What is the psychology of emotions, classification, mechanism of occurrence, features of control

The main element of a harmonious personality is considered to be emotional stability. Therefore, the psychology of emotions is an important part of this science. Emotions and feelings in psychology represent a connection between the state inside and the influence of external factors. A person’s behavior and his contacts with other people directly depend on the ability to manage his emotions. In addition, the ability to control one’s feelings has a direct impact on a person’s physical health, illness and failure.

Main types of feelings and emotions

Emotions are a certain reaction to external factors in psychology. In this case, a person may demonstrate a desire or reluctance to take part in ongoing events. He is also able to show others his inner state. It could be anxiety, love, joy.

Such reactions depend on the subjective assessment of current events. It has been established that the feelings that a person experiences are associated with his attitude towards himself. They are influenced by their internal state. The state of the nervous system is also of great importance. That is why people react differently to the same events.

Depending on the symptoms, there are the following types of emotions and feelings in psychology:

1. Positive – provide a charge of good emotions. This group includes joy and rejoicing. Positive emotions also include joy or interest.
2. Negative - have a negative charge. This category includes a wider range of feelings. It could be guilt, anger, resentment. Negative emotions include uncertainty, melancholy, and fear.
3. Neutral - can have a negative or positive connotation, but do not have a pronounced emotional connotation or serious manifestations. This group includes surprise or curiosity.

Each type of feeling in psychology is characterized by specific verbal signs - speech, gestures, intonation. To keep emotions under control, you need to understand which of them took over at one time or another.

Despite the variety of ways of expression, there are 4 basic types of emotions in psychology. These include joy, anger, fear and sadness. Each variety has certain subspecies. The degree of their expression depends on the characteristics of the individual and the specific situation.

So, emotions in psychology are divided into the following types:

1. Joy. Subtypes of this emotion include hope, delight, happiness, and interest. Also included in this category are jubilation, anticipation, and acceptance. Such feelings manifest themselves in the form of laughter, a relaxed state, a smile, and a sparkle in the eyes. A person may feel the need for a hug, he is ready to help, holds his palms open.
2. Sadness. This concept of emotions and feelings in psychology includes melancholy, despondency, a feeling of hopelessness, and laziness. This category often includes pity, regret, and sadness. This condition is accompanied by absent-mindedness in the gaze, weakness of the hands and breathing. The person’s voice becomes muffled and his gaze becomes extinguished. Often the corners of the lips droop and the shoulders rise.
3. Fear. This category of emotions and feelings in psychology includes horror, anxiety, guilt, and confusion. They also include suspicion, anxiety, and uncertainty. The main symptoms include increased tension, trembling voice, chest pain, the need to hide or leave. A person may open their eyes wide and goosebumps appear on the skin.
4. Anger. Such feelings in psychology include anger, arrogance, and denial. This group also includes irony, indignation, discontent, and rage. Emotions manifest themselves in the form of an evil glint in the eyes, clenching of palms, and a glance from under their brows. When a person experiences such feelings, he may bulge or, conversely, squint his eyes and draw his eyebrows together.

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Outline of the content of the lecture course and seminars

The identification of psychological laws of development of the emotional sphere and volitional regulation is traditionally included among the most difficult problems of psychology.
With a variety of theories (hypotheses), there is a large number of alternative positions. In Russian psychology, there is still no comprehensive theory of emotional phenomena. There is also no consistently constructed theory of volitional regulation. Despite this, a number of interrelated theoretical positions and hypotheses can be formulated in the context of the domestic cultural-historical activity approach to the analysis and explanation of mental phenomena. Descriptive characteristics of emotional processes

Topic 1

Features of the manifestation of emotions and feelings

Only children clearly show their emotions. Everything they encounter is immediately expressed. With age, a person has more opportunities to keep the balance of emotions under control. He does this consciously or under the influence of others.

