Of course it's seen as better. Do you lose your temper and get angry after every setback or inconvenience?

This is so self-evident I'm surprised it's even discussed.

Does "emotion" only equal "angry" and "having a temper"? Is this also a puritan/evangelical thing? What about displays of love and tenderness?

And even so, the answer to your question is most of the times "yes", at least in my case, as in I do prefer to spill it out in the heat of the moment instead of keeping it all inside.

It's not wrong having "emotions" and displaying them, I though that this was established since back in the Romantics' day (with only a resurgence of "showing emotions is bad" in the Victorian era).

I'm not sure where you got the idea that "control over emotions" equals "not displaying emotions". I'd say it rather equals "not acting on emotions".

Situation: You are angry at a person.

- Control over emotion: You tell them you're angry and why.

- Lack of control: You punch them in the face.

Situation: You see a person in need of help.

- Control over emotion: You allocate reasonable amounts of resources to help them.

- Lack of control: You drop everything and spend all resources availabel to help them.

Anecdata time. The later situation was comically obvious a month or so ago in Sweden. We have a group of people (supposedly) from Afghanistan that may or may not get deported. They are protesting in our capital, and the protest had been going on for some time. A high profile lawyer raises some money (amounting to a couple of thousand dollars) in order to support these people. He goes to where the protesters are assembled. The first person he speaks to, he feels so sorry for that he decides just to give her the entire sum of money he has raised, and be done with it.

I'd argue that (apart from committing borderline fraud), this person displayed an unreasonable lack of control over his "love and tenderness". He spent a fairly large amount of money that could have been used to help a large group of people on a single individual on the spur of the moment.

Having emotions is not wrong. Showing them is not wrong either. Letting them get the best of you (i.e. lacking control over them) often is.

I didn't find anything about the story of the lawyer when searching. Could you tell me where to look? The story fits my preconceived notions too well to not question it...

Thank you for forcing me to look for reference. It turns out that I got the story a wrong in pretty much all the details, but - I'd argue - correct in the conclusion. The event did not happen a month or two ago, that was apparently the point at which I heard about it. And it didn't involve Afghani refuges. It involved Syrian refuges, and it happened in 2015.

The lawyer, Viktor Banke, raised around 15,000 SEK (slightly less than $2000) to help Syrian refugees who were living temporarily in the Mosque at Medborgarplatsen in central Stockholm. He had raised this money with the promise that they'd be given to the people who were running the shelters, to help them finance the operation. When he arrives, he meets a Syrian woman with children who, while travelling from Syria through Europe, had been registered as a refugee in Hungary. Since EU policy at the time was (and maybe still is?) that refugees should be handled by the first country they register in, it looked very likely that she and her children would be sent back to Hungary. Notably in this story is that at the time Hungary was considered a "less attractive" country for refugees than Sweden. Viktor then decides to hand the raised money (not a huge sum of money, but still) to this woman, rather than to the people operating the shelter.

I don't have any international references for this at all - apparently Viktor wrote about it in his new book Andrum, in which he discusses Swedish politics w/r to the refugee situation in Europe (I have not read the book).

Brief source in Swedish: https://bjornostbring.wordpress.com/2017/08/09/recension-av-...

My apologies for my misleading previous post. That's what happens when you tell a story from memory. Anecdotes indeed.

It's a conversation, not research papers ;-)

The point wasn't about showing emotions, it was about controlling emotions so that you have conscious choice over whether to show them or not.

For instance, in certain circumstances anger may be appropriate to be shown, but in other cases if you show anger it could work against you. Similarly with humour or any other emotion.

I see your point now, thanks. Still personally think that this makes people more "stiff" and more "false", so to speak, which I personally don't like. Maybe it's a cultural thing (I live in Eastern Europe, am in my mid-30s now).

Whether the persona they show is more or less like their true self depends on what you consider their "true self" to be. If you look at any sort of school of thought which embraced asceticism, you'll find people that, because we experience way more emotional changes over a day than we experience changes on our set of desired behaviors, came to think of emotions as unreal, annoying distractions. The major example of this kind of thinking being Stoicism, but really, it just of sort of permeated every other pre-modern society.

So yeah, I don't think it's a "puritan/evangelical" thing. It's more of a "anything but contemporary urban society" thing.

I think it can also be situational as well - you can obviously be freer with emotions with close friends then at work.

(46, English)

You wouldn't want to live in a society where everything acted on their emotions only.

Yes, I actually want to live in a society where people are a lot more open when it comes to expressing their emotions and feelings compared to a society which actively tries to supress them and instead rely on other social tools.

That's actually one of the few reasons why I've still not emigrated yet. The few countries which I now find economically stable are generally seen as "cold" when it comes to human interactions and expressing your feelings (Norway, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden) while the few other options which I found a lot more similar to my country (I now live in Romania) have been going through difficult economic times lately (Spain, Italy).

You are missing the point.

If people acted on their emotion (i.e. mostly controlled by our reptile brain) it would be a very violent society and quite frankly unsustainable.

You can relate this with Young Brash Jobs vs Old Mature Jobs who made better choices!

> It's not wrong having "emotions" and displaying them

I agree, it's not wrong, which is why we sympathize with emotional displays in children, the mentally disabled, and people who have suffered great loss. Those responses are involuntary, or nearly so.

The problem is that emotions will lie. As someone who has fought battles with depression, irrational exuberance and other unbalanced states, looking back at how I misinterpreted reality and acted on false certainty is embarrassing.

As I've gotten older, I have strengthened an invisible muscle which allows me to clamp down on my involuntary responses so I can evaluate them more rationally before choosing whether to embrace or extinguish them. I consider myself very fortunate to have had the time to make progress with this, and I am always happy to see others do the same.

When you bottle up a feeling that you later realize to have been based on falsehood, it doesn't hurt your psyche any longer. It just fades away, with only a glimmer of gratitude left behind that you didn't make a foolish choice because of it.

Not only evangelical.. "The wisdom only enter the wise" (Talmud approved!) As I understand this one, one would "intellectually" work on itself to get a "emotional" wisdom as the reward of his aging process. Personally I feel more and more angry with time, I suppose it is not a good thing.