OVERVIEW
The phone rings and you answer. “I’m pleased to tell you…”, the voice begins, “that we would like to offer you the job”. How you interpret this news, what it means to you, your body’s response, your facial expression, how you prepare to react, how you feel – all these cascading elements, each influencing the other, are what forms an emotion. Emotions are all about context and interpretation. You’re excited because it’s your dream job, but in an alternative scenario you might have developed second thoughts. You’re alone, so you jump with joy, but in public maybe you would have just smiled to yourself quietly. Emotions imbue situations with meaning; without emotions, we would always respond robotically. Emotions prepare our bodies for the perceived challenge before us. Consider you were sleeping when the phone rang. The job’s importance to you will send a shot of adrenaline around your body, clearing your mind, so you can answer lucidly. Emotions also convey our feelings to others. The caller will sense the delight in your voice and be reassured that they’ve made the right choice. People high in emotional intelligence can anticipate and read the emotional reactions of others, as well as being able to advantageously and appropriately influence their own emotions.
Some psychologists have proposed that there are a fixed number of emotions, classifiable according to the universally recognised facial expressions of happiness, disgust, surprise, sadness, anger and fear. But in reality there are probably as many emotions as there are meaningful situations to be encountered. Meanwhile, everyday verbal labels – “I was ecstatic, elated” – simply represent one of the ways we struggle, helped often by the use of metaphor and analogy, to convey something of what an emotional reaction was like for us to experience.
The immediacy of an emotion, and the way it synchronises changes to our mental and physical being according to our interpretation of the situation, distinguish it from other states of mind like mood (the cause of which might be days or weeks old), personality (a set of pervasive traits that describe our behavioural tendencies) and fatigue.
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