Emotions as a Motive, Essay Example

Emotions play a rather significant role in our lives and influence the majority of our decisions seriously. This happens because they add colors to our life, they give additional implications to the events that occur with us and cause different reactions in us, so they share our vision of the life situations we come across. Emotions may become various tools in our lives, in particular it is possible to speak about emotions in the role of a motive for certain actions that instigate us to do this or that thing, and not another one. Why this happens and how we can control the flow of our lives judging from the point of view of emotions is the topic of the present discussion.

Jastrow (2007) indicates that emotions perform a function of a certain vector for the actions we commit and act as a motive to action in general:

“The emotion like the motive is something that moves to action; the psychology imbedded in the etymology is sound. Action must be both specific and intent” (p. 111).

Judging from the opinion of Jastrow (2007), it is possible to conclude that emotions are a real motive for actions that we undertake and they give rationalization and sense to them in case we want to justify the way we behaved and the deeds we did. In general, emotions have always been a very strong motive for action because it is a rare occasion that all people control their actions and emotions and act only according to the common sense or the initially created and rationalized plan. Surely, there is always an element of unpredictability in the human behavior, which adds charm and at the same time danger to our conduct.

However, it is still possible to conclude that emotions as a motive for our actions may often show the right way out due to the strong connection of emotions and intuition; of course there is a plenty of cases when people committed crimes in the state of affection, but still life guided by emotions may be incomparably fuller and more vivid than the life according to the schedule and principles of rationalism.

References

Jastrow, J. (2007). Character and Temperament.