X “The first example will be the person that I call "emotional anthropologist," or Dylan Evans. This well-known researcher whose studies have raised a lot of controversy in the twentieth century, helped to clarify one essential issue. All over the world people are insufficiently that feel emotions, in addition they act the same way. The only source of nieprozumień between eg. A European to an African, a culture that gives shape after the birth of a man is to express your emotions. On the same basis the culture defines the canon of "normality" and "disorders". Maybe it was the inspiration for Zbigniew Freud to create a "culture as a source of suffering"?” X “Let‘s have look at wars. They differ in time and in place. The reasons and requirements also differ. But what they do have in common is that they are kind of natural, innate, we are born with the desire to be and to have the best. Animals also fight over territories - or females. Even the most peaceful clans fight. It is normal to have strong core values and to fight over them, even when it seems immature or just dull. What I am trying to say is that innaneteness can explain why we have wars and, to some extend, it can also explain different types of war. Fights for a territory are innate, we are born with the need of our own space, we want to live with our close ones (with the ones we share our culture) which are really mainly connected by territory. On the other hand, terrorism, suicidal attacks, guerilla are not so innate and we can‘t expect humans all over the world to understand them. It is the same with happiness and amae. First one is probably known all over the world, but the other not so much.” “We can also use the idea that emotios exist outside our bodies. That they are elusive and almost the same everywhere. Everybody can feel them but noone can touch them. Everyone is able to imbody them, but only for a while. No emotion exist in our bodies permanently. It only fill up the space between us and flies around us. But we can also „use“ them whenever we want to. It is easily available for all of us.” “If we try to see security studies from this perspective, we can for example see disasters as a „living phenomenons“. They exist in the atmosphere and sometimes they goes down to the earth. Terrorism can be seen as lying dorment of our minds but once upon time embodied. It can also be seen as an empty bottle which fills up and then suddenly explodes. Exactly like emotions - according to lot of authors of modern age.” X “This thought brings me to the fact that we cannot think about emotions the same way like the language. Emotions are communication tool through which we can convey and receive certain signals that others understand, but through them we are not able to understand what they bring, which is one of the most significant possibilities of language. The fact that I have emotions does not make them understandable. To decode them I need language. On the one hand, we have a language that has two basic functions: communicative and mental. On the other hand, there are emotions that only meet the communicative function, but by its very nature can never fulfill of themselves cognitive component. For this reason I think that conceptualize emotions as a universal language is impossible. They can be at most a universal basic communication. Now, this finding to which I came, bringing an interesting array of thinking: if emotions can communicate with themselves but cannot think and cognitive only by themselves, what they can inherently produce?” “And this brought me to the idea that through emotions, we can learn about us a lot and also about other people a lot of things, but things of another kind than allows language and its functions. Emotions are not only one of the tools of communication, but a tool indeed for communication and sharing of something, that language just can´t. Paradoxically, sometimes I have the impression that if the language is trying of something it has no force to make it, language builds a wall around the communication than over it. And in this I see exclusivity of emotions. Emotions are not something comparable to the language, but something that works on different principles and convey other things.” X “Emotions and feelings are very difficult to be understood, yet every human being feels. There are many concepts which try to explain, what emotions are and how can be grasped, but in my opinion, no definition can exactly explain, what a certain feeling “feels like”. The biggest problems with emotions are that there are subjective. Even though as Evans states, “emotions are universal” (Evans, 13), everyone express one’s emotions and feelings differently. We also cannot be forced by anyone else to feel something, since emotions cannot be consciously influenced.” “It has been proved that people from the whole world “experience emotions, but only some of them have a word for it” (Evans, 3). Many times, I found myself in situations, where I wanted to describe my feelings to somebody but I just could not do it. For instance, once, long time ago, I found out that my boyfriend was cheating on me. At the moment I heard that rumor, my eyes started to be teary; my heart was heavily pounding, my hands swelling, and my head dizzy. I wanted to shout, to cry, and to dig myself a hole in which I would lie down and never go out again. My heart was literally aching with pain, and for the first time I realized what it looks like, what it feels like to be heartbroken. Few days later, when I was talking to my best friend, I wanted to tell her