Expressing Emotions
An emotion is a subjective feeling provoked by real or imagined objects or events that have high significance to the individual.
Emotions exert an incredibly powerful force on human behavior. Strong emotions can cause you to take actions you might not normally perform, or avoid situations that you generally enjoy. Why exactly do we have emotions? What causes us to have these feelings?
Emotions result from four occurrences:
1. you must interpret some stimulus
2. you have a subjective feeling, such as fear or happiness
3. you experience physiological responses, such as an increased heart rate
4. you display an observable behavior, such as smiling or crying (Plotnik 1999).
Emotions exert an incredibly powerful force on human behavior. Strong emotions can cause you to take actions you might not normally perform, or avoid situations that you generally enjoy. Why exactly do we have emotions? What causes us to have these feelings?
With the technology advances of the past few years we have learned to express a variety of emotions with emoticons. There are smiles, frowns, angry faces, surprised faces, so that we can easily express what we are feeling using fewer words, but they are still expressions of our emotions.
All emotions have three parts: the physical, the behavioral and the cognitive.
The behavioral part is the outward expression of the emotion, such as body language, hand gestures, and the tone of a person's voice.
The cognitive aspect concerns how we think about or interpret a situation, which affects emotions.
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin argues that all people express certain basic feelings in the same ways. Studies have implied that certain basic facial expressions are innate-that is, part of our biological inheritance.
Psychologist Carroll Izard and his colleagues (Trotter, 1983) developed a coding system for assessing emotional states in people.
Another psychologist (Russell, 1994) concluded that there are universally recognized facial expressions of emotions.
James Averill (1983) believes that many of our everyday emotional reactions are the result of social expectations and consequences. We learn to express and experience emotions in the company of other people, and we learn that emotions can serve different social functions.
Learning explains the differences we find among cultures once we go beyond such basic expressions as laughing or crying. Children are taught either directly or indirectly-which emotions are appropriate in certain circumstances.
All of us are born with the capacity for emotion and with certain basic forms of expression, but when, where, and how we express different feelings depend in large part on learning.
Analyzing facial expressions helps us to describe emotions, but it does not tell us where emotions come from. Some psychologists believe emotions derive from physical changes, while others believe that emotions result from mental processes.
Threatening Elements
When people from various cultures were asked to identify the threatening shapes in each pair, they consistently chose the triangular and diagonal elements. Psychologists have proposed a number of different theories to explain the how and why behind human emotions.
Theories of Emotion
The James-Lange Theory
James concluded that we use the word emotion to describe our visceral or gut reactions to the things that take place around us. He also argued that bodily reactions form the basis of labeling and experiencing emotions. Because Carl Lange came to the same conclusions at about the same time, this position is known as the James-Lange Theory (Lange & James, 1922).
According to this theory, you see an external stimulus that leads to a physiological reaction. Your emotional reaction is dependent upon how you interpret those physical reactions.
For example, suppose you are walking around your neighborhood and you see a big fierce looking dog. You begin to tremble and your heart begins to race. According to this theory you aren't trembling because you are afraid, you are afraid because you are trembling.
The Cannon-Bard Theory
The Cannon-Bard theory of emotion is also a physiological explanation of emotion developed by Walter Cannon and Philip Bard. This theory states that we feel emotions and experience physiological reactions such as sweating, trembling and muscle tension simultaneously. More specifically, it is suggested that emotions result when the thalamus sends a message to the brain in response to a stimulus, resulting in a physiological reaction.
Read Theories of Emotion to learn more about how the theories differ from each other.
The Schachter-Singer Two Factor Theory
This theory suggests that people's experience of emotion depends on two factors: physiological arousal and the cognitive interpretation of that arousal.
Example: If a person finds herself near an angry mob of people when she is physiologically aroused, she might label that arousal anger. On the other hand, if she experiences the same pattern of physiological arousal at a music concert, she might label the arousal excitement.
Situational Cues
Charles Darwin was one of the earliest researchers to scientifically study emotions. He suggested that emotional displays, or situational cues, could also play an important role in safety and survival.
If you encountered a hissing or spitting animal, it would clearly indicate that the creature was angry and defensive, leading to you back off and avoid possible danger.
In much the same way, understanding the emotional displays of others gives us clear information about how we might need to respond in a particular situation.
Examples: Anger
It has been said that "anger is like the mercury in a thermometer". When left unchecked the intensity of the emotion increases from frustration to anger and then to other things like rage and bitterness. Just as animals give signs or cues that tell us to back off, so do humans.
Have you ever seen two people squaring off to fight? You can tell from their body language which one will back down and which one will not.
The situational cues for anger such as the tone of voices, the body language of the crowd, and the encouragement or discouragement of those around will either cause the fight to begin or defuse the situation.
Examples: Curiosity
When your teacher wants to peak your interest in a new subject she creates situational cues such as body language, the tone of her voice combined with what she is saying to raise your curiosity which in return causes you to pay attention to what she has to say.
Examples: Anxiety
Think about anxiety for a minute. What situations cause you to feel anxious? What are the cues that signal feelings of anxiety? How about when you donate blood, or you have to tell your parents you failed a test, or you want to ask a girl out on a date?
The situational cues for anxiety are all the same, the nervous feeling in your stomach, the body language you display, the tone of your voice as you speak.
As you have learned, our emotions serve a wide variety of purposes. Emotions can be fleeting, persistent, powerful, complex, and even life-changing. They can motivate us to act in particular ways and give us the tools and resources we need to interact meaningfully in the world in which we live.
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