In psychology, human emotions can be controlled as follows:

1. Hold them back against your own will. At the same time, the person does not demonstrate anger and does not show love. This method may be a consequence of upbringing or serious emotional shock.
2. Show feelings depending on the situation. At the same time, a person can mentally process unwanted emotions, transforming them from destructive to neutral. They can also be converted into constructive ones. This method is a consequence of working on your personality. It is considered more harmless to physical and psychological health.

A person who does not close himself off, but controls his state, and also understands the feelings and emotions of other people, is endowed with emotional intelligence. Such people do not lose their temper over little things. At the same time, they are able to support another person if he is sad or angry.

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Differences between feelings and emotions

These concepts are quite close in meaning, but they cannot be called identical. So what are emotions and feelings in psychology? In science, these concepts mean different components of the same emotional background.

Feelings are deeper states in psychology that determine a person’s persistent attitude towards external factors. They may not be so obvious and have smoothed manifestations.

What are emotions in psychology? They represent a reaction in the form of a burst to a certain situation. In this case, the person experiences vivid manifestations. Often this condition develops unconsciously.

In psychology, feelings are considered a more conscious expression of a person’s attitude towards a certain object. At the same time, a person may encounter a variety of emotions, but not express feelings without the appropriate prerequisites.

Human feelings are determined by the influence of society and external factors. Emotions are a subjective assessment that is based on an internal attitude towards the situation. They also depend on the state of the nervous system.

Biological purposefulness of emotions.

Items by themselves do not cause action. Their mental image only opens up the field of potentially possible actions. They cause action only due to their emotional coloring. Emotions

assess the significance of the reflected object for the subject and cause appropriate activity to ensure the achievement of the goal. Emotions are the most important element of the image of the environment. They violate the equivalence of objects and environmental conditions, giving some of them a special meaning and requiring them to perform certain actions.

Thus, emotions arose in the process of evolution as a means that allows living beings to determine the biological significance of external influences and states of the organism itself.

Subjectivity of emotions.

Emotional phenomena have a dual structure. They consist of reflected subject content and subjective experience. The reflected content constitutes the subject of emotions. Emotion gives its subject a specific subjective coloring. At the same time, the same objective content in different conditions can cause different emotional experiences.

The subject of emotional experience can be emotions themselves. For example, the object of shame may be vain pleasure experienced in the past. A person may not like his mood.

Sometimes there is an impression of the absence of the object of experience. For example, the reasons for his mood are not always clear to a person. This happens when a person rejects the actual cause of the mood as impossible due to a discrepancy with his ideas about himself.

Data from a psychiatric clinic show that there can be pointless emotions, but they are extremely unstable and quickly activated, that is, they find a new object, giving rise to numerous phobias, manias, and hallucinations. Inappropriate objectification of emotion is also observed when the brain of a person or animal is irritated.

Properties of emotions

Emotions are primarily characterized by a sign and can be positive or negative.

Positive emotions signal a favorable progress in satisfying needs. Positive emotions are caused by objects that are objects of a particular need, conditions that contribute to satisfying the need, achieving the goal (pleasure, joy, enthusiasm).

Negative emotions signal the unsatisfactory progress of the process of meeting human needs. They arise when set goals are not achieved, obstacles appear on the way to the goal, etc. (anger, rage, displeasure).

Emotions are also characterized by polarity. It is determined by the sign of simultaneously occurring emotions when exposed to one stimulus. On this basis, unipolar and bipolar emotions are distinguished.

Unipolar

emotions are characterized by the fact that one object evokes emotions of the same sign (a student who received an “excellent” is happy and rejoices).

Bipolar

emotions are characterized by the fact that a person experiences emotions that have different signs. They are called ambivalent. These emotions are caused by opposing properties of the object.

Emotions are characterized by their duration

: Emotional reactions usually last a few minutes, but some last up to days or even weeks. If severe emotional experiences last more than 2-2.5 months, then this is considered a pathology and requires treatment.

