Post #3 in category. We recommend reading posts in numerical order.

E-motion: “Energy and information in motion.” Dan Siegal

Mot-ivation: Latin root -mot, meaning “to move”.

Vector in mathematics and physics: “Magnitude and Direction. A quantity defined by both how big it is (magnitude) and the way it points (direction).”

Emotion is about movement, about direction, about energy toward or away.

Antonio Damasio discusses an important function of emotion as our continuous self-monitoring of our body’s changing internal states. He says emotions are so pervasive that they are involved in “the functions of the entire body, including all of the functions of the brain itself, including abstract reasoning.”

Jaak Panksepp, researching mice, wrote that primary emotional systems are pre-wired in the brain. He considers fear, rage, panic, grief, care, play, and lust as some of the oldest and most fundamental organizing forces in the mammalian nervous system.

Dan Siegel describes emotion as the process in which the many separate functions of a distributed brain are drawn into a single coherent state of mind.

A shortcut way of thinking about emotion is to think of emotion in terms of pleasure versus discomfort, the “pull toward” or the “push away,” and as a continuum of arousal: how much energy, how much intensity, and in what context is it experienced.

Our emotions combine with our other developmental domain processes to help determine: Should we move closer, or move away? Should we try again, or give up? Should we ask for help, or can we manage ourselves?

Kenneth Dodge writes, “Emotion is the energy that drives, organizes, amplifies, and attenuates cognitive activity, and in turn is the experience and expression of this activity.” Emotion does not merely influence thinking from what the person senses from their body or from outside of their body. Emotion is also the subjective experience that emerges from cognitive activity itself. Our thoughts influence our feelings and our feelings influence our thoughts.

When we interpret events, remember experiences, anticipate the future, or evaluate situations, we also experience those cognitive processes as emotions.

Emotion and motivation are the expression of needs, values, and intentions, a cause of certain thoughts and beliefs, the motivation and impetus for action, and the personally meaningful evaluation of results. The distinction between “the thinking brain” and “the feeling brain” breaks down in lived human experience.

Emotion as an Integrated Developmental System

The brain functions as interconnected, integrated networks, each structure, each area and each pathway continually influencing the others. Emotion is not a separate developmental domain that operates alongside cognition, language, social understanding or motor behavior. Emotional processes are woven throughout every aspect of human functioning. The relationship between the amygdala and the hippocampus illustrates this principle of structural interconnectivity and developmental function.

The amygdala continually scans incoming sensory information, assigning emotional significance to what is seen, heard, touched, remembered or imagined. It helps generate experiences of fear, anxiety, pleasure, attraction or aggression.

The amygdala does not act alone. It works closely with the hippocampus. The hippocampus connects emotional experiences with the broader context of memory, place and personal history. A person who unexpectedly encounters a lion in the open savannah experiences alarm and fear generated by the amygdala. But that person can stand close to a lion in the zoo and not be frightened because their hippocampus helps to provide information that this situation is safe. The quick emotional response and the slower cognitive interpretation interact as parts of a single integrated adaptive system.

When an experience carries emotional significance, the amygdala signals that the event matters. Stress hormones are released, attention becomes focused, and the hippocampus encodes the experience, including the context, the informational data, and the person’s feeling states, into memory.

The events we remember most vividly are usually those charged with emotional meaning. And previously stored memories help shape the emotional responses generated by the amygdala. Memory influences emotion, and emotion influences memory in continuous reciprocal exchanges.

Domain integration is also involved in the person’s social development. The amygdala rapidly evaluates social signals, helping us determine whether another person appears welcoming, threatening, or trustworthy.

Emotions are involved in the formation of early attachments, reducing anxiety and increasing comfort and pleasure during nurturing, physical contact and parental bonding. Successful social interactions also depend upon the hippocampus, which retrieves memories of previous social experiences and relationship histories.

As we communicate, we are not relying upon emotion or cognition separately. We are integrating emotional appraisal, memory, perspective-taking, language and social understanding. The amygdala helps us interpret subtle shifts in the other person’s facial expression, vocal tone, and body language. The hippocampus helps us to remember what was said before, to maintain the thread of a conversation, and to interpret meanings and intentions.

Our movements and actions reflect our brain interactions and developmental domain integrations. The amygdala triggers rapid defensive movements and actions before conscious deliberation and decisions are made. A sudden threat may produce startle, freezing, screaming, fighting or escaping. Other situations can generate emotional expressions such as a genuine smile, or approaching someone to give or to get a warm hug.

The hippocampus provides the spatial maps that guide purposeful movement, helping us navigate and travel through complex environments. Emotional significance and motor planning are linked from the very beginning of our actions and behaviors.

Emotional experience is inseparable from memory, language, social understanding, attention, decision-making, and motor behavior because the neural systems underlying these functions are deeply interconnected. What we call “emotion” and “cognition” emerge together through the coordinated activity of interacting neural networks, life experience and learning.

Interest, curiosity, enjoyment, understanding and success motivate the child to look, to listen, to wonder why, and to learn. Without emotional interest, a great deal of our thinking and learning would be far less successful.

When a child learns, emotional, cognitive, social, language, and motor processes interact and influence each other. Safe, enjoyable and supportive interpersonal learning relationships support interest. Interest promotes attention. Attention supports memory. Memory influences emotion. Emotion affects communication. Communication changes social relationships.

The child who learns, remembers, communicates, plays, loves, fears, explores, moves through the world, and adapts and progresses as a whole integrated person. There is no dividing line where emotion stops, and where cognition and our other developmental systems begin.

Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim

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