"Just flowers"
Just flicking though my pictures, I am beginning to realize that my love
affair with flowers appears to be never-ending. Indeed, 'petal power' evokes
positive emotional stimuli which can be immediate and long-term. Aside from the
commonly associated visual aesthetic pleasures of seeing flowers, I simply
cannot help it but 'smile', which suggests that there are emotional rewards
associated with flowers. Even psychologists attesting to the 'floral
attraction' hypothesis also suggest that, there are recognizable features such
as the activities of the zygomatic muscle (smiling) which highlight a positive
response to flower stimuli, Dimberg and Thell (1988).
Smiling can be used as a reliable indicator of positive emotional and
secondary effects on moods because of the cognitive processes that align
(happy) memories with the 'positive' sensory elements evoked by flowers. The
brain is a beautiful thing isn’t it? Imagine all those multi-channel sensory
interactions busy at work helping to make me 'happy' . Well, it would be interesting
to actually understand the neurobiology of emotion in terms of the
psychological relationships between flowers and human's sensory properties ,
but I will leave that to the biologists and psychologists.
