What Are Emotions?
- Emotions are a relatively short-term mental internal mental state that prepares us to act and is mostly caused by external factors.
- For example a bully might make you feel scared and depressed but a comforting friend would make you feel happy.
- Sometimes internal events, such as your thoughts, also affect your emotions.
The 3 Reactions of Emotions
- All emotions involve a mixture of three reactions.
- an autonomous physiological response to an event that triggers an emotion.
- Emotional arousal and expressive reactions. The event leads to changes in brain systems, bodily functions, behavior.
- Finally a subjective emotional experience, where the person is aware of the feeling and the cause.
- For example if you had to make a presentation, the event of having to speak in front of a crowd might trigger nervousness, which could lead to sweating, stuttering and fidgeting. You would understand that your nervousness is caused by stage fright.
Impact of Emotions
- Emotions impact every part of our lives as people react to different situations with varying emotions.
- Emotions energize us to act and influence our behavior: an even that triggers an emotion.
Emotional Contagion
- Emotions are contagious, meaning that if someone feels a certain way, they likely influence others to act similarly.
- For example if you're feeling down then a joyful friend could easily brighten your mood.
- Emotional contagion is very strong and doesn't require physical contact.
- Even simplified expressions such as a smiling emoji can invoke happiness.
Controlling of Emotions
- Our brain controls our emotions, and they are based on brain activity like all other human behavior.
- Emotions are protective mechanisms in the brain and body.
- An autonomous emotional arousal occurs alongside unconscious physical changes in the brain and body.
- For example strong emotions might cause increased heart rate, sweating, blushing or crying.
Subjective Interpretations and Emotional Experience
- Identifying and interpreting your bodily states causes a conscious emotional experience, for example feeling joy or anger.
- Impactful events can lead to strong emotions.
- An emotional experience requires cognitive evaluation.
Preparation to Act
- The main purpose of emotions are to prepare us to act.
- Emotions activate vital bodily functions that are important for proper effective behavior with minimal thinking.
- Emotions protect people from traumas and allow us to survive and remain healthy.
- Emotions are crucial to people and emotional dysfunctions are generally related to serious mental illnesses.
- Emotions are a central protective mechanism that have shaped evolution and human development.
- For example, fear and anger are primal emotions that helped our ancestors survive and fight.
Emotional Expressions
- Emotional expressions are fundamental to social interaction.
- Humans have innate readiness to express and recognize emotions.
- This ability is so strong that people can often sympathize with non-living beings such as robots.
- Expressing, perceiving and interpreting emotions are key in socialization.
- Emotional skills allow for mutual understanding and appropriate behaviors.
- Face-to-face communication is the best for expressing and perceiving emotions.
- People can recognize even slight differences in facial expressions.
- Facial expressions are a result of evolution and are universal social signals.
- The six basic emotions are joy, anger, sadness, disgust, fear and surprise and they are found in every culture across the world.
- They are part of natural human behavior and can even be expressed by people who have been blind since birth!