Lecture
Emotions play an important and integral role in interpersonal interaction. They influence our behavior, decisions, perception, and the quality of communication. Here are some of the key aspects related to the role of emotions in interpersonal interaction:
Expression of emotions: Emotions can manifest themselves through nonverbal means, such as facial expressions, gestures, intonation, and body language. How we express our emotions can influence how other people perceive us and what emotional responses they evoke.
Perception and understanding of emotions: An important aspect of emotional communication is the ability to perceive and understand the emotions of other people. This helps us better understand their needs, mood, and point of view.
Empathy: Empathy means the ability to feel and understand the feelings and emotions of another person. Empathy fosters close and supportive relationships and can help in resolving conflicts.
Influence on decision-making: Emotions can influence the decision-making process. For example, positive emotions can foster optimism and decisions based on a belief in success, whereas negative emotions can trigger caution and risk assessment.
Role in conflicts: Emotions can have a significant impact on the development and resolution of conflicts. Outbursts of anger or resentment can intensify a conflict, whereas the ability to express one's feelings constructively can help resolve disagreements.
Emotional support: Emotional support includes expressing care, sympathy, and understanding in relationships with others. This can be especially important in difficult situations or during negative emotional states.
Managing emotions: The ability to manage one's own emotions and respond to the emotions of others can help create positive and productive interpersonal relationships. Emotional intelligence includes skills of self-regulation and emotional adaptation.
Emotions – are elementary experiences that arise in a person under
the influence of the general state of the organism and the course of the process of satisfying current needs. Emotions – are subjective psychological states,
reflecting, in the form of direct experiences, sensations of the pleasant
or unpleasant, a person's attitude toward the world and people, toward the process and result
of his or her practical activity. Emotions are extremely important in interpersonal
communication. Emotions perform a regulatory function in people's relationships
because they appear as a complex form of behavior, a readiness to act in a certain way toward this or that person. In everyday life, the expression of an emotional state either facilitates or complicates interpersonal communication. Emotions are capable not only of activating but also of depressing and even destroying the personality.
Psychology distinguishes a number of basic emotional states
1. Joy. This is an emotional state with a vivid positive coloring. It is associated with the possibility of fully satisfying a current
pressing need under conditions where, up to that moment, the probability of this
was low or, at least, uncertain. Joy belongs to the sthenic emotions.
2. Suffering. A negative emotional state that is the antipode of joy. Suffering arises when it is impossible to satisfy a current need, or upon receiving information about this, provided
that up to the present moment satisfaction of this need had seemed
sufficiently probable. Suffering often takes the form of emotional
stress. Suffering is an asthenic emotion.
3. Anger. A negative emotional state. It most often proceeds in
the form of affect. It is caused, as a rule, by the emergence of an unforeseen serious obstacle in the path of satisfying a need that is exceptionally important for
the subject. Unlike suffering, anger has a sthenic character – it allows one to mobilize all one's strength to overcome the obstacle.
4. Fear. A negative emotional state. It arises with
a real, presumed, or imagined threat to the subject's life, health, or well-being. Unlike the emotion of suffering, which is caused by the real absence of the possibility of satisfying a need, the experience of fear is associated only with a probabilistic forecast of possible harm. It has an asthenic character.
5. Interest. A positive emotional state that fosters
cognitive activity: the development of skills and abilities, the acquisition of knowledge. Interest motivates learning. This is a sthenic emotion.
6. Surprise. This emotion is neutral in sign. It is a reaction to
a suddenly arising situation or object in the absence of information about
the nature of the given object or situation.
7. Disgust. A negative emotional state. It arises in
cases of contact with objects that evoke a sharply negative attitude in the subject at any level – physical, moral, aesthetic, or spiritual.
8. Contempt. A negative emotional state. It arises in
interpersonal relations, i.e., the object of contempt can only be another person or a group of people. This emotional state is
a consequence of views, attitudes, and forms of behavior
of the object that are unacceptable to the subject and are regarded by the subject as unworthy, base, not corresponding to his or her ideas about moral norms and aesthetic criteria.
9. Shame. A negative emotional state. It arises when the subject becomes aware of his or her own inconsistency with a situation, with the expectations of others, as well as the inconsistency of his or her thoughts, actions, and forms of behavior
with his or her own moral and aesthetic norms.
All people are, to one degree or another, hostages of their own emotions. Some manage with ease not to let anger spill out onto those around them, while others, within
a fraction of a second, turn into an emotional explosive.
Emotional states are mental states that arise in the course of a subject's life activity and determine not only the level of informational and energetic exchange but also the direction of behavior.
Emotions control a person far more strongly than it seems at first
glance. Even the absence of emotion is itself an emotion, or rather, a whole emotional state characterized by a large number of features in a person's behavior.
By their influence on a person's life activity, emotions can be divided into
two groups:
1) sthenic – those that increase the organism's vital activity, and
2) asthenic – those that decrease it.