Emotions are characterized by the strength of the experience :

in some cases they have weak intensity, while in others, on the contrary, they proceed very violently.

Functions of experiences

Human feelings and emotions, in the course of phylogenetic development, began to perform a number of functions unique to them.

1. The reflective function of feelings, which is expressed in a generalized assessment of events. Feelings allow us to determine the usefulness and harmfulness of factors affecting a person and respond before the harmful effect itself is determined. For example, a person crossing the road may experience varying degrees of fear depending on the current traffic situation.

Thanks to the reflective function of emotions and feelings, a person can navigate the surrounding reality, evaluate objects and phenomena from the point of view of their desirability, i.e. feelings also perform a signaling function. The experiences that arise signal to a person how the process of satisfying his needs is going, what obstacles he encounters on his way, what he needs to pay attention to first, etc.

2. Incentive or stimulating function . For example, in a traffic situation, a person, experiencing fear of an approaching car, accelerates his movement across the road. Thus, emotions and feelings help determine the direction of the search, as a result of which the satisfaction of an emerging need is achieved or the problem facing a person is solved.

3. Reinforcing function. Significant events that cause a strong emotional reaction are imprinted in memory faster and for a long time. Emotions of success and failure have the ability to instill love or to extinguish it forever in relation to the type of activity that a person is engaged in, i.e. emotions influence the nature of a person’s motivation in relation to the activity he performs.

4. Switching function of emotions . It is especially clearly revealed in the competition of motives, as a result of which the dominant need is determined. Thus, a contradiction may arise between the natural human instinct of self-preservation and the social need to follow a certain ethical norm, which, in essence, is realized in the struggle between fear and a sense of duty, fear and shame. The attractiveness of a motive, its closeness to personal attitudes, directs a person’s activity in one direction or another.

3. Adaptive function of emotions. According to Charles Darwin, emotions arose as a means by which living beings establish the significance of certain conditions to satisfy their actual needs. Thanks to the feeling that arises in time, the body has the opportunity to effectively adapt to environmental conditions.

4. Communication function. Mimic and pantomimic movements allow a person to convey his experiences to other people, inform them about his attitude to objects and phenomena of the surrounding reality. Facial expressions, gestures, postures, expressive sighs, changes in intonation are the “language of human feelings,” a means of communicating not so much thoughts as emotions. Research has shown that not all manifestations of feelings are equally easy to recognize. Horror is most easily recognized (57% of subjects), followed by disgust (48%) and surprise (34%).

Within the framework of the communicative function, others can be distinguished. Feelings, for example, can have the function of influencing others. Thus, children very quickly notice that their emotional reactions associated with physical illness have a great impact on others. A five-year-old child quite consciously says that he will cry until his parents fulfill his wish.

Types of emotional phenomena

Sensual tone.

A feeling is sometimes experienced only as a pleasant, unpleasant or mixed shade of any mental process. At the same time, it is not recognized in itself, but as a property of objects or actions, and we say: a pleasant person, an unpleasant taste, a scary bull, a funny expression, tender foliage, a cheerful walk, etc.

Emotions.

In a narrow sense, an emotion is a direct, temporary experience that arises in any situation. facilitating or hindering the satisfaction of the subject's needs. Emotions are effective. In some cases, they become motivations for actions, for statements, increase the tension of forces and are called sthenic. Out of joy, a person is ready to “move mountains.” Feeling sympathy for his friend, he is looking for a way to help him. With an active emotion, it is difficult for a person to remain silent, it is difficult not to act actively. In other cases, asthenic emotions arise, which are characterized by passivity or contemplation; the experience of feelings relaxes the person. His legs may give way from fear. Sometimes, experiencing a strong feeling, a person withdraws into himself and withdraws.

Affects.

Affects are emotional processes that quickly take hold of a person and proceed violently. They are characterized by significant changes in consciousness, impaired control over actions, loss of self-control, as well as changes in the entire vital activity of the body.

