The Emotional Roller Coaster
March 7, 2006
Between leading groups at work and talking with friends, I’ve spent so much time thinking about emotions lately that I seem to be overflowing with them myself these days. In an attempt to better communicate all things emotional to others, I’ve spent considerable time lately exploring my own emotions and feelings. I even whipped out an old psychology book to review the technical information surrounding the emotional side of human nature. What I found only reinforced the conclusions I’d come to myself: feelings and emotion are so very difficult to explain and rationalize that they are often better left to the individual to figure out personally.
But you know me… I want to figure everything out for myself.
And so begins what I’m calling The Emotional Roller Coaster: Taking the Track Apart. In other words… I’m starting a post series dedicated to emotions, feelings, and all things that come up along the way. My goal is to explore individual human emotions in some depth, and hopefully, figure a few things out along the way.
A little background information would seem in order. I apologize in advance if this gets a tad bit technical. It’s a necessary evil of this examination.
Defining exactly what makes something an emotion is just as difficult as describing individual emotions themselves. There are numerous ways to attempt grasping the idea of emotion, none of which are all-inclusive. Perhaps by providing a couple of different approaches here, we can start to understand a little better through the art of assimilation.
One way to view emotion is to look at how it relates to motivation. The theories surrounding motivation are as varied as those surrounding emotion, so for the purpose of this examination, let’s keep the focus on the emotional aspect. The simplest way to do this to view the motive-emotive relationship as linear:
Internal desire (drive) —> Motive —> Behavior —> Drive reduction/emotional response
This is how a textbook might describe motivation. To put it simply, some desire motivates us to behave in a certain way in order to fulfill said desire. Where does emotion fit into this explanation? You can look at emotion as the noticeable result of fulfilling the desire. Take eating, for example. The internal drive is hunger. You don’t just decide that you’re hungry. Your body has many ways of telling you it’s hungry. That desire to be fed becomes the motivation to act, ie, eat. As a result of eating, the desire for food reduces and you feel full, satiated, and usually happy. Ah ha! Happy. There’s the emotion. So is happiness after eating a side effect of the motive… or is it another cause? That question is still being debated… so I’ll let you come to your own conclusions. But suffice it to say, the two are definitely related.
The Rational Emotive approach is another way to look at emotion. Come on… I lead groups on Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) at work… you didn’t think I’d leave this out, did you? I usually illustrate RET in a circular configuration, but since I can’t do that here, I’ll have to make it linear. Make it a circle in your head:
Thoughts —> Emotions —> Behaviors —> Consequences —> (repeat)
According to this theory, our thoughts influence our emotions which, in turn, influence the way we behave. The consequences of our behavior then create new thoughts, new feelings, and new behaviors… and thus, the cycle repeats. In this approach, emotions and the regulation of emotions are under direct control of the way we think and process a situation. The way we act is under the direct control of the way we feel, etc. RET tells people that their emotions are not the ultimate motivation for their behaviors; instead, the thoughts running through their heads are. Change the thought and the emotions (and, consequently, the behaviors) change as well.
These are but two of the many ideas and theories circulating about emotions and how they play a part in the human condition. But hopefully these two approaches illustrate just how vast and varied emotional exploration can be. Hopefully other approaches and ideas will work their way into my study.
The last question for me to answer is simple: which emotions will I examine? I have a short list of some basics: joy/happiness, anger, love, pain, sadness/depression…
I’m open for suggestions on some others. Drop me a line or leave a comment below.
And stay tuned for the next post in the series…
Part 1 of The Emotional Roller Coaster: Taking the Track Apart. Please visit the Series page for a complete index of all related posts.
Posted in Emotions, Human Nature, Noteworthy, Series
January 30th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
[...] a look at a previous post I wrote on dealing with emotions, too. If you look at your feelings from that perspective you see that they’re completely [...]