A Study on Evolutionary Perspectives of ‘Emotions’ and ‘Mood’ on Biological Evolutionary Platform

Abstract

This study endeavours to define evolutionary perspectives of emotions and mood on biological evolutionary platform. Emotions and Mood are two separate entities of the mental apparatus. 'Mood' is the energy level of the mind at a given particular moment, whereas 'emotion' is a specific sensation or feeling in the mind that provides directional drive to the other faculties of the mind – memory, intelligence, and physical activities – for their actions to be performed to pursue a specific goal. Present study supports that every emotion has been developed individually in the course of biological evolution, and they all have been evolved to maintain the survival needs. According to ‘Emotion Model’ posited by Das, each emotion is distinct and different with a specific survival role and physiologically can be qualitatively and quantitatively determined on different emotion scales. So there is no such existence of as such primary and secondary emotions. Furthermore, each emotion has some certain expressing habits, which both are suited for adapting with the emotion provoking situations and are used for inter-communication purposes. This study also clarifies how evolution of emotions has been an important tool in sociobiology maintaining the bridge between Darwin's evolution theory and Hamilton’s inclusive fitness theory, and has become responsible for entire social evolution.