Affects are short-lived, as they immediately cause an enormous expenditure of energy: they are like a flash of feeling, an explosion, a rushing squall. If an ordinary emotion is emotional excitement, then affect is a storm.

There are three main stages in the development of affect.

1. Preparatory stage. At the beginning of an affective state, a person cannot help but think about the object of his feeling and what is connected with it, involuntarily distracting himself from everything extraneous, even practically important. Expressive movements become more and more unconscious. Tears and sobs, laughter and cries, characteristic gestures and facial expressions, rapid or difficult breathing create the usual picture of increasing affect. Severe tension disrupts small movements. Inductive inhibition increasingly covers the cerebral cortex, which leads to disorganization of thinking; excitation increases in the subcortical nodes. A person experiences a persistent urge to give in to the feeling he is experiencing: fear, anger, despair, etc. Every normal person can restrain himself and not lose power over himself at this stage. Here it is important to delay the onset of affect and slow down its development. A well-known folk remedy: if you want to control yourself, try counting to yourself at least to ten.

2. Affect itself. At this stage, a person loses control over himself, committing unaccountable and reckless actions that later will be ashamed to remember and which are sometimes remembered as if in a dream. Inhibition covers the cortex and extinguishes the existing systems of temporary connections in which a person’s experience, his cultural and moral foundations are fixed.

3. Final stage. After an affective outburst comes weakness, loss of strength, indifference to everything, immobility, and sometimes drowsiness.

Moods.

Mood is a general emotional state that colors all human behavior over a significant period of time.

The mood can be joyful or sad, cheerful or lethargic, excited or depressed, serious or frivolous, irritable or good-natured, etc. When in a bad mood, a person reacts to a joke or remark from a friend in a completely different way than when in a cheerful mood.

Usually moods are characterized by unaccountability and weak expression. The person doesn't even notice them. But sometimes the mood, for example, cheerful and cheerful or, conversely, sad, acquires significant intensity. Then it leaves its mark both on mental activity (on the train of thought, ease of consideration), and on the characteristics of a person’s movements and actions, even influencing the productivity of the work performed.

Mood is influenced by very different reasons, for example, satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the entire course of life, in particular, how relationships develop at work, in the family, at school, and how all sorts of contradictions that arise in a person’s life are resolved.

A person’s mood largely depends on the general state of health, especially on the state of the nervous system and the endocrine glands that regulate metabolism. Physical education and sports are very useful for improving mood, but the meaningfulness of the activity, satisfaction with it and the moral support of loved ones are especially important.

The reasons for a particular mood are not always clear to the person experiencing it. So, a bad mood may be associated with an unfulfilled promise, not written, although promised in a letter, unfinished business. Although a person may not realize this and say that he is “simply”, “unknown why”, in a bad mood. All this gradually oppresses a person, so it is important to be able to understand your moods in order to, if possible, eliminate the objective causes of such conditions.

Stress.

Stress theory creator Hans Selye

defines it as a set of stereotypical, phylogenetic programmed nonspecific reactions of the body that prepare it for physical activity, i.e. to resistance, fight, flight.

A special form of experiencing feelings, close in its psychological characteristics to affect, but in terms of duration approaching moods, is emotional stress.

Emotional stress is caused by such stressors as unexpected, unfavorable influences: danger, pain, fear, threat, cold, humiliation, overload, and difficult situations: the need to quickly make a responsible decision, dramatically change the strategy of behavior, make an unexpected choice, respond to offenders. Stressors can be not only strong actual mental and physical stimuli, but also imagined, imaginary, reminiscent of grief, threat, fear, passion, as well as other emotional states.

In some people, under stress, activity continues to increase, and an increase in general tone

and vitality, self-confidence, composure and determination.
For others, stress is accompanied by a decrease in activity efficiency, confusion,
inability to focus attention and maintain it at the required level of concentration; fussiness, speech incontinence, aggression, and signs of “psychological deafness” in relation to others appear.

