Memetic Horizon

Emotions, we feel them, we have felt them since we can remember.  As years went by and we found ourselves in more complex relationships, or other people's emotional experiences are communicated to us, we have a greater reportoire that our subconscious can draw on.  Could it not be that the demands of an infant are the limit of geneticly inherited emotions and that richer ones are learned?

 

Emotions being such a hard thing to identify and clearly communicate probably have a low transmission as far as memes go.  Most of the emotions that we feel and could feel, based on our current configuration, are likely to have been learned from personal experience.  It would seem that socialization has a part in this, where we are told that something is good or bad or sad by those that raise us.  Now this kind of emotional conditioning may backfire in regards to the specific event, but by seeing a role-model act in an emotional way towards a particular stimulus we 'learn'  a new way to feel in a given circumstance.  Not to say that we learn the dictionary definition of a word, but rather that we learn the practical manifestation of the meaning.

 

Until we have a way to get neural pictures of people in different states and studies of brain chemistry change of the long term we cannot know for certain anything about the actual emotions felt.  Observations of what we would call 'emotional behavior' is the best to go on.  In mass media entertainment when protagonists are seen as acting out a given emotional behavior is a reaccuring situation one may feel encouraged to portray that behavior themself.  This doesn't tell us that the individual in question feels the emotion portrayed, but rather that the behavior is done to feel like they themselves are protagonists