust would allow us to respond to upsetting emotions with greater tolerance than if our emotional anchors are anger, insecurity, and fear. Mindfulness, meditation, and hypnosis are vehicles to support the healthy calibration of our emotional homeostasis. Through our awareness of the role emotions play in the healing response, we can strive to develop strategies that allow for a wide range of emotional responses trusting that we can return to our emotional home-base homeostasis. Emotions provide us with information about our natural healing responses; when those responses are blocked, we can use that information to enhance our natural self-righting processes.