Stress mobilizes a person's mental reserves. However, various overvoltages do not pass without a trace for a person: adaptation reserves are reduced, and there is a danger of the appearance of a number of diseases. Stress is followed by a general feeling of fatigue, indifference, and sometimes depression. The most destructive stressors are information deficit, a situation of uncertainty, the inability to find a way out of a critical situation, internal conflict, a feeling of guilt, attributing responsibility to oneself even for those actions that did not depend on the person and which he did not commit. The result of their action can be neurotic states.

Frustration

Frustration (from Latin frustratio - deception, futile expectation) is a negative mental state caused by the inability to satisfy certain needs. This state manifests itself in feelings of disappointment, anxiety, irritability, and finally despair. In this case, the efficiency of operations is significantly reduced.

Higher human feelings

Feelings are mental states that have a clearly defined objective character. They reflect a stable attitude towards any specific objects (real or imaginary). A person cannot experience feelings at all if they are not related to someone or something. For example, a person is unable to experience the feeling of love if he does not have an object of affection. In the same way, he cannot experience hatred if he does not have what he hates.

A person has a special class of higher feelings. Depending on the subject area to which they relate, they are divided into moral, aesthetic, and intellectual.

Moral feelings

Moral, or moral , are the feelings experienced by people when they perceive the phenomena of reality and compare these phenomena with the norms developed by society. Moral feelings include a sense of duty, humanity, benevolence, love, friendship, patriotism, sympathy, etc. Immoral feelings include greed, selfishness, cruelty, etc. The manifestation of these feelings assumes that a person has learned moral norms and rules of behavior in the society in which he lives.

One of these feelings is conscience . It is associated with a person’s moral stability, his acceptance of moral obligations to other people and strict adherence to them. A conscientious person is always consistent and stable in his behavior, always correlates his actions and decisions with spiritual goals and values, deeply experiencing cases of deviation from them not only in his own behavior, but also in the actions of other people. Such a person is usually ashamed of other people if they behave dishonestly.

Intellectual feelings

Intellectual feelings are experiences that arise in the process of human cognitive activity. The most typical situation that gives rise to intellectual feelings is a problem situation. Success or failure, ease or difficulty of mental activity cause a whole range of experiences in a person. Examples of intellectual feelings are feelings of surprise, curiosity, inquisitiveness, feelings of joy about a discovery, feelings of doubt about the correctness of a decision, feelings of confidence in the correctness of a proof. They act as unique regulators of mental activity. Intellectual feelings not only accompany human cognitive activity, but also stimulate, enhance it, influence the speed and productivity of thinking, the content and accuracy of the knowledge gained.

Aesthetic feelings

Aesthetic feelings represent a person’s emotional attitude to beauty in nature, in people’s lives and in art. The aesthetic attitude manifests itself through different feelings - delight, joy, contempt, disgust, melancholy, suffering, etc.

Emotions are included in many psychologically complex states of a person, acting as their organic part . Such complex states, including thinking, attitude and emotions, are humor, irony, satire and sarcasm, which can also be interpreted as types of creativity if they take on an artistic form. Humor is an emotional manifestation of such an attitude towards something or someone, which carries a combination of funny and kind. This is laughing at what you love, a way of showing sympathy, attracting attention, creating a good mood. Irony is a combination of laughter and disrespect, most often dismissive. Such an attitude, however, cannot yet be called unkind or evil. Satire is a denunciation that definitely contains condemnation of the object. In satire, as a rule, he is presented in an unsightly form. Unkindness and evil are most manifested in sarcasm, which is direct mockery, ridicule of the object.

In addition to the listed complex states and feelings, tragedy . This is an emotional state that occurs when the forces of good and evil collide and the victory of evil over good

It should be noted that the considered division of feelings is rather conditional. Usually the feelings experienced by a person are so complex and multifaceted that it is difficult to classify them into any one category.

