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Quote by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

“Worse yet, human nature was allowed no outlet in the motional life of the enslaved. There was no acceptable place for the range of human emotions. If you were angry, you had to swallow your rage. If you were afraid, you had to pretend as if you were calm. If your mother and brother had died a month apart, you had to go to work without tears, without a break, without comfort.”

Quote by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

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Erica Armstrong Dunbar

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“Emotions are observable and measurable, reflected in bodily changes and actions. Since human bodies are the same across the globe, emotions are by and large universal, including what happens to us when we fall in love, have fun, or get mad. That is why we never feel emotionally disconnected even in a country where we don’t speak the language. Feelings, on the other hand, are private experiences, varying from place to place and from person to person. What one person experiences as pain, another may feel as pleasure. There is no simple one-to-one mapping between emotions and feelings. Every language has its own concepts to describe subjective states, and people bring different backgrounds and experiences to how they feel and why.”

“Several studies have found that people are less likely to persist on difficult or unsolvable problems if they have already exerted self-control on a prior task, such as attempting to control their thoughts or emotions or resisting the temptation to eat chocolates and cookies. Some recent evidence suggests that the capacity for self-control is enhanced by positive emotions, and there is evidence that people in good moods persist longer (and perform better) at solving tasks.”

“Desires and emotions as such are involuntary; they are not subject to direct and immediate volitional control; they are the automatic result of subconscious integrations. (...) It is impossible to compute the magnitude of the disaster, the wreckage of human lives, produced by the belief that desires and emotions can be commanded in and out of existence by an act of will.”