An emotional state in which sthenic or asthenic emotions predominate can manifest itself in a person in any type of his or her activity
and become a characterological trait. A person's life, health, family, work, and entire environment depend on his or her emotional state, and a change in a person's emotional state leads to fundamental changes
in his or her life.
In everyday life, people stratify into groups based on similar emotional
states. Different groups understand each other poorly, and communication between them is worse, whereas within a group things are somewhat better. As a rule,
a cohesive, formed group belongs to one emotional
state.
Each person is unique and holds his or her own personal opinion about
life, but his or her point of view is determined not by reasoning or education, but by
his or her emotional state.
There is a set of invariant reactions corresponding to each emotional state. In all people, emotions change in a strictly defined
order. This regularity applies to all people without exception; it is one
and the same, and invariant in form for everyone.
A person usually knows his or her emotional state well and transfers it onto other people and onto life as a whole. The higher a person's emotional state, the easier it is for him or her to achieve his or her goals in life. Such a person is rational, sensible, and therefore happier, more alive, more confident. The
lower his or her emotional state, the more a person's behavior is
governed by momentary reactions, regardless of his or her education or
intellect.
In the psychological literature, it is also common to divide the emotional states a person experiences into emotions proper, feelings, and affects.
Emotions and feelings are personal formations that characterize a person socially and psychologically; they are related to short-term and working memory.
Affect is a short-lived, violently occurring state of intense
emotional arousal, arising as a result of frustration or some other cause that strongly affects the psyche, usually associated with
the non-satisfaction of needs that are very important to the person. Affect does not
precede behavior but forms at one of its final stages. Unlike emotions and feelings, affects proceed violently and rapidly, and are accompanied by
sharply pronounced organic changes and motor reactions.
Affects are capable of leaving strong and lasting traces in long-term
memory. Emotional tension, accumulated as a result of the occurrence of affect-generating situations, can build up and, sooner or later, if it
is not given a timely outlet, lead to a strong and violent emotional discharge,
which, by relieving the tension, often brings with it a feeling of fatigue, depression, and low spirits.
One of the most common types of affect nowadays is stress – a state of mental (emotional) and behavioral disorder associated with a person's inability to act appropriately and sensibly in a given situation. Stress is a state of excessively intense and prolonged psychological tension that arises in a person when his or her nervous system receives an emotional overload.
Stress is one of the main "risk factors" in the occurrence and
aggravation of cardiovascular diseases and diseases of the gastrointestinal tract.
Passion is another type of complex, qualitatively distinctive emotional state found only in humans. Passion represents
a fusion of emotions, motives, and feelings concentrated around a particular type of activity or object. Passion is a great force, which is why it is so
important what it is directed at. An enthusiasm born of passion may stem from unconscious bodily urges, and it may also be imbued with the greatest consciousness and sense of purpose. Passion essentially means an impulse, an enthusiasm,
an orientation of all of a person's aspirations and forces in a single direction, a concentration of them on a single goal. Precisely because passion gathers, absorbs, and
throws all one's strength onto a single thing, it can be ruinous and even fatal, but
for that very same reason it can also be great. Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without great passion.
Speaking of the various types of emotional formations and states,
mood should be singled out. Mood is understood as the general emotional state of a person, expressed in the "tenor" of all its manifestations. Two main features distinguish mood from other emotional
formations. Emotions and feelings are connected with some object and are directed
at it: we rejoice at something, are upset by something, are anxious about something; but
when a person is in a joyful mood, he or she is not simply glad about something, but feels joyful – sometimes, especially in youth, so much so that everything in the world seems joyful and beautiful. Mood is not object-related but personal – that is one point; and, secondly, it is not a special experience tied to some particular event, but a diffuse, general state.
Mood is most closely connected with how
a person's vitally important relationships with those around him or her and the course of his or her own
activity take shape. Manifesting itself in the "tenor" of this activity, woven into active relationships with those around, mood is formed within that very activity.
At the same time, what is essential for mood, of course, is not the objective course of events in itself, independent of the person's attitude toward it, but also
how a person assesses what is happening and relates to it. Therefore, a person's mood depends substantially on his or her individual characterological features, in particular on how he or she relates to difficulties – whether he or she is inclined to overestimate them and lose heart, easily becoming demobilized, or whether, in the
face of difficulties, without giving way to carelessness, he or she manages to preserve confidence
that he or she will cope with them.
Thus, each of the described types of emotion has within itself
subtypes which, in turn, can be evaluated along different parameters –
intensity, duration, depth, degree of awareness, origin,
conditions of occurrence and disappearance, effect on the organism, dynamics of
development, orientation (toward oneself, toward others, toward the world, toward the past, present,
or future), the manner of their expression in external behavior (expression), and
neurophysiological basis.
For a person, the main significance of emotions lies in the fact that, thanks to
emotions, we understand others better, can, without using speech, judge one another's state, and are better able to attune ourselves to joint activity and communication.
Life without emotions is as impossible as life without sensations.