the whole story, to describe my feelings during that moment. I knew that I was definitely angry. I was also disappointed, I felt pity. I was sad. I wanted to name the feelings with one word but I could not, because there waas no such word. It was the same situation as Evans describes in his book. He writes about lacking a word amae, a word originally from Japan. This word describes exactly the emotion he felt in a certain situation, yet it does not have English equivalent. (Evans, 2) I wanted to explain myself to my friend so she can truly understand the depth of the feelings I felt. When I told her that my heart was broken, I think that such expression helped her much more in understanding me that just saying “I was angry and sad and disappointed at once”.” “Another aspect of emotions is that they cannot be voluntarily fully changed. I would like to present it on a short passage from a book called 1984, written by George Orwell. “They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought: but in the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable” (Orwell, 159). George Orwell describes very nicely how untouchable feelings are. As I described earlier on the example with love – my feelings towards another person gradually increased and I felt very happy. But there was also a moment, when they started to decrease again. I wanted to pursuit my happiness and my love, but I could not, because people cannot influence how one feels. Our emotions are given and we do not choose who we fall for or not.” X “That remaining 40% of our happiness comes from our intentional activity: what we do and how we think. Forty percent of our happiness is therefore in our control. Researchers have been actively testing what activities and thought patterns add to our happiness and which ones reduce it. Study after study has shown that as people integrate these activities into their lives and make new habits, they sustainably increase their happiness.” X “From my own experience, Japan became in modern world of internet sort of mythical counter where everything is weird. If you randomly browse comic websites with funny pictures or memes, you are most likely going to came across strange photos with titles “Meanwhile in Japan”. The photos may show strange inventions, people dressing unusually or acting weird. It is a strong contrast to Ekmans finding about Japanese people hiding their emotions. In my opinion this loud, colourful and over the top pop culture in Japan is a result of hundreds years of oppression of emotions.” X “I agree that culture is much more important for determining emotions than neurology. But author goes on to say that »anger is an emotion that would seem to be universal and unlearned if any emotion is, however different its manifestations in various cultures.« He is clearly implicating, that the popular belief is that we all feel anger, and even when he challenges this theory with two examples of supposedly un-angry cultures, he remains skeptical about the thesis, that some cultures don’t feel, know, or even talk about anger at all. This two cultures most certainly don’t experience anger as we do, but to some extent I believe they get angry and we could see it if we would entirely understand their ways. I guess what I want to say is that the Tahitian and the Utka also experience anger but they maybe express is in a way that we cannot understand it.” “When it comes to anger I will always believe, like I said in the beginning of my essay, that we all experience it. But for me it would be really interesting to find out what are the different ways of experiencing this emotion, like Tahitian and Utka do, or maybe if my assumption is wrong, how they “don’t” feel it. I also wonder if there is an opposite culture, where people feel anger more passionately than we do. When I was describing my experiences with anger I was thinking about how it would look like if I would just let the anger off the leash. In our culture it would probably be unacceptable, but in a different culture people would maybe be offended if I would hold my anger back. So in the end, we can always look on it in different ways and there is never only one explanations of things.” X “Paradoxically, the same thing what means for one person happiness, for the other it could means only problems and suffering. Money, for example. To be a rich includes risk that your family (child..) could by in dangerous of abduction. But this is very film-drama example, but only for idea what I am going to talk about, it is sufficient. We can't define happiness, this term has as many meanings as there are people in the world. (Ahmed, 2010) But what does it mean for us? We have to find our own way to happiness, of course, but first we have to know, what makes us happy.” “In our very hasty age and society there is a number of confused people. Confused by their lives in rush, when they don´t have a time for their closest or hobbies. How they can grab a time for themselves, when they must to spend most of day at the work and after desperately trying to enjoy a social life, even if they are tired and in fact they have no desire at all to be in the company. Although they are among people, often feel alone with their problems and thoughts. (Tolle,2010)” “How Seligman told, after World War II emotions like depression, anger and schizophrenia had been conceptualized and people with this "sick emotions" began to be treated. (Seligman,2011) But there is a question, if this "emotions" are products of time, or a reasons why it is like that. Produces hasty time nervous and