Today I had a big fight with my sister. We were both sulking, upset and angry. I told my father that I was really hurt and he said that it is not worth being hurt when there are people right now in Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo and elsewhere who have lost their homes, family members and futures in the blink of an eye. And that if you told those people that there were two girls in New Jersey who got to go to school every day, who had a comfortable house, an intact family and never had to worry about food or money or safety, they would think it was ridiculous how sad and hurt and angry we were being. I understand my dad's point. He is saying firstly that we should be grateful for what we have and not bitter about the small things that are not going well. And secondly that we should think of our problems in perspective in terms of what the rest of humanity may suffer. But can the above idea ever really act as consolation, or should it? It seems that you can't put emotions in perspective - does the...

What is it to keep one's emotional reactions in proportion? There is a philosophical issue here that seems worth raising: emotional reactions are not simply sensational reactions to the world, they can be cognitive reactions too. Emotions can sometimes tell you things about the world that one's beliefs aren't registering. Perhaps your upset about the argument with your sister contained a cognitive response that was appropriate to the scale of the argument with your sister, in which case the emotional content in itself should not be changed by the thought that there are many situations in this world that would be infinitely more upsetting and difficult to bear. The advice that one should keep one's emotional responses in proportion - making sure the cognitive content is correct, if you like - might sometimes require one to let it go, but equally it might require one to stand by the upset and conclude that the argument one had this morning was indeed really upsetting. If so, one needs some other way...

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