Passion

Passion is another type of complex, qualitatively unique and unique emotional state found only in humans . Passion is a fusion of emotions, motives, feelings concentrated around a certain type of activity or subject. S.L. Rubinstein wrote that “passion is always expressed in concentration, concentration of thoughts and forces, their focus on a single goal... Passion means impulse, passion, orientation of all aspirations and forces of the individual in a single direction, concentrating them on a single goal” (Rubinstein S.L. , 1998).

Emotions and personality

People as individuals emotionally differ from each other in their emotionality and general emotional orientation.

Emotionality of the individual.

1. Emotionality is a set of human properties that characterize the content, quality and dynamics of feelings. The substantive aspects of emotionality are determined by those phenomena, situations and events that are of particular significance for the subject. They are associated with the core parameters of the personality: its motivational orientation, worldview, system of values ​​and basic ideas, etc. Qualitative characteristics of emotionality are expressed in the sign and modality of the dominant emotions. The dynamic properties of emotionality include features of the emergence, course and cessation of emotional processes and their external expression.

The main components of emotionality include: emotional excitability, emotional responsiveness, strength of emotions, emotional stability, emotional lability.

Emotional excitability , which is understood as the readiness of an emotional response to stimuli that are significant to a person.

With increased emotional excitability, the functional level of activity changes in response to weaker external and internal influences. Excitability can manifest itself in behavioral characteristics such as short temper, irritability, and anxiety.

Anxiety is a tendency to experience anxiety in a threatening situation, characterized by a low threshold for the occurrence of an anxiety reaction. Anxiety is defined as the experience of emotional discomfort associated with the expectation of trouble, the premonition of impending danger. It is characterized by a feeling of tension, anxiety, and gloomy forebodings. Unlike fear, the subject of which is always clear, anxiety has no such subject. Anxiety is caused by an uncertain threat.

Emotional responsiveness and receptivity are close to emotional . Emotional responsiveness as a stable property of an individual is manifested in an easy, quick and flexible emotional response to various influences - social events, communication, surrounding people. Emotional responsiveness to another person's experiences is called empathy. A person can experience an experience of the same quality, or, if empathy is distorted, the opposite. If a person reacts equally to the experiences of different people in different situations, then his empathy manifests itself as his stable property. Empathy as a personality trait acts as a motive for certain forms of behavior and plays a vital role in the moral development of a child.

The power of emotions. Some people can experience feelings of such strength and intensity that others are unable to experience. The energization of activity depends on the strength of emotions.

Emotional stability - resistance to the action of emotiogenic factors, control of impulses and drives, ensuring stability of activity.

The emotional stability of a subject is determined by two factors: 1) the latent time of the appearance of an emotional state (the later emotions appear, the higher the stability); 2) the force of influence necessary to evoke an emotional reaction (the greater the force of such influence, the higher the emotional stability).

Emotional lability is the mobility of emotions, thanks to which a person quickly reacts to changing situations and circumstances, freely leaves some emotional states and enters others. Too pronounced lability of emotions can complicate relationships with others, since a person manifests himself as impulsive, reactive, and has poor control over himself and his states.

Lability is contrasted with emotional rigidity , which is characterized by the inertia of emotions and the difficulty of switching from one emotion to another. Even if emotiogenic situations and circumstances change, a person continues to experience the emotions caused by them;

Classification of feelings

This part of the human personality is difficult to classify. Feelings are considered very multifaceted. That's why they are diverse. In psychological practice, the following types of feelings are conventionally distinguished:

1. Moral. They, in turn, are divided into moral and immoral. The first category includes a sense of duty, humanity, and love. The second group includes greed, hatred, selfishness, and cruelty. Moral feelings determine relationships between people and acceptable behavior.
2. Praxic. This category includes the selection of a field of activity - profession, hobby. Such feelings determine a person’s attitude towards his responsibilities and concerns. They also affect connection with society.
3. Intelligent. They are divided into specific and nonspecific. The first group includes a thirst for knowledge, determination, and getting satisfaction from some kind of discovery or obtaining information. Nonspecific feelings include irony, surprise, and humor. This group of feelings determines a person’s attitude towards intellectual needs.
4. Aesthetic. These include receiving satisfaction from touching, contemplating or listening. This group includes love for music, technology, nature, and works of art. Such feelings determine a person’s interests, which help satisfy aesthetic needs.

