#automaticappraising

In another excerpt from Emotions Revealed I found something that is essential to understanding people's reactions to specific stimuli and acting appropriately in the given situation. "The central mechanisms that guide our emotional responses are set into action by [the] automatic appraising... Stored in these central mechanisms there must be sets of instructions guiding what we do, instructions that reflect what has been adaptive in our evolutionary past." - Emotions Revealed; Paul Ekman By looking into our past, we can find what exactly our ancestors did to cope with various different situations relating to our own, and use this information to guide our actions in dealing with others in similar circumstances.