aggressive individuals or in people are rising negative emotions and this is the reason why is our age so tough and ruthless? It is the fault of people that you do not create the conditions for happiness?” “Of course there are a number of great spiritual teachers, but the most known is probably Dalajlama. His rules for a happy life are notorious. So well-known, that can be regarded as a cliche. But, how many lives already verified, in anything other is not so much truth as the cliche. This universal good advices are absolutely essential elements of communication and coexistence of people, yet only a few people really respect that. Build their own success over the interests of others, not accepting his closest friends. Instead of helping a friend in need, mischievously take pleasure in the misfortunes of other. This is sad reality especially for little czech man.” “Despite the increasingly popular seminars about "life coaching" or "how to learn to happiness", "how to live more efficiently" I am afraid the bigger part of society still need advice with managing their lives and inner feelings. It is not easy at all to be happy between stressed men and catch everything, what is necessary by the standards of today's society. Like a great career (even women), child (especially women, ideal with great career), nice house in the downtown, perfect holiday every year, one in summer on the exotic island, at winter skiing on the mountains. Of course I am exaggerating. But the standards of happiness are created by society, not by single individual. It is depend of us to make our personal happiness regardless of the surroundings, which wants for us only the best. That what they considered to be the best for us. Thanks, no.” X “Personally I agree with anthropologist as Solomon. I think that our emotions are biologically identical but how we express our emotions and how we interpret our emotions depends of our culture. I am going to take an example in my everyday life. I am from Belgium, my father is Vietnamese and my mother is Belgian so I can see different interpretations of emotions between my mother and my father. My father don't express a lot of his emotion even if he is sad, happy, angry,.. It is normal for him not to show his emotions and be rather reserved, don't say if something is wrong or something is good. And my mother is totally different: she expresses everything and she explains always what she feels. This example can explains why I think that the cultural component is important: we express our emotions differently but we have the same physiological feeling.” “Personnaly, I see happiness on a continuum. In our course of Understanding affect : emotions, the teacher asked students to say how much they felt on a scale of 1 to 10 about happiness. And on average, students answered 8. They are not feeling sad and they are not feeling totally happy.” X “Happiness is the main goal of everybody's life and also the most important feeling that most people want to have in their life! People believe that if they have happiness in their life, they will feel complete and they will have much better life! Everybody wants to be happy and is that thing that gives meaning to humans life! The basic idea of happiness is to be satisfied and fulfilled with your life and to have more positive than negative feelings! More over is to have the ability to control how you feel and with consistent practice, you can form life-long habits for a more satisfying and fulfilling life. Most times we can't really realize that we are happy and also doesn't mean that we really know what we wish for in order to be happy. Sometimes even if the people have happiness in their life and have all they wanted in life it doesn't mean that they are happy, maybe they will want to get more goals or power in order to feel happy and complete!” “According to the history of happiness, it says that happiness is what you get for having the right associations, might be how we are directed toward certain things. Sometimes people use the word happiness to redescripe social norms as social goods which doesn't mean that is necessary good or happy things but they are things that society shows as good things and people follow them in order to fit up with the societies prototypes.” “For example Media shows that developing countries are shown to be happier than overdeveloped ones.” X “Thomas Dixon writes about emotions through history context. Expressing emotions such as love or passion on public would be unthinkable 80 years ago. In my opinion, connected to Dixon‟s study, emotions are highly supported to be seen nowadays. You can visit a psychologist or some advisor to help you improve yourself (for example in your school or job results). Artists and photographers are trying to catch some great expression (tear in the eye of a child in Syria during civil war). Great example could be certainly Facebook. With more than a billion of users, we can observe signs of „„emotions“and feelings written all over the internet. It can be affected by our political or economical situation, religion changes, education etc.” “Problem of 21st century may be that stress is everywhere around us. We can read about wars and dying people every day in newspapers and it can affect us a lot, even though we‟re sitting at the table and drinking morning tea. Many companies and associations are bringing us something new every day, something we should be already educated with. Naturally, it is closely linked with information technologies, which we expect to be helpful for our lives. Suddenly, there‟s