What effect does the Autonomic nervous system have on emotions?

Question

What effect does the Autonomic nervous system have on emotions?

Answer 1

Your fight or flight responses are stimulated by the ANS.  Nervousness, fear, anger, protectiveness, and lust are all enhanced by the ANS, but the nervous system produces the responses to the brain's emotions, not the other way around.

"To begin, many researchers distinguish feeling and emotion, where feeling refers to the subjective experience of the emotion. Some believe that emotions can occur unconsciously, and hence that emotion is a more general phenomenon than its subjective feeling. Feelings may also more narrowly refer to the experience of bodily changes.

A second distinction focuses on the difference between the emotion and the cause of the emotion. For example do we say that thoughts about a loved one cause the emotion of love or that these thoughts are part of the emotion? One way to resolve this issue is to see whether the emotion can occur independently of these thoughts. Thus, thoughts about a particular person or situation could not be part of the emotion of love, since one can experience the same emotion about many other things. Yet could one experience love without some thought or other of a loved person or object? If not, then we may stipulate that thoughts of a loved object are part of the emotion. Some theorists argue that at least some emotions can be caused without any thoughts or indeed 'cognitive activity' at all. They point to very immediate reactions (e.g. LeDoux 1996), as well as the conjectured emotions of infants and animals as justification here. Debate on this point is ongoing but represents a major distinction between what are called 'cognitive' theories of emotions and 'non-cognitive' theories of emotions, where non-cognitive theories regard some other feature of emotions, such as bodily responses to be essential."

"Emotion involves the entire nervous system, of course.  But there are two parts of the nervous system that are especially significant:  The limbic system and the autonomic nervous system."

"Its function appears to be preparing the body for the kinds of vigorous activities associated with “fight or flight,” that is, with running from danger or with preparing for violence.

Activation of the sympathetic nervous system has the following effects:

    dilates the pupils

    opens the eyelids

    stimulates the sweat glands

    dilates the blood vessels in large muscles

    constricts the blood vessels in the rest of the body

    increases the heart rate

    opens up the bronchial tubes of the lungs

    inhibits the secretions in the digestive system

One of its most important effects is causing the adrenal glands to release epinephrine (aka adrenalin) into the blood stream.  Epinephrine is a powerful hormone that causes various parts of the body to respond in much the same way as the sympathetic nervous system.  Being in the blood stream, it takes a bit longer to stop its effects.  This is why, when you get upset, it sometimes takes a while before you can calm yourself down again!

The sympathetic nervous system also takes in information, mostly concerning pain from internal organs.  Because the nerves that carry information about organ pain often travel along the same paths that carry information about pain from more surface areas of the body, the information sometimes get confused.  This is called referred pain, and the best known example is the pain some people feel in the shoúlders and arms when they are having a heart attack.

The other part of the autonomic nervous system is called the parasympathetic nervous system.  It has its roots in the brainstem and in the spinal cord of the lower back.  Its function is to bring the body back from the emergency status that the sympathetic nervous system puts it into.

Some of the details of parasympathetic arousal include...

    pupil constriction

    activation of the salivary glands

    stimulating the secretions of the stomach

    stimulating the activity of the intestines

    stimulating secretions in the lungs

    constricting the bronchial tubes

    decreasing heart rate

The parasympathetic nervous system also has some sensory abilities:  It receives information about blood pressure, levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, and so on.

There is actually one more part of the autonomic nervous system that we don't mention too often:  The enteric nervous system.  This is a complex of nerves that regulate the activity of the stomach!  When you get sick to your stomach or feel butterflies when you get nervous, you can blame the enteric nervous system. "

Answer 2

it makes you do something you dont normally do

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Answer 3

no effect. but your emotions can have effects on you ANS.