Emotions

Are you skilled at identifying when other people are angry? How about sad? Our accuracy when identifying others’ emotions relies on how much expressivity those people are able to use. Research suggests that our accuracy increases with experience.

However, our accuracy in defining our own emotions is limited by our vocabulary. Since we use our language in order to describe our emotional experiences, using a limited emotional vocabulary can keep us from getting the support that we need from others. Sometimes it is vital to our safety and the safety of others to be able to identify emotions. Have you ever been so filled with grief it was difficult to describe?

A broader vocabulary can help us to better communicate our emotional experiences and get better support from those around us. For example, The National Suicide Lifeline uses an emotional vocabulary list in order to better help callers and workers pinpoint words that callers use in order to gauge their risk.

Identifying Emotional Fallacies

Sometimes when we experience an unpleasant emotion, it is useful to try to reappraise negative emotions and dispute any irrational thinking also known as emotional fallacies. Seven emotional fallacies were discussed by Adler (1978). Even though we are the best judge of what emotions we are experiencing, sometimes we quickly assign a negative meaning to our emotions even though they may not be quite that negative. For example, “I am panicking and my heart feels like it will explode!” versus “my heart rate is increasing because I am anxious right now” In other words, we might overreact and use our self-talk to become more anxious.

These emotional fallacies are listed in Table 4. They include perfectionism (“I have to make sure that every bit of my grass is even in my front yard”), catastrophic thinking (“If I don’t watch my family sleep through the night, I am afraid that they will die and I will be alone”), shoulds, (“I should have said that I wouldn’t babysit this dog”) overgeneralization (Everytime that my friend talks to me he avoids eye contact with me”), taking responsibility for others, (I wish that my uncle wouldn’t say such mean things online about other people”) and helplessness (It doesn’t really matter what I choose to do because I don’t have any control over my fate anyway.”)

Table 1

Identifying Emotional Fallacies

Now that we see that emotional fallacies can often exaggerate our emotional experiences, let’s focus on how we can counter emotional fallacies. You can fight these fallacies by using what Cognitive Behavioral Therapists (CBT) call the Rational-Emotive Approach. In this approach, first we must be aware of the emotions that we are experiencing. Sometimes it helps to take time to reflect on what we are experiencing by keeping a journal. Next, we reach back into our memory attempt to connect what this trigger has in common with triggers in the past. “I’ve experienced a racing heart once before when I ran too fast and again when I got scared at the Halloween House of Horrors.”

Once the trigger is spotted, we identify any negative self-talk and refute any emotional fallacies. “I am just jogging” “My heart is not going to explode (catastrophic thinking) because it didn’t explode the last time I felt like this while I jogged (disputing irrational thoughts).” Once we have disputed the irrational thought, we can begin to use our self-talk in order to deal with our emotions.

Managing Emotions

In this section, we introduce the idea of emotional work. When you think of a surgeon in the operating room, what is the worst emotion that they could express? The most effective? Most jobs and social roles demand that we suppress our emotions. For example, a firefighter would not be effective if they ran away from burning buildings with people left inside. Even though the firefighter might momentarily want to get to safety, their role as a firefighter demands that they calmly and methodically go into buildings in order to save others.

Have you ever known someone who blurts out everything that they are thinking? Goleman (2002) coined the term emotional intelligence (EQ) to describe the ability of identifying, managing and discussing emotions. Let’s take each part of that definition and pull it apart to see how emotional intelligence is demonstrated.

Let’s say you are driving your child to school and they will not stop loudly singing off-key. You sense that you are growing irritated and your thoughts are getting interrupted. In this case, you have identified the emotion and the trigger of that emotion. You are getting a headache from the noise coming from the back seat. If you are able to demonstrate emotional intelligence in this situation you would say something like, “Mommy is getting a headache because it is too loud. I am trying to keep from getting a headache so let’s just talk with our indoor voices right now.”

When you think of someone who shouts, “We’re all going to die!” while experiencing a bumpy ride on an airplane, we might say that they have a low emotional intelligence because they have blurted out what they were thinking instead of thinking about what they are going to say and considering the impact of their words on others..

The part of emotional intelligence that allows us to identify that we are feeling fearful and then manage this emotion is often what might be missing in this situation. People are able to demonstrate different amounts of emotional intelligence depending on the context. For example, if someone is extremely frightened of snakes, and they walk into a room with a snake on the floor, they might jump up on a chair, run away, or try to flee the room. Seeing the snake is such a strong trigger, it would be difficult to demonstrate emotional intelligence. When we say that someone has high EQ, they are able to discuss emotions effectively with others (Butler & Modaff, 2012). In the snake situation, the person would be able to tell their friends that they are afraid of snakes and that they feel very uncomfortable.

In a different situation, like the one on the plane, they may not have as much problem filtering what they are feeling for the benefit of others. They might see that there is a small child two seats down who is looking worried by the bumpy flight, and think, I don’t want to upset any of the other passengers.

Accepting Responsibility for Emotions

Have you ever said to someone, “You're making me angry!” and they replied “No I'm not!”? No matter how much it might seem like it, other people do not cause your emotions and to think so would allow us to have no control over our emotions. In order to take responsibility for your emotions, try to consciously communicate using I-statements.

