Emotions
Tamara Arrington
COM 252
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!

4 Components of Emotions
Physiological changes
 Nonverbal reactions
 Cognitive interpretations
 Verbal expression

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)
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
Influences on Emotional
Expression

Personality
 Culture
 Biological sex and gender
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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
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

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

Managing Difficult Emotions
Facilitative and debilitative emotions
 Thoughts cause feelings (self-talk)
 Irrational thinking and debilitative
emotions (fallacy of perfection)

Fallacies

Fallacy of perfection
 Fallacy of approval
 Fallacy of should
 Fallacy of
overgeneralization

Fallacy of causation
 Fallacy of
helplessness
 Fallacy of
catastrophic
expectations
Minimizing Debilitative
Emotions
Monitor your emotional reactions
 Note the activating event
 Record your self-talk
 Dispute your irrational beliefs