There are also quite complex feelings that cannot be attributed to a specific type. Love often forces a person to reveal his aesthetic potential, strive for knowledge, or choose a certain type of activity.

Functions of feelings in psychology

The task of the senses is determined by their ability to record information about important objects or events. The main functions of feelings in psychology include the following:

1. Reflective - helps to evaluate current events in order to determine the level of danger and find ways to prevent it.
2. Stimulating – forces you to find ways to solve specific problems and set goals for the future.
3. Switching – promotes prioritization, identification of important actions, objects and decisions. This function can be interpreted as willpower.
4. Reinforcing – helps to remember important events. This is achieved through their subjective assessments.
5. Communicative – helps to communicate with others.
6. Adaptive - on the basis of experienced feelings it is easier to adapt to new conditions.

Features of managing emotions

There are 2 extreme states that cause emotions, namely creation and destruction. There is a key rule in psychology: in order to achieve harmony, you need to learn to manage emotions directly, and not just their expression.

All quarrels, misunderstandings and conflict situations are caused by a lack of control. The consequence of improper processing is illness, nervous exhaustion and other psychosomatic conditions. These symptoms are caused by attempts to express happiness instead of sadness or suppress feelings of anger.

The mechanism of emotions

To learn to understand yourself and deal with difficult cases in a timely manner, you need to study the psychology of emotions. A person receives his main reactions from people with whom he comes into contact in the first year of life. These include parents, immediate relatives, and guardians. The baby’s reactions to the world coincide with the perceptions of others.

The tendency to learn emotional reactions is laid down at the genetic level. It is then reinforced by interaction with others. At the same time, scientists cannot yet unambiguously answer the question of whether there are innate emotions.

There is an assumption that newborn babies can react only on an unconscious level. They scream in indignation or discomfort, widen their eyes when frightened, and keep an eye on toys that interest them.

At the same time, the moments of manifestation of emotions are influenced by the environment in which the baby is located. This is why some babies can wake up even from a slight rustle, while others cannot be awakened by the barking of a dog. This means that children do not experience special emotions about their usual environment.

Adult individuals have their own list of reactions to external events. Psychologists call this the emotional background. For some people it is stable, for others it is not. Some people seem calm and confident, others seem anxious, restless, and hysterical. The higher the parameters of a person’s emotional intelligence, the easier it is to communicate with him.

Nonverbal expression of emotions

To learn how to control your emotions and read other people, you need to become familiar with body language. Sometimes even almost imperceptible symptoms are enough to help determine a person’s condition and then use the knowledge gained.

Posture, head position, movements, glances, gestures can tell a lot about a person’s condition. Nonverbal manifestations of emotions include the following components:

• look - it can be running, burning or extinct;
• skin tone - it can be pale or red, often covered with sweat or wrinkles;
• heartbeat – slow or rapid;
• tremor – a person’s fingers, limbs, lips, eyelashes may tremble;
• breathing - can be measured, chaotic, fast, noisy;
• posture - a person can slouch, raise their shoulders high or straighten them;
• fingering some objects in the hands - it can be slow, chaotic, fast, orderly.

There are a large number of nonverbal expressions. Therefore, body language should be studied for quite a long time and consistently. It is on such symptoms that the mechanism of functioning of the lie detector is built. The sensitive device is able to read even minor changes in human reactions. They determine the veracity of the information received.

