Human Instincts, Everyday Life, and the Brain: a paradigm for understanding behavior - Volume One

VOLUME ONE Feelings act as instincts in humans and other species. Feelings are designed to help us obtain and protect resources. Feelings are a more reliable means of directing our behavior than are learning, memory, culture, and conscious thought. Instead, we use learning, memory, culture, and conscious thought as means to satisfy our feelings. We seek positive feelings and avoid negative feelings. Positive feelings occur in the form of pleasure, which is provided by a variety of sources, including positive reactions from others, pleasant stimulation, the achievement of goals, and sex. Negative feelings include physical discomfort; loneliness; anxiety; envy; anger; and hurt from criticism, rejection, embarrassment, and self-criticism (guilt). Feelings involve an increase in tension or a release of tension. Tension and the increase of tension are experienced as hurt, and the release of tension is experienced as pleasure. People engage in specific behaviors in response to positive and negative feelings. This explains behavior at both the individual and societal levels. Five behaviors are examined in Volume One. They are seeking positive reactions from others, avoiding embarrassment, avoiding criticism, avoiding those who reject us, and trying to help others. Each of these behaviors is discussed below. People want positive reactions from others, and try to get them in a multitude of ways. People seek positive reactions in order to experience pleasure and avoid loneliness. When people receive the kinds of positive reactions they want from the individuals they want them from, they feel pleasure and they cease to feel lonely. People establish relationships in order to obtain a steady supply of positive reactions. Those who provide a person with positive reactions usually provide the person with resources. Resources include food, shelter, protection, help, money, stimulation, and sex. Those who do not provide a person with positive reactions usually do not provide the person with resources. Therefore, the ability to get positive reactions from a person serves as an early indicator that one is likely to get resources from the person. People provide others with positive reactions and resources in order to get both positive reactions and resources from others. When people experience pleasure they smile and laugh. Smiling and laughing are desired positive reactions, and people do things for others in order to receive smiles and laughs. Laughter provides animated smiles. People are embarrassed when others know they have done something that is disapproved of. Embarrassment is a punishing experience because it hurts. People try to avoid embarrassment in order to avoid hurt. In order to avoid embarrassment, people a) avoid doing the things that others disapprove of, and b) try to keep others from finding out what they do that others disapprove of. When a person is disapproved of, others are less willing to give the person resources. Embarrassment acts as an early warning system. It notifies us that we are in a situation which is likely to cause others to cut off our resources. When we avoid embarrassment we avoid alienating others and losing resources. People try to avoid criticism from others. Criticism hurts, and people avoid criticism in order to avoid hurt. When a person is criticized, other people are already reducing that person’s resources or making plans to do so. Therefore the more sensitive a person is to criticism and the possibility of receiving it, the more the person tries to avoid criticism, and the better the person protects his or her resources. People reject others because their own resources are limited. If they give their resources to everyone who wants them, they will not have them available for themselves and those they want to give them to. People usually do not experience hurt when they reject others. However, those who are rejected do experience hurt. Because of this hurt, people normally avoid those who reject them. This enables them to stop wasting time and energy continuing to try to get resources from those who are unlikely to provide them. Instead, people seek resources from those who do not reject them and are much more likely to provide them with resources. When people hurt others, cause them to lose resources, or fail to help them, they often criticize themselves. Self-criticism, or guilt, is a punishing feeling. It hurts. Therefore people try to avoid hurting others in order to avoid feeling hurt themselves. People spend most of their time with a small number of people and receive most of their resources from them. It is very much in their interest that they do not damage these people or alienate them. When they take good care of their human resources they are likely to continue receiving resources from them. It is an expensive process to try to establish relationships with new people in order to receive the same resources that one was already receiving. When people feel hurt, they cry, cry out, or want to do so. When they cry they notify others that they are being hurt and need help. When they cry they are more likely to cause those who are hurting them, or who could help them, to feel guilty. Therefore crying helps people protect themselves from being hurt and enables them to get help. Volume One includes 110 photographs, a list of the implications of this research, and a discussion of how humans view nonhumans. Hardcover: 516 pages ISBN: 978-0-9920710-0-4 Distributed by The Book Emporium, 169 Queen Street, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island C1A 4B4, Canada. e-mail: bookspei@gmail.com

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