Secondary emotions

Secondary emotions are acquired over time, and depend on the VPC.

Now imagine you come across a snake again, but this time, you’re a herpetologist – someone who studies reptiles and amphibians. You’ve been around snakes all your life, and you feel totally comfortable with them. And now you’ve just encountered a rare and harmless snake that’s been your favorite species since you were a child.

Now what emotion are you feeling? It’s no longer fear; you’re overjoyed! What you’re experiencing now is a secondary emotion.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start by going back to the basics. Remember, an emotion is essentially a combination of your emotional body state and the mental images that triggered it. In our example, there are lots of images that could be at play. There’s your visual image of the snake in front of you. Perhaps there are memories of previous encounters with the same species. And maybe there are words representing information you’ve picked up about this species of snake.

Over the course of your life, you’ve built up a rich collection of images of the various things you’ve come into contact with – snakes, in this example, but it could be anything. People, places, objects, events, and so on. Over time, you start to associate these images with different emotions.

Maybe your favorite teacher introduced you to snakes during a fun trip to the zoo. That experience planted a seed of associated happiness in your brain, so to speak. Then perhaps you saw another snake on a visit to a pet store with your dad, and that made the seed grow a little more. If your life experiences keep watering the seed, it’ll eventually develop into a strong association between snakes and happiness. At this point, you’ve acquired a secondary emotion: happiness for snakes.

To feel this emotion, you still need your somatosensory cortex to keep you abreast of your emotional body state. You also need your limbic system to help create that state. But you also need something to take all of your various images of snakes and combine them with the various signals coming in and out of your limbic system and somatosensory cortex. And guess what that something is?

Your prefrontal cortex – particularly our old friend, the VPC – suspect number one in the mystery of practical reasoning.