1. Emotions
Tamara Arrington
COM 252

2. Emotional Intelligence Daniel Goleman (1995)
The ability to understand and manage one’s own emotions and be sensitive to others’ feelings
Important in interpersonal relationships of all kinds: friendships, romantic relationships, marriage & family, and in the workplace - keeping your job could depend on it!

3. 4 Components of Emotions
Physiological changes
Nonverbal reactions
Cognitive interpretations
Verbal expression

4. Types of Emotion
First-order: triggered automatically in response to environmental stimuli (fear, surprise)
Second-order: triggered by “emotional scripts” or “emotional knowledge” we have learned as a part of socialization (guilt)
Second-order knowledge differs across cultures (shame – Chinese culture, love – Western)

5. Types of Emotion (cont’d.)
Primary and Mixed (Plutchik, 1984)
8 primary: joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation
Infinite number of mixed – feelings that need more than one term to fully describe
Intense and Mild
Annoyed  Angry  RAGE

6. Influences on Emotional Expression
Personality
Culture
Biological sex and gender
Sex of the individual
Whether the other is same or opposite sex
Who the person is we are communicating with
The differences in power between the individuals

7. Influences on Emotional Expression (cont’d.)
Social Conventions – we are discouraged from the expression of most emotions
Social Roles
Fear of Self-Disclosure
Emotional Contagion

8. Guidelines for Expressing Emotion
Recognize your feelings
Choose the best language
Share multiple feelings
Recognize the difference between feeling and acting
Act responsibly for your feelings
Choose the best time and place to express your feelings

9. Managing Difficult Emotions
Facilitative and debilitative emotions
Thoughts cause feelings (self-talk)
Irrational thinking and debilitative emotions (fallacy of perfection)

10. Fallacies Fallacy of perfection Fallacy of approval Fallacy of should
Fallacy of overgeneralization
Fallacy of causation
Fallacy of helplessness
Fallacy of catastrophic expectations

11. Minimizing Debilitative Emotions
Monitor your emotional reactions
Note the activating event
Record your self-talk
Dispute your irrational beliefs