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Defining Emotion

Scholarly definitions of emotion mirror our everyday experiences. Emotion is an intense reaction to an event that involves interpreting event meaning, becoming physiologically aroused, labeling the experience as emotional, managing reactions, and communicating through emotional displays and disclosures (Gross, Richards, & John, 2006). This definition highlights the five key features of emotion. First, emotion is reactive, triggered by our perception of outside events (Cacioppo, Klein, Berntson, & Hatfield, 1993). A friend telling you that her cancer is in remission leads you to experience joy. Receiving a scolding text message from a parent triggers both your surprise and your anger. When an emotion-inducing event occurs, we engage in the same perceptual process as we do with other types of interpersonal events—selecting, organizing, and interpreting information related to that event. As we interpret the event’s meaning, we decide whether the incident is positive, neutral, negative, or somewhere in-between, triggering corresponding emotions (Smith & Kirby, 2004).

A second feature of emotion is that it involves physiological arousal in the form of increased heart rate, blood pressure, and adrenaline release. Many researchers consider arousal the defining feature of emotion, a belief mirrored in most people’s descriptions of emotion as “intense” and “hot” (Berscheid, 2002).

Third, to experience emotion, you must become aware of your interpretation and arousal as “an emotion”—that is, you must consciously label them as such (Berscheid, 2002). For example, imagine that you and a good friend have struck a bargain not to discuss with anyone else an event that embarrassed you. One evening while checking Facebook, you see that he has posted your tale of humiliation in his status update. Within seconds, you interpret his behavior as negative—a betrayal of your trust. Your face grows hot, your breathing quickens, and you become consciously aware of these physical sensations. This awareness, combined with your assessment of the situation, causes you to label your experience as the emotion “anger.”

Fourth, how we each experience and express our emotions is constrained by historical, cultural, relational, and situational norms governing what is and isn’t appropriate (Metts & Planalp, 2002). As a consequence, once we become aware that we’re experiencing an emotion, we try to manage that experience and express that emotion in ways we consider acceptable. We may allow our emotion to dominate our thoughts and communication, try to channel it in constructive ways, or suppress our emotion completely. Emotion management results from the recognition that the totally unrestrained experience and expression of emotion will lead to negative consequences.

Finally, when emotion occurs, the choices you make regarding emotion management are reflected outward in your verbal and nonverbal displays, in the form of word choices, exclamations or expletives, facial expressions, body posture, and gestures (Mauss, Levenson, McCarter, Wilhelm, & Gross, 2005). The communicative nature of emotion is so fundamental that emoticons have been developed to represent emotional expressions in mediated communication like text messages and e-mail. Emoticons enable people to convey happiness, sadness, anger, and other emotions (see Table 4.1).

Table 4.1 Common Emoticons

Another way in which emotion is communicative is that we talk about our emotional experiences with others, a form of communication known as emotion-sharing. Much of interpersonal communication consists of emotion-sharing—disclosing emotions, talking about them, and pondering them. Studies on emotion-sharing suggest that people share between 75 and 95 percent of their emotional experiences with at least one other person, usually a spouse, parent, or friend (Frijda, 2005). The people with whom we share our emotions generally enjoy being confided in. Often, they share the incident with others, weaving a socially intimate network of emotion-sharing. The teens in the Gospel for Teens program (described in our chapter opener) use emotion-sharing to connect with one another and collaboratively work together to heal their individual experiences of grief and anger.

Sometimes emotion-sharing leads to emotional contagion, when the experience of the same emotion rapidly spreads from one person to others. Emotional contagion can be positive, such as when the joy you experience over an unexpected job promotion spreads to your family members as you tell them about it. At other times, emotional contagion can be negative, such as when fear moves quickly from person to person in a large crowd. Such was the case in the 1903 stampede in Chicago’s Iroquois Theater, one of the deadliest disasters in American history. A small fire broke out, and although it was quickly extinguished, people’s fear of the fire swept through the crowd, causing a panicked stampede that killed more than 500 people (Brown, 1965).