One of my friends is very anxious these days. One day, she shouted at me and told me to shut up. I was very angry and told others that she is a very mean person. My friend was surprised because I used to tell them she is honest and warm-hearted after I got a Christmas present from her. My friends’ words make me to think about the reason of my two totally opposite comments of one person. These two comments are made under two different situations, but the emotion plays a big role in both situations.

Therefore, I raised my knowledge question that is: To what extent, does the emotion affect our judgment?

Emotion as a way of knowing could influence and even change people’s point of view. There are strong emotion like happiness, sadness, hatred, anger and so on. Those strong emotions sometimes contradict with the logic. Our logic provides us several solutions to an event, but under an extreme solution, we would not choose the most suitable solutions. Once I put a selfie on the social media, a stranger posted a comment below, which said me ‘fat and ugly’. Though I know it is not true and it’s an internet-violence with no reason, I was still self-abased for my appearances for a long time.

Every object has several sides, at least two, the good side and the bad side. We always say it’s important to choose the angle of looking things. Our emotion decides our point of view. There is a famous experiment of half bottle of water, which could help to judge whether you are an optimistic person or a pessimist. However, I think this largely based on people’s emotion. When one’s emotion is happy, the person would tend to see the good side of an event or a thing, thus made an optimistic judgment, in this case we might say, ”There is half bottle of water.”

Another example is people with depression would also value things differently compared with normal people. I once had a conversation with a friend who used had depression. She told me that she knew doing sports is good for her, but the depression let her lose the ability to do so.

In our daily life, ethics problems are the biggest parts that we need to apply our emotions to solve. How do we know it is a right thing to do? It is largely based our and other people’s feeling. When we are kids, we know we made a mistake by making mother and teachers unhappy or angry. When we grow up, we are taught to think about other’s feeling first. Thus, emotion is a factor that comes to decide the public moral standard.

Different perspectives lead people to have different feelings. Those massive feelings push them to act and react. But when emotion comes to play a role during the judgment, the result become unreliable. It is hard for us to make the conclusion what is right and what is wrong.