Table of Contents
What is Kindness
Kindness is the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. Being friendly means having a personality that appears like us, neither dominating nor demanding, like a friend. Being generous means one who gives to others what one has in excess, without clinging on hard to his excess wealth. Being considerate means one who can take into account the difficulty, pain, and problems of others, while behaving with others.
Emotion vs Expression
Importantly, kindness is a behavioral and personality trait, that needs to be exercised, and not a core emotion that can be experienced. Therefore, kindness is like an expression of empathy.
The way we may smile when we are happy, but not necessarily always smile when we are happy, or we always are happy when we smile, the exact same way one may show kindness without being empathetic, one can be kind when one is empathetic, or one may choose not to be kind when empathetic.
How likely would you answer that “she is happy?” if you saw the second picture of her in the bottom row?
Why Emotions can not be judged from Expression?
Emotion is a continuous story, that stitches several sequential memories and events, where each event has its own feelings and thoughts. Feelings change all the time, but emotions are long-lasting. Here the girl has a happy emotions when it comes to her childhood friend. However, her feelings may change based on the situation. In the bottom two last columns, she was first sad because he was not around, and then she was angry even when he came because she wanted him to make her smile.
