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When you read or watch anything that makes you very emotional, STOP and Ask yourself "Who would want me to get me all charged up?". The answer to that question help you regulate your emotion and focus on the real problem.
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When you find yourself angry at or hating a certain group of people, no matter who they are (Transgender, White, Black, Gay, Feminists, whatever be the group) STOP and Tell yourself "These conflicts and anger between people is an illusion. I am not angry at these people. I am angry at the people manipulating these groups".
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This is a very insightful post. I have actually been thinking of creating a whole blog post dedicated to what emotions are, how they work and why they are important and how it ties with instincts. Also how we all have two brains - emotional and logical and how they both need to be in harmony to be able to live happily.
The example you gave ( a person dying) is very apt. My personal favourite is killing an animal. But it works the same way. So many small details to factor in rather than just saying GOOD or BAD or SAD or HAPPY. This kind of calculation is a math of its own, and its called fuzzy logic.
Infact emotions are the fuzzy logic equivalent of our logical mind, and they can perform amazingly complex calculation in a split second and tell you what you should do based on all your values, your experiences and individual differences in various factors affecting the current situation.
Instincts are nothing but the outcome of this emotional brain performing complex fuzzy logic that takes into account so many things that we cannot consciously even be aware of them. That is why it is important to trust your instinct. It might get things wrong sometimes, but that failure becomes part of the learning data and next time the instinct will be even more finely tuned. The more you trust your instinct the more finely tuned it will be.
I would say that values is one part of emotions. Our emotional brain is unable to communicate verbally. Emotions are the language of the emotional brain. Values are one part of the equation. An equally important part is your insecurities. Emotional brain tries to protect your innermost person ("ego"). Insecurities are perceived as threats to our ego and hence trigger strong emotions. This is why I can ask you a innocdent question but end up making you angry, because it might have touched close to an insecurity.
The ultimate way to handle emotions is to learn mindfulness. Minfulness is a means to communicate with our emotional brain by simply observing out thoughts and feelings without judgement, and querying what is the cause of these thougts, and unraveling the thread. Eventually you will uncover your hidden insecurities, many of them caused by childhood issues (issues can be very simple things like you were unable to gain approval of your parents as a child). When you work on resolving these issues you will lose your insecurities and then your emotions become pure reflections of your values under conflict.