Emotional understanding

I am Gayatri Patil, a 24-year-old school teacher. My husband Suresh often cites me as being too emotional and that characteristic of mine affecting my rational thought processes. I want to understand as to what emotions are and what role they play in our life.

Most of our affairs of everyday life are tinged with feeling and emotion. Joy and sorrow, excitement and disappointment, love and fear, attraction and repulsion, hope and dismay – all these and many more are feelings we often experience in the course of a day. Life would be dreary without such feelings. They add colour and spice to living; they are the sauce which adds pleasure and excitement to our lives. We anticipate our parties and dates with pleasure; we remember with a warm glow the satisfaction we got from getting a good grade and we even recall with amusement the bitter disappointments of childhood. On the other hand, when our emotions are too intense and too easily aroused, they can easily get us into trouble. They can wrap our judgment, turn friends into enemies, and make us miserable as if we were sick with fever. It is not easy to define emotions. They say something about our feelings, mention the physiological or bodily basis of our feelings, show the effect on our perception, thinking and behaviour, point out the driving or motivational properties of such emotions like anger and fear and refer to the ways in which we express our language, facial expressions and gestures. There are various theories of emotion formation. One theory says that our perception of the reaction that we give to any situation is the basis of our emotion. The emotional experience which occurs after the bodily change has a certain pattern. The state of the body in which there is arousal may be associated with anger, the state in which there is tension with anxiety, the state in which there is relaxation with elation and the state in which there is a collapse with sadness. Another theory is about emotions forming from our appraisals of the situations either in the environment or coming from our body. In addition, memories of past encounters with similar situations, dispositions to respond in certain ways, and the consideration of the consequences of actions that might result from the emotional state also enter into the appraisal. The outcome of the complex appraisal of all the information is the emotion as it is felt.  Emotions are also related to motivation. Almost all our sustained and goal-directed behaviour is emotionally toned and that it is the emotional tone which provides the motivation for long sequences of behaviour. For e.g. the motive driving your behaviour in school may be the emotional fulfillment of doing good work, the satisfaction of being esteemed by other teachers, parents and children and the pleasure of mastering new things in life. Emotions are a great method of communication. Our emotions have a great impact on others when we express them in ways that can be perceived by others. We often seize upon instances of emotional expression in others to form our ideas of their personality. We perceive emotions from many sources. The voice is one source. Screams denote fear or excitement, groans denote pain or unhappiness, sobs denote sorrow, and laughter denotes enjoyment. A tremor or break in the voice may mean great sorrow, a loud, high-pitched, sharp voice usually means anger. The facial expressions also denote the emotions. One can also learn how to control the emotional expression for the more subtle emotions in life like awe or jealousy. A person exhibits several emotions at one time; these blends of emotions are hard to judge. So, unless we know a person’s idiosyncrasies, the context of the situation and the content of the matter, it may be difficult for us to know exactly what emotion that person is experiencing. Of course, people are most accurate in their judgments when the facial expression and the context are both present and convey complementary information. In the case of conflicting cues, we tend to rely more on the facial expression or other non-verbal behaviour than on the context in making our judgment. Your husband may have a tendency to make his judgments from your facial expressions. So he may be biased in his opinion about your emotions. You may now provide him the context of your emotions and that may allow him to have a better judgment.