Summary
To understand the difference between emotions, feelings, and moods and the best ways to manage negative moods; the ways in which gender, personality, and culture influence emotion; why improving emotional intelligence can help us more competently manage our experience and expression of emotion; and how to deal with such emotional challenges as communicating empathy online, fading romantic passion, managing anger, and suffering grief.
Emotion, the most personal and interpersonal of human experiences, fills our lives with meaning—which is why we are compelled to express emotion through communication.
- Emotion is an intense reaction to an event that involves:
- Interpreting the meaning of the event through perception.
- Becoming physiologically aroused in the form of increased heart rate, blood pressure, and adrenaline release.
- Becoming aware of your reaction and labeling the experience as emotional by assigning an emotion, such as joy or anger, to the reaction.
- Attempting to manage your reaction in adherence to accepted historical, cultural, relational, and situational norms.
- Acting upon your emotional-management choices by communicating your reaction through verbal and nonverbal displays.
- Emotion-sharing refers to disclosing, talking about, and pondering emotions.
- This can lead to either positive or negative emotional contagion, wherein the experience of the same emotion spreads from person to person.
- Feelings are short-term emotional reactions to events that generate only limited arousal. Examples include concern, gratitude, and pleasure.
- Moods are low-intensity states that are not caused by a particular event and typically last longer than feelings and emotions. Examples include boredom, grouchiness, and serenity.
- Your mood’s profound effect on perception and interpersonal communication suggests that it’s important to learn how to shake yourself out of a bad mood.
- The most effective strategy for shaking a bad mood appears to be rigorous physical exercise; sexual activity does not seem to consistently elevate mood.
- Scholars have identified six primary emotions that involve unique and consistent behavioral displays across cultures: surprise, joy, disgust, anger, fear, and sadness.
- Intensely emotional situations provoke a more intense version of one of the six primary emotions, prompting the use of additional terminology for describing the reactions (e.g., “anger” escalates to “rage”).
- Blended emotions involve feeling two or more primary emotions simultaneously. For example, the emotional experience of romantic jealousy might involve anger, fear, and sadness.
Culture, gender, and personality all affect how we experience and express emotion.
- Although men and women may experience emotions with different frequency and express these emotions differently, when they experience the same emotions, there is no difference in the emotion experienced.
- Personality exerts a pronounced impact on our emotions. Three of the five major personality variables (all of five of which—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—are represented by the acronym OCEAN) have the most impact on emotions:
- People high in extraversion experience positive emotions more frequently.
- People high in agreeableness report high levels of happiness, and evince better skills for emotional communication and emotion management.
- People high in neuroticism experience negative emotions more frequently, and tend to focus their attention primarily on negative events.
- Learning how your personality traits shade your emotional experience is part of becoming a competent emotional communicator.
Managing Your Emotional Experience and Expression
Managing your emotions is part of emotional intelligence (EI), the ability to interpret emotions accurately and to use that information to manage emotions, communicate them competently, and solve relationship problems.
- People with high emotional intelligence have four skills that lead to a broad range of positive outcomes.
- Acute understanding of their own emotions
- Ability to see things from others’ perspectives and have empathy
- Aptitude for constructively managing their own emotions
- Capacity for harnessing their emotional states in ways that create competent decision making, communication, and relationship problem solving
- Emotion management, arguably the most important of these skills to improve, involves attempts to influence which emotions you have, when you have them, and how you experience and express them.
- The two most common ways to manage emotions after they have been triggered are suppression and venting.
- Suppression means inhibiting thoughts, arousal, and outward behavioral displays of emotion.
- Venting is allowing emotions to dominate their thoughts and explosively expressing them.
- There are four ways to prevent unwanted emotions from occurring.
- encounter avoidance (staying away from people, places, or activities you know will provoke unwanted emotions)
- encounter structuring (intentionally avoiding specific topics)
- attention focus (intentionally ignoring elements of an interaction)
- deactivation (systematically desensitizing yourself)
- The most effective emotion management technique is reappraisal: actively changing how you think about the meaning of emotion-eliciting situations so their emotional impact is changed.
- Reappraisal is accomplished in two steps: calling to mind the positive aspects of an encounter, and considering the short- and long-term consequences of actions.
Emotional challenges include lack of empathy online, anger, passion, and grief.
- Online communication can lead to angry and inappropriate messages—ones that never would have been expressed face-to-face.
- Two features of online interaction explain why we are more likely to inappropriately express emotions online:
- Asynchronicity: The fact that we don’t interact in real time, predisposes us to openly express emotions that we might otherwise conceal if we knew the response would be immediate.
- Invisibility: The sense that we’re neither heard nor seen, distances us from awareness of consequences.
- Neurological research of online behavior suggests that the lack of feedback, in the communications sense of the term, impedes empathy.
- To express emotions more competently online, (1) invest intense effort into perspective-taking and empathic concern, and (2) integrate these aspects of empathy directly into your online communication.
- Anger occurs when one feels blocked or interrupted from attaining an important goal by what one considers the improper action of an external agent.
- Anger is our most intense and potentially destructive emotion.
- The impact of anger on interpersonal communication is devastating.
- Anger is most often managed through suppression (“bottling up” anger), but the excessive use of suppression can lead to a state of chronic hostility.
- Many people believe that venting (explosively disclosing angry thoughts) will result in catharsis, a release of emotion that occurs from openly expressing one’s emotions. Venting, however, can often boost anger.
- When using the Jefferson Strategy, you count to ten (or one hundred if you’re really angry) before reacting to something that has angered you. This gives you time for arousal to diminish and for the processes of critical self-reflection, perception-checking, and empathy to begin.
- Passion, a blended emotion, combines surprise and joy—coupled with a number of positive feelings, such as excitement, amazement, and sexual attraction.
- Passion tends to wane over time, as novelty is replaced by familiarity.
- Grief, the intense sadness that follows a substantial loss, is emotionally taxing and can last a long time, and normal emotion management strategies provide no relief.
- To cope with grief, use emotion-sharing: talking about your grief with others who are experiencing or have experienced similar pain.
- A key tool for emotion-sharing is joining a support group, or, if that is not possible, finding support online.
- To help others manage their grief, engage in supportive communication by sharing messages that express emotional support and offer personal assistance. Seven suggestions for supportive communication follow.
- Make sure the person is ready to talk.
- Find the right place and time.
- Ask good questions.
- Confront the subject of suicidal thoughts directly.
- Legitimize, don’t minimize.
- Listen actively
- Offer advice cautiously.
- Show concern and give praise.