a lot of thing we have to focus on, and it could bring stress or unnecessary anger.” “[“You are not your job, you're not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis. You are all singing, all dancing crap of the world.” “Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything. Nothing is static, everything is evolving, everything is falling apart.” * Fight Club]” “Seligman is basically trying to explain his goal to almost helpless people. What I find interesting, is his idea of listening for underlying positive motivations in present, past and future. For example, North American high-school system is known for being really supportive in particular subjects, such as molecular biology or sport. Personally, I would be really glad if I had the choices as these on high school. In Czech Republic, this method of studying is popular mainly at universities. Moreover, naturally, on high schools, students learn everything. That may be great for irresolute young people, but also a little confusing. So I‟m asking myself (maybe a little inappropriate) question; When is the best time to ask a young person what they want to do in their life? Measuring happiness is quite impossible (as we can read in Ahmed‟s paper), but I am sure that education is very important factor. It usually depends on upbringing, whether parents and teachers really ask their child/pupil simple questions.” “We can see great results of happiness in history, politics and language too. First democratic president of Czech Republic, Václav Havel, is known for his famous quote: „„Truth and love will overcome lies and hatred. “ During the Velvet Revolution there were posters with these „words of hope„and people remembered it. That‟s why there‟s this name for someone being maybe a little bit too positive or politically active; truth lover (it may not be the correct equivalent). Nowadays, it is used rather ironically and with contempt. If something extends in language so much, it cannot be a coincidence. Language is correct tool of expression, but not only that. It is a good sign of some culture and its change in the broadest sense. Words and concepts as „love„and „truth „got their hit in Czech culture. It may be the consensus to describe something Sara Ahmed writes about. During 25 years, the meaning changed.” X “So when we think of this idea that our brains practically adapt to our environments or what we could consider cultures, it only makes sense that varying geography and culture affect our perspective emotions considering that emotions and cognition are tightly linked. This argument only suggests further emphasis on the brain’s unique capabilities as they relate to emotions, but does not want to contradict Evan’s idea that emotions are biological and universally felt, considering that all newborn humans are biologically hardwired with the same brain material, however our differing environments begin to shape the brain like creating a puzzle piece to fit it and the emotional aspect follows suit.” “In a sense I do relate to those who believe you can’t put a science to happiness, but more than that I believe that this “science of happiness” is not as new as people make it seem to be. If we really consider a lot of what positive psychology and happiness science is suggesting we do in order to achieve a happy balance we a notice something familiar within its content. I had noticed that these teachings and suggestions were very much reflective of what we could observe in various ancient and world religions, Buddhism and Hinduism in particular come to mind. Many of these steps to achieve happiness are reminiscent of those used to achieve enlightenment or nirvana, so to say a methodical way to achieve happiness and focus positive well-being is a new age idea is to somewhat discount the teachings of ancient spiritual philosophers. However, because of modernism as touched on by Dixon’s “Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions,” we tend to discredit the wisdom and language of such historical figures possibly due to lack of empirical research on behalf of spiritual ideas.” “In respect to this class I believe it is important that I continue to try and take an objective and outside perspective to each new topic if only to keep my mind a blank slate for new opportunities for knowledge and understanding. I say this because objectivity isn’t something that comes by easily for me and therefore it is something I need to develop in order to advance my scope of thinking.” X “Nowadays the importance of emotions and feelings is increasing, because emotions have gained new meaning. This increasing is also a reaction to the way of life which is becoming more and more stresfull. Also hapiness has got a new place in our life. This emotion or mood looks like a purpose of our lives, when everybody finds own happiness.” “Abstract of happiness depends on every single person, every single human being. And ways how to reach happiness are different, too, because happiness is very changeable feeling so it could have lots of meanings. To be happy is the wish of all human beings.” “In the past people thought happiness was associated with social hierarchy, so it was really a destiny thing. Nowadays we believe we must do something to reach it, try to do something what makes us happy, so we must choose the right way that can lead us to happiness.” “There is a high number of synonyms with very different expressions conveying to different kind of atmospheres and different feelings. I mean there are many different ways how to express one idea. For example