Understanding Sexuality, Violence, and Affective Processes
The Value of Sexuality
Regarding introducing sexual practices from an early age, parents and schools cannot avoid this issue. Television and other media often depict sexual situations.
At school, teachers can teach about the responsible use of freedom, but they cannot prevent a student’s desires. Trying to suppress these desires is like trying to eliminate wine to prevent drunkenness, or eliminating night to prevent theft, or eliminating women to prevent male adultery.
The Value of Fearing Violence
Violence is not a perverse or diabolical phenomenon. It is a component of our condition that must be reasonably compensated and mitigated by cooperation, harmony, and peaceful agreements.
Affective Processes: Understanding Emotions
Affectivity is a study area of psychology closely connected to health. Humans feel, think, and act, distinguishing emotional processes (feelings, emotions, emotional states, humor, passions, tendencies, instincts, etc.) from cognitive processes (perception, attention, memory, intelligence, language, etc.) and behavior (volitional acts, attitudes, motivations, learning, etc.).
Affective processes manage energy and define how certain information sectors are cognitively processed. They are determined not only by cognitive structures but also by feelings (Lersch, 1966).
Drugs can trick the system into producing positive emotions or causing the body to assess a stimulus as positive for survival when the opposite is true. Emotional mistakes are common in the lives of living beings.
Feelings: A Deeper Dive
Feeling is the meaning perceived by the senses. However, it goes beyond mere stimulation. Feeling is what is not instinct, thought, or perception; it is all that psychic life that is not objectified. Feelings are ego states (Scheler, 1972).
Sentimental feeling and life are synonymous. These terms are preferred by philosophers and psychiatrists with anthropological orientations because their semantic field is the most comprehensive and human (animals are excited but have no feelings). The accent is placed on the inner state.
Lersch’s Fundamental Characteristics of Feelings:
- Emotional interdependence between the inner and outer world, characteristic of humans.
- Lack of objectivity.
- Positive and negative shades of pleasant or unpleasant experiences.
- Passive states of the self experienced as positive (+) or negative (-), such as happiness or sadness.
- Subjective communication from subject to subject through sympathy and empathy.
- Referrals to internal experiences, as opposed to cognitive processes like thinking, which is aimed at attracting the external world.
- Inobjectified character.
- Atmospheric and imprecise (“feel like”).
- Not apprehended from a conceptual point of view (gender differences exist).
- Generally, feelings (as opposed to emotions) have no observable physiological correlate, are not as sharp, and may not have been determined by an identifiable event.