expression
Our face is hard wired to our emotions. Over time our favourite emotional states shape our face and show who we are. Along with our posture and other habits they eventually become our personality.
instinctive response
Emotional reactions are almost reflexive. We have little conscious control. An emotional state arises instinctively, triggered by an arousing event or memory. Changes in innervation, blood supply and chemistry activate or deactivate particular parts of the body and mind.
The amygdala coordinates behavioral, immunological and neuroendocrine responses to environmental threats. It makes instantaneous decisions about threat levels. by comparing incoming emotional signals with its own emotional memories. Through its connections to the hypothalamus and other autonomic centers it can hijack neural pathways, the brain and the endocrine system to trigger an emotional response before the higher brain centers can make an assessment.
emotional awareness
Fully experiencing feelings and emotions brings them to consciousness where they don't have to be denied or shut out. Repressing them or fearing being taken over is usually more distressing than the emotions themselves.
There are countless combinations of feelings and emotions. When we pay close attention we can detect many different shades of sadness for example. Each with its own place in our lives. Each triggered by particular kinds of experiences.
What is the tiniest almost imperceptible feeling you can detect? In the face, gut or muscles maybe?. Perhaps on hearing or smelling something, walking into a room, looking for something, seeing someone or making a small movement.
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be curious – like a baby
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what do you feel?
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What set it off?
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where do you feel this?
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Where does the feeling start?
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Where does it move to?
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How does it change?
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accept and appreciate it
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fully feel this
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what does it say?
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Are there words to describe this feeling? Is there a name for it?
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can you make the feeling feel stronger or weaker? alternate between feeling and letting go of the feeling
What emotions are being held back. Is a fixed pleasant expression preventing the emergence of inexpressible negative feeling? Are drugs or meditations dampening an emotion? Do overwhelming emotions suddenly take over? What triggers them?
the language of emotions
Emotions are a hard-wired language common to all races and cultures. If we are aware enough we can understand each other's needs, values and intentions even without speaking each other's language. We can communicate with the emotional signals in facial expressions, tone of voice and posture. Many animals can communicate between species.
communication
We talk in order to change each other - partly through the ideas in our words but mostly through the emotional changes we induce in each other using our face, posture and voice. Watching or imitating someone else's emotions can be enough to begin to enter that state or react to it.
Small involuntary shifts in facial expression, tone of voice, or posture are enough to pass emotions to someone else, often without being consciously aware. For instance shouting and frowning have evolved to elicit uncomfortable physiological changes in the other person.
We are hard-wired to interact with others. We can judge exactly the direction of their gaze. We experience in our bodies the feeling of what it is like to be them including their emotional state.
We subconsciously detect emotions by pheromones and other smells. A few people are consciously aware of the smell of each emotion.
Management or parenting styles are largely different ways of communicating emotionally.
We start learning the language of emotions from the time of birth as we learn to speak and communicate our thoughts and feelings in tandem. We learn to manipulate others by the way we activate or hide our emotions. Each display of an emotion forces a response as our mother and carers first internalise and feel our state and then react to it.
We modify our emotional states to some extent using our thoughts and activities. We may try to induce familiar or comfortable emotions in ourselves to mask uncomfortable ones. For instance by work up a temper to override joy or grief if we don't want to experience or disclose those feelings. Or show joy instead of anxiety. These can become automatic habits.
We may try to change the emotional states of others to something that we are more at home with. Shouting and frowning or obstructive withdrawal is often an automatic response from someone who has experienced a punitive upbringing and can be effective in setting the mood of a household.
This is complicated by the instinctive empathy that most of us feel for others, even abusers, after we absorb their personalities and values. We learn to conceal, disguise or stifle many emotional reactions out of social courtesy or role obligations. And learn not to notice some of the emotions of others.
Faking or concealing emotions can be exhausting or incapacitating and may end in unexpected and overwhelming outbursts
On the other hand when we find enjoyable spontaneous ways to be ourselves then we are aware of how we feel and who we are and more energy is available to realise our full potential.
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Paul Ekman |
copyright (C) John Brasted 2008
updated 06/11/11