Social emotions are emotions and feelings that arise when social needs are satisfied. They include feelings caused by an unintended and undesired social position, a discrepancy between how we want to look and how we actually look, and the discrediting of a basic attitude regarding the nature of a relationship (embarrassment, shyness, social anxiety), etc.
As with any other types of emotions (biological or psychological), social emotions can be positive (sometimes called unifying, or conjunctive) and negative (sometimes called separating, or disjunctive).
Positive feelings usually arise when people are pursuing
common goals, the achievement of which brings each of them a certain satisfaction. The participants in communication in such situations are interdependent: the initiative and
activity of one depends on the contribution made by the others. Accordingly,
each side regards the other as a desired object. A beloved or a friend is cherished, such a person is cared for, protected,
supported, given gifts, and sometimes helped to develop his or her abilities.
Positive feelings vary in intensity from mild preference to deep devotion. When experiencing positive feelings,
a partner is, as a rule, credited only with the most desirable intentions.
The fact that the perceiver's desire may not correspond to the objective qualities of the object of love is easy to discover by observing the behavior
of a person in love: he or she attributes the most lofty
motives to his or her partner, justifies him or her in everything, stubbornly fails to notice shortcomings, and endows
him or her with precisely those qualities that he or she is accustomed to admiring.
Negative feelings usually arise in cases where one person's success entails some kind of failure for another. A situation of
rivalry arises, the consequence of which, as a rule, is conflict: the opponent is regarded as a dangerous object that must be put out of action
or destroyed. Disjunctive feelings are sustained by means of contrasting concepts. In the behavior of the opposing side, only what is considered repulsive is noticed. Since almost any act of a person can receive several interpretations, the opponent's actual behavior, as a rule, does not matter. If he holds himself courageously, he is called a fanatic; if in the face of formidable opposition he retreats, he
is called a coward. Since the enemy is regarded as something inferior, the use of the principle "the end justifies the means" is justified in relation to him. Opponents attribute unrealistic motives to one another and then
react emotionally to the images they themselves constructed. This explains the fact that rivals and enemies rarely understand one another.
The following forms in which the organizing function of emotions is realized are usually distinguished:
1) expressive movements, or reactions;
2) emotional actions;
3) statements about the emotional states being experienced.
Expressive reactions are a consequence of emotional arousal (i.e.,
they are, as a rule, reactive in character); this is the external manifestation of emotions.
Each emotion is accompanied by physical changes in facial expression, body, voice, and appearance as a whole. In this way, our feelings let us know how
people, ideas, and the environment affect us.
Emotional actions are performed in order to express or reduce an emotional state. Thus, if a person, shaken
by news of the death of a relative, begins to sob and collapses exhausted into
an armchair, his or her behavior is a form of expressive emotional reaction; but when this same person puts on mourning clothes, talks about how grieved he or she is, takes part in a funeral ceremony, sobs and laments, he or she is performing
specific emotional actions, i.e., actions caused by an emotion and
aimed at expressing and "discharging" that emotion.
Emotional actions can constitute a complexly organized activity. For example, in order to express his anger, a person writes a journalistic article or a satirical pamphlet. American Indians, in order to express
their feelings (love, anger, etc.), paint their faces with various colors.
Emotional actions are caused not only by emotions that have been experienced, but also by
entirely different reasons, for example, the desire to earn approval or
the fear of provoking someone's displeasure. An example of an emotional action undertaken to achieve a particular emotional effect is the account given by an American intelligence sergeant in Vietnam, who described his experience as follows: "First you hit to become enraged,
then you hit because you are already enraged" (Reykowski, 1979, p. 153).
Emotional utterances perform the function of a mediator between
an individual and his or her emotion. A mature emotion is accessible to mediated regulation,
to reflection, whose principal means is speech. In the process of socialization, a person moves from being an object of a natural, spontaneous emotion, when he or she is inseparable from it
(for example, a newborn child), to becoming a subject of emotion, distinguishing himself or herself as such partly because he or she is able to say
what he or she feels. This process underlies the formation of the tools of
managing emotions and feelings.
Thus, emotions and feelings perform a regulating function in
interaction between people, since they appear as a complex
form of behavior, as a readiness to act in a certain way toward this or that person. Thus, to hate someone means to be ready
to act aggressively toward him or her or to defend oneself against him or her. To be jealous of someone means to regard with distrust the words and actions of one's
partner concerning intimate relationships, possibly to watch him or her or to provoke a quarrel with him or her, etc.
It is precisely from observable actions and reactions that one can determine what
feelings a person is experiencing. How can one assert that your friend is in love if she denies it? Only by observing her reactions: she
blushes in the presence of that person, defends, in conversations with others,
the assessments and judgments held by that person, and at every
convenient opportunity tries to be where there is a chance of meeting him, etc.
It is important to note that emotions are a natural part of human communication, and completely ignoring them can lead to misunderstanding and conflicts. The ability to recognize, express, and effectively manage one's own emotions, as well as to show empathy for the emotions of others, contributes to more harmonious and productive interpersonal relationships.
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