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Professor Antonio Damasio – The Feeling of What Happens

We do not need to be conscious of the inducer of an emotion and often are not, and we cannot control emotions wilfully.  You may find yourself in a sad or happy state, and yet you may be at a loss as to why you are in that particular state now.  A careful search may disclose possible causes, and one cause or another may be more likely, but often you cannot be certain.  The actual cause may have been the image of an event, an image that had the potential to be conscious but just was not because you did not attend to it while you were attending to another….

In other words, the representations which induce emotions … need not be attended, regardless of whether they signify something external to the organism or something recalled internally.  Representations of either the exterior or the interior can occur underneath conscious survey and still induce emotional responses.  Emotions can be induced in a non-conscious manner and thus appear to the conscious self as seemingly unmotivated….

Once a particular sensory representation is formed, however, whether or not it is actually part of our conscious thought flow, we do not have much to say on the mechanism of inducing an emotion.  If the psychological and physiological context is right, an emotion will ensue.  The non-conscious triggering of emotions also explains why they are not easy to mimic voluntarily…… a spontaneous smile that comes from genuine delight or the spontaneous sobbing that is caused by grief ….  Causal voluntary mimicking of expressions of emotion is easily detected as fake – something always fails, whether in the configuration of the facial muscles or in the tone of voice.  The result of this state of affairs is that in most of us who are not actors, emotions are a  fairly good index of how conducive the environment is to our well-being, or at least, how conducive it is to our minds...........
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When we sense that a person is ‘tense’ or ‘edgy’,  ‘discouraged’ or ‘enthusiastic’, ‘down’, or ‘cheerful’, without a single word being spoken to translate any of those possible states, we are detecting background emotions.  We detect background emotions by subtle details of body posture, speed and contour of movements, minimal changes in the amount and speed of eye movements and in the degree of contraction of facial muscles………

From experience, you know that the responses that make up emotions are most varied.  Some responses are easily apparent in yourself and in others.  Think of the muscles of the face adopting the configurations that are typical of joy or sorrow or anger; or of the skin blanching as a reaction to bad news or flushing in a situation of embarrassment; or consider the body postures that signify joy, defiance, sadness, or discouragement; or the sweaty and clammy hands of apprehension; the racing heart associated with pride; or the slowing, near stillness of the heart in terror.