I have always seen myself as a person who is not very emotional, as I’m not good with showing feelings in public. I think carefully about what I say even when I’m emotionally triggered, and I always regarded my tears or other outlets of strong emotional responses as a weakness. My attitude towards emotions being a sign of weakness has changed a lot in 2019. Emotions are normal, they even serve specific helpful functions for our behaviors, and everyone has them. Admitting my own vulnerability of becoming hurt, I realised that in emotions there lies a strength, and I am still trying hard to be more vulnerable and show emotions - at the right time. Especially negative emotions are often difficult to experience, analyse and admit to.
It is super important to understand our own emotions, at least the ones that have the potential to hurt ourselves if we do not understand and accept them. We need to accept emotions as normal, and feel secure to display them, but when we seemingly start crying for no reason (and there is never no reason), we want to be able to answer the question “Why are you crying?”. I want to be able to back up my emotional response by a legitimate reason for why I am getting angry, feel sad, or shameful.
To be honest, for someone who still has troubles displaying my own feelings, making sense of my emotions actually gives me such a sense of legitimacy for them that I do not feel ashamed of them anymore. They are no longer something that my head needs to win control over or prevent from happening. Emotions, especially the negative ones, are a logical consequence of any situation or event in our everyday life that ticks certain boxes on an emotional triggering list. And, as you will come to learn, I love making lists. So, here’s the list of the seven categories according to which a situation gets evaluated by our sub-conscience, and - depending on which boxes get ticked - we experience a certain emotion:
🔲 Motivational Relevance / Importance
☛ Is this situation/event important to me, my well-being and my personal goals?
🔲 Motivational Congruence
☛ Is the situation/ event harmful, or is it beneficial for the achievement of my goals or my well-being?
🔲 Problem-focusing Coping Potential
☛ Am I able to avoid or later on repair the undesirable consequences, or able to maintain the desirable consequences of the situation?
🔲 Emotion-focused Coping Potential
☛ Am I able to emotionally handle and mentally adjust to the situation/event?
🔲 Self-accountability
☛ Am I myself to credit or blame for the situation/event?
🔲 Other accountability
☛Should someone else receive the credit or blame for the situation/event?
🔲 Future Expectancy (of event or its desirability)
☛ Is there any possibility that the situation or event could change so that it becomes more or less beneficial for me?
While the first two, “primary” determinants regulate the intensity and valence with which we experience the triggered emotion, the last 5 are “secondary” determinants that decide the type of emotion we feel. Without motivational relevance, an emotional response is unlikely. Combined with motivational congruence, a situation is appraised as either beneficial or harmful to us, actually or potentially. In any case, if the situation is identified by my sub conscience or more conscious cognitive processes as important to me and my goals in life, but that it is not congruent with those goals or my well-being, we feel stress. Stress is the basic emotion that arises under conditions of appraised harm (motivational incongruence of the situation).
Now, if we can also tick the box number 6; that someone else is accountable for this stressful situation we’re in right now, we feel anger. I for example get angry if I see someone treating good people poorly or unfairly.
If instead of box 6 we can tick the box 5, meaning we ourselves are responsible, we feel guilt or shame instead of anger - this would be me saying something mean to my Mum that might hurt her and feeling bad about it immediately afterward.
A low problem-focused coping potential together with low future expectancy leads to experienced sadness, because we are not physically able to prevent or fix the consequences - a typical lovesickness situation.
Fear and anxiety on the other hand are felt when we have a low or uncertain emotion-focused coping potential, e.g. when our child is not coming home after school.
A high coping potential, especially a high emotion-focused one on the contrary leads to a feeling of being challenged and keeps us motivated to stay engaged, especially if supplemented by a high future expectancy of the desirability of the event. Imagine for example an important deadline at University or work approaching when you know you can make it happen and do well on the test.
We experience hope when we expect the event to become more desirable in the future, but when we have no problem-focused coping potential and thus have no real power of the outcome of the situation, such as when we still hope for sunshine on our big garden party that is planned for the afternoon of a so far rainy day.
All emotions are experienced for a reason, and are supposed to lead to a certain behavioral response. The emotion sadness for example motivates our cognitive and behavioral system to stop investing further and withdraw from a certain situation, or to get some help. Fear on the other hand tells us to be cautious, and keeps the body alert to avoid any harm. Anger tells us to go in attack mode, and to remove any potential sources of harm, while guilt or shame tells us to fix the harm we caused or to prevent it the next time we find ourself in the same situation. And hope lets us sustain a positive outlook and we keep striving for accomplishment and a better future.
This list of course also works backwards, and we can identify certain factors depending on the emotion we feel. This let’s us reconsider if we actually even need to feel negative emotions, or if our mind is trying to tell us something. The process of reevaluating and overthinking after an initial affective reaction is called emotional self-efficacy, and with it we have the ability to prevent or defer an overly emotional, instinctual display of behavior.
Emotional self-efficacy is a cognitive capability and describes both the ability to understand the impact of one’s own emotions on thoughts and behavior, but also the ability to delay or prohibit impulsive affective reactions. This ability can help us in situations where we might not immediately want to show what’s on our mind, or even just to understand our emotions first before we confront those around us with the full emotion we’re feeling, without actually being able to state in words what’s on our mind.
I for once wanted to share this thought-stimulating finding, and I hope you find it helpful or at least interesting to consider next time you feel strongly about something.
Welcome to Vallidated!
Valli
xx
Source: Smith & Lazarus, 1990.
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