Verbal displays of emotions

This category includes verbal manifestations of human emotions. In this case, it is worth paying attention to specific wording that indicates a state of happiness or anger, and to words that are woven into the context.

The stronger the emotions a person experiences, the brighter the sound coloring of his words turns out. Joy can manifest itself in the form of an exclamation, anger in the form of a scream. Melancholy is reflected by whispers or muffled speech.

A person is able to detect changes in the tone and timbre of the voice from the first month of life - it is during this period that the brain begins to use the organs of perception. Already at 1.5-2 years old, a child can assess the emotional state of people close to him by voice. Teenagers already have their own set of speech colors. It is based on lifestyle. It is also influenced by the reactions of society.

Words used in context may not help understand the mood. Sometimes they do not have a pronounced emotional connotation. At the same time, the psychology of feelings allows you to read the emotions that a person is trying to convey. This technique is often used by liars. They convey their thoughts in such a way as to create the desired impression on the person who listens to them.

External expression of emotions

If all people said what they feel, it would be much easier. However, the older a person gets, it is easier for him to hide some experiences behind others. So, in a state of sadness, people can add joyful notes to their voices and smile. Thanks to this, from the outside they will seem cheerful and carefree.

For people who are not sensitive, such deception will be quite enough to avoid analyzing the emotional background of others. In such a situation, intimacy or heart-to-heart talk is simply impossible.

To learn how to communicate with people, it is worth analyzing their internal state. At the same time, it is important to be able to discern the seal behind the joy, and hidden experiences behind the external calm. It is also worth understanding how strong the hidden feeling is and whether the person needs help.

The psychology of emotions is a rather subtle area that has many facets. To learn to keep your emotions under control and determine the state of other people, you need to take into account many features.

IMPORTANT! Informational article! Before use, you should consult a specialist.

Motivation includes forces such as:

• Needs
• aspirations
• attractions
• desires
• intentions
• interests
• drives
• actual motives.

In depressive states in moderate or severe forms of manifestation, a person generally freezes all activity, he is unable to perform any actions and not only actions, but also no actions. Because the basis of depression, or rather one of its reasons, is a pronounced decrease in the driving force of motives . A decrease in this motivating force leads to the fact that a person is unable to perform any activity. He turns his face to the wall and spends most of his time that way. The man asks to be left alone, lies there and cannot do anything. For depressed patients, this condition, oddly enough, also has a positive effect—saving or protective. What saves people in a state of depression from committing suicide is a decrease in motivational force. They cannot move from thought to action due to the lack of sufficient motivating forces. If depression is present and the patient is diagnosed with high drive, this is a case to sound the alarm. This means a very high risk of true suicide. We know that in a state of depression, not only does the motivating force decrease, but also strong emotions of a negative sign begin to predominate, including feelings of melancholy and despair that are typical for depression. Of course, these strong feelings cause various kinds of suicidal thoughts. Yes, I don’t want to live anymore, I can’t stand all this anymore, I want to end this once. It is here that a decrease in motivation, a decrease in the motivating force of mental activity is a very important protective measure, and in most cases, with normal depression, those people who experience various kinds of negative emotional states and naturally experience various kinds of problems are saved by this. The main function of motives is the motivating , but along with this function there is another equally important one and this is the meaning-forming function. If any motive answers the question what! Then the meaning answers the question for what. What is the meaning-forming function of motives? This is the ability to generate meaning. That is, the ability to establish relationships with other motives. Different motives have different meaning-forming functions. In psychoanalysis, another phenomenon is considered - it is called attraction . A person has such a motivational force as need . Motives come precisely from needs, as well as desires, intentions, interests. drives appeared . And this concept is very close to the concept of attraction, only in an English-language manner, and this concept is often used in behavioral psychology. Motives also include interests . These are all different kinds of motivational phenomena. Each of these phenomena has its own characteristics, but the main thing that unites them is the presence of an incentive function of mental life.