Thread:Garr9988/@comment-5782071-20170715215246/@comment-1674153-20170716210421

Actually, fear and pain are extraordinarily emotional responses. Namely because all emotions are physical responses.

According to Edwin S. Shneidman PhD, who is the founder of the American Association of Suicidology, the sensation of pain is a combination of physiological process and psychological need. Meaning that when things are hurting, it can be as much about the actual damage as it is the individual psyche's perception to the damage, which is how we learn behavior patterns. Anyone who has gotten a shot can confirm it somehow didn't hurt as much when you were distracted from the actual invasion of the needle, because we damage is predominantly percieved emotionally.

When you experience pain, you are either experiencing peripheral sensitation or central sensitation. Peripheral senses "actual" damage to your body, like when your finger gets cut or your skin is burned. Central, on the other hand, won't actually involve bodily harm, as it is when your central nervous system is being sensitive and creating the familiar feeling of pain as nerves get too stimulated. Incidentially, chronic pain derives from your CNS firing in the same patterns long after the actual PNS was damaged, usually because the PNS didn't heal correctly.

Anyway, all this to say that pain is just like any other emotion - a reaction of electrical and chemical impulses in the brain, the CNS, that result in action that either enforces or punishes behavior - and it's certainly arguable that pain and fear are one of the strongest emotions as they very clearly degrade neural patterns for the sake of self preservation, in the same way that intense positivity, like pleasure and happiness, enforce neural patterns.