You can say something like, “When you say that you don’t want to help with the dishes, I feel myself becoming angry.” Avoid saying, “You are making me so angry right now!” We learned that humans also have a tendency to blame others when things go wrong. It can be a challenge to accept that our emotions are caused and regulated by ourselves. Especially when we feel intense and unpleasant emotions.

Choosing the Best Time and Place to Express Emotions

The next time you identify that you are experiencing intense emotions, here are some suggestions for how to determine whether you will communicate your emotional experiences with others. Below there are six questions you can ask yourself when debating whether to show your actual emotions. Most of these questions address the social expectations for emotional expression:

• Bystanders: Who is around--who will see?

• Privacy: Do I have enough privacy in order to feel comfortable enough to allow myself to express my emotions?

• Will expressing this emotion negatively impact me? Is it worth the risk?

• Can someone use this emotional display against me?

• Is it expected that I display emotion in this situation?

• How much time do I have in order to express this emotion? What happens after this? Do I have to go directly to work after this?

Sometimes, it may seem like there is no good time or place to express emotions. However, since you can choose when and how you express emotions, you can set aside time specifically for dealing with emotions so that you don't feel as if they are piling up and weighing you down. This is particularly true of emotions like grief. Grief is caused by a trigger of loss. Grief can cause both mental and physical pain and needs to be worked through. Allowing ourselves the time to examine and understand our grief can be exhausting, but can speed our healing from the loss.

When we do decide to express our emotions we should be aware of social expectations that rule how we express emotions. Framing rules are those rules that determine how we define an event in terms of its emotional tone. Often they are ambiguous and subjective, since they are unwritten and often not discussed before events. If you've ever been to a funeral of an elderly person, you might have experienced the framing rule that defines a funeral as a chance to gather and celebrate a long life - and is therefore, a happy occasion.

The feeling rules are socially shared norms that influence how people want to try to feel emotions in given social relations.” They help us to know what emotions are socially acceptable in a certain situation (Hochschild, 1979). In the funeral example, the feeling rules were that people were to feel joyful. If someone caused a spectacle with loud, wailing crying, they would be ignoring the feeling rules. Anytime our actual emotional experience doesn't match the feelings rules, it requires emotion work or emotional labor (Tracy, 2005). Emotion work is defined as the work required to generate feelings that are “appropriate” for a situation. In this case, the emotion work necessary to follow the feeling rules would have been to mask or conceal one emotion by portraying another emotion.

Summary

In this unit we focused on the communication skills utilized in identifying and managing emotions. In order to identify our emotions, we must first be able to name what we are feeling. We learned about emotional fallacies, such as: perfectionism, catastrophic thinking, shoulds, overgeneralizations, taking responsibility for others, and helplessness. We ended the unit discussing how we manage our emotions, and how managing our emotions relates to emotional intelligence.

1. Discussion:

Look at the photo of the flight attendants below. What types of emotion work do you think is required to be successful in this field?

2. Activity: Emotional Vocabulary List

Read through the emotional vocabulary list similar to the one used at the National Suicide Hotline. The link is here: https://www.karlamclaren.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Emotional-Vocabulary-List-Color.pdf

After reading through some of the emotional vocabulary are there some words that you wouldn’t readily use? Are there some new words that you might start using to describe your emotional state to others?

Butler, J. A. & Modaff, D. P. (2012). The communicative management of emotional display expectations by in-home daycare providers. Qualitative Communication Research, 1(4), 461-490. doi:10.1525/qcr.2012.1.4.461

Hochschild, A. (1979). Emotion work, feeling rules, and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551-575.

McLaren, K. (2013). The art of empathy: A complete guide to life’s most essential skill. Karla McLaren. https://www.karlamclaren.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Emotional-Vocabulary-List-Color.pdf

Tracy, S. J. (2005). Locking up emotion: Moving beyond dissonance for understanding emotion labor discomfort. Communication Monographs, 7(2), 261-283

Emotion work: Changing the emotion that one is feeling to be more in line with the feeling rules for the situation.

Emotional fallacies: Cognitive exaggerations that often increase the intensity of emotional experiences. Some of these fallacies include perfectionism, catastrophic thinking, shoulds, overgeneralization, taking responsibility for others, and helplessness.

Emotional intelligence: The ability to accurately identify, analyze, and effectively communicate an emotional experience.

Framing rules: Unwritten rules that determine how we define an event.

Feeling rules: Socially shared norms that determine how we feel in a social interaction.

Mask emotions: Selecting a different emotion to display than the one that you are actually experiencing.

Rational-Emotive Approach: The process of identifying exaggerations in one's thoughts, and refuting each of the exaggerated thoughts in order to decrease emotional intensity to external and internal emotional triggers.

1. Daniel Goleman Introduces Emotional Intelligence.

Watch this Big Think video to learn from Daniel Goleman himself about the concept of EQ:

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7m9eNoB3NU

2. Six Steps to Improve your Emotional Intelligence.

Watch this TedTalk to learn how to improve your EQ. Do you agree with all of the steps?

Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6_J7FfgWVc

"Woman holding her head" licensed by David Garrison is in the Public Domain, CC0.

"Women in brown blazer and brown skirt set" licensed by Jeffrey Paa Kwesi Opare is in the Public Domain, CC0.