the teorem: „He died,“ sounds differently than the theorem „he’s gone“, which sounds more softly and evokes different feelings. […] Language and positive rhetoric is the element of positive psychology. The internal monolog is very useful when we teach how to think positively, but using voice is more succesfull because of hearing things we think about.” X “Mahatma Gandhi believes that […]. Freud believes that […]. At the end, Aristotelis believes that […].” X “Within positive psychology there is a lot of research being done about the life of the “happy people”. But how can you determine who the “happy people” are? The way psychologist use now is to ask people how happy they are, but just like Ahmed states in her book, when you ask people about how happy they are, do you really objectively measure their happiness? Or do you rather measure how happy they want to be or how happy they think they should be right now. And when you do not have an objective measurement of happiness, how can you draw objective conclusions that are based on these measurements? For example, one of the findings of Lyubomirsky is that happy people are more positive. What I am wondering is, are happy people really more positive, or do positive people tend to say that there happier without actually being happier than less positive people?” “Although I do not agree with some of the methods used in positive psychology, I do not necessary disagree with their results. I do think that people can improve their own happiness. In a radio show I heared, researcher Matt Killingsworth stated that he found out that people are less happy when they are not thinking about the thing they are doing4 . He states that people are happier when they are “living in the moment”, and to become a happier person, it helps to focus more on the actual thing you are doing instead of letting your mind wander about other, mostly negative, things. When comparing this finding with my definition of a “happy moment” described earlier, this actually seems valid. In order be completely satisfied with a moment, you have to have your attention in this moment.” X “Why [do we] sometimes treat emotions as a disease that must be quickly overcome?” “However, many researchers believe that if someone behaves only with the logic system, then is more like a robot and less like a human.” X “Are the emotions learned ? In the Evan's reading before a anthropologist called Paul Ekman, we thought that the emotion were learned. Indeed the emotions were seen like the language and it was trivial to think that, before can speak english you had to hear english with the same thoughts, before feel joy you have to see other feels joy and to see the joy's expression. And by this view "the cultural theory of emotion" accepted that the emotions were transmitted culturally therefore the emotions and the emotion's experiences should be different from culture to culture. But one day, a young anthropologist Paul Ekman go to show that it is not as simple as everybody thought.” “Therefore, in swimming inside our culture we learn some rules that will guide our emotions, for instance, in France when we have fixed an appointement with someone and that this person did not come to the appointement, our culture learned us that it was not polite and even insulting. Our society tell us that we have the right to be frustrated and this frustrating driven to be angry. Thus, in this culture, we have the vocabulary to describe a emotion but also a lot of experiences where we have learned to have this emotion rather than another. In the same logic, if the Utka Eskimos never learned or never lived in their culture this kind of situation, and moreover they do not have the vocabulary to describe this emotion, it is easy to think they could not feel "angry", and thus the culture could not neutral in the way how we feel the emotions. I think that certain emotions are universal and innate but it is the culture that is going determined the shape and the situations where the most of people can express and feel the emotions.” “As Ahmed in "the promise of happiness" quotes some searchers saying "everybody wants to be happy."' “To be happy is fundamental, and I agree when Ahmed quotes some searchers saying "There is probably no other goal on life that commands such a high degree of consensus", but it would be interesting to know if we share the same shape of happiness and if we can learn to be happy. My point of view is that the shape of happiness is firstly determined by the culture, who is going to define by the norms, rules of the society the representation of happiness and what category we can find it, for exemple in Occident, the societies the most of time say that we can find it if we have a good situation professional and familial with a nice house. Secondly, I think it is important do not forget subjective dimension the shape of happiness is subjective, because at the final even if the culture play an role it is us with what we are who decide which form we want for happiness, and this is the reason for which I do not think that we can learn to be happy. The only thing that we can do it is share with the others people our emotions.” X “And there is a matter about love and amorousness. Everybody feels its love different and shows dissimilar. And we don’t know which one is bad or right. Some people love shating their love, they love kissing in public, they love pompous and grandiose gesture. So they are so openly. And they aren’t shay. But we don’t know if they love the others more, it’s only gesture and their character.”