Emotions are evolutionary
adaptations, as they enhance an organism's ability to
experience and evaluate its environment and thus increase its
likelihood to survive and reproduce, by providing the simplest
plans for evolutionary most common actions needed, such as
approaching or avoiding (in)digestible objects, fighting for it
with other organisms or running away if the other organism is too
powerful (anger vs. fear), and forming or loosing cooperative ties
based on reciprocal altruism (gladness vs. sadness) with other
organisms. In addition, emotions serve important functions in
animal communication (between or within species).
Despite that in many cultures emotions (passion) are contrasted
with cognition (reason) as
a source of motivation and decision making, modern psychological
science recognizes that, in healthy animals and humans, an
individual's emotion, cognition, and behavior have a certain degree
of integration and also can influence reciprocally each other.
