Take a moment and recall the most recent emotion you felt. What comes to mind? For most people, it’s a hot emotion—that is, a physically and mentally intense experience, like joy, anger, or grief, during which your palms sweated, your mouth felt dry, and your heart pounded (Berscheid & Regan, 2005). When we are asked to translate these emotions into words, we use vivid physical metaphors. Joy makes “our hearts leap,” while anger makes “our blood boil.” Grief is “a living hell” (Frijda, 2005). Understanding what emotions are and how they differ from feelings and moods are the first steps in better managing our emotions.

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).

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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 a friend posts an embarrassing photo of you on Instagram. Upon discovering it, 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.

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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 people developed emoticons to represent emotional expressions in mediated communication, such as text messages and e-mail.

Another way in which emotion is communicative is by talking about our emotional experiences with others, a form of communication known as emotion-sharing. Much of interpersonal communication consists of 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. For instance, interacting with people who are anxious can cause an increase in your own anxiety level—even in cases in which you don’t share their worries or feel personally concerned about their well-being (Parkinson & Simons, 2012). In extreme instances, emotional contagion can be disastrous. Such was the case in the 1903 stampede in Chicago’s Iroquois Theater. A small fire broke out, and although it was quickly extinguished, people’s fear of the fire swept rapidly from person to person throughout the crowd, causing a panicked stampede that killed more than 500 people (Brown, 1965).