Last update: October 14, 2015
Emotions predispose us to action in different ways. Each emotion shows us a path that, in the past, allowed us to appropriately resolve the innumerable challenges to which human existence has been subjected.
Daniel Goleman
Enjoyment
Joy is the positive feeling that arises when we reach a goal or a goal, we live an experience that we consider pleasant or we manage to fight the bad mood.
- Under the influence of joy, we are able to bring back cheerful memories. It works as an engine that moves our life and makes us choose those moments in which we have experienced this positive emotion.
- It stimulates hormonal changes reducing stress, improving the immune system reaction and cardiovascular responses.
- Facilitates social interaction, making us more communicative and willing to help others, and is able to mitigate the effects of negative emotions.
- It is contagious. When we feel happy, we tend to share it with others, with the whole world, and we try to make those around us feel the same positive feeling.
However, without sadness we would not be able to experience joy.
Sadness
Sadness is a negative feeling characterized by the fact that our mood worsens, which reduces our mental activity and our actions.
- Sadness is a very subjective and personal emotion. It manifests itself in situations in which we lose something or someone or in which something hurts us. It can range from simple melancholy to deep grief, but it should not be confused with depression.
- It affects our mental processes, reducing our creative capacity. We focus on the available information, trying to reflect on what has happened negative and do not contemplate other options to find a solution to a conflict or to get out of a negative solution.
- Feeling sad does not predispose us to social contact and it makes us isolate or, on the contrary, pushes us to seek help.
- When we are sad for a long time, we can experience what is known as learned helplessness, which makes us think that no matter what we do, nothing will change, and so we stop trying.
Sadness, however, also has a positive side: it makes us reflect on what is really important.
Anger
Anger is a negative feeling that occurs when we are subjected to situations that we consider frustrating or harmful to our integrity and that of our loved ones.
- Anger drives us to action, but it blinds our reasoning. It interrupts our complex thoughts and makes us express negative emotions towards the source of our frustration, be it a person or a situation.
- If we think we can do something to combat those factors that prevent us from achieving our goals, we will feel anger. If, on the other hand, we think we cannot do anything, we will feel sad.
- Anger also manifests itself when the rules and rights within our community they are being broken: injustice.
- There are many ways to channel anger and we can experience it when we receive no reward for our work or actions. For example, if our boss at work doesn't pay us or if he doesn't reward our efforts for others.
Don't let anger overwhelm you, because in the long run it leads to hatred.
Fear
Fear is a feeling that arises when we perceive an imminent danger that we think may hurt us or our loved ones.
- It is a complex emotion and, at the same time, fundamental for our survival. Since prehistoric times, fear has served the human being to escape or face what implies a real danger to our safety and to decide which situations we must avoid.
- Fear proves negative when what we fear is not a real danger, but we feel fear based on our own interpretation of the facts. We project ourselves into an imaginary future and the mere thought of its consequences is unbearable. This is what we know by the name of anxiety.
- Sia the experiences we live, both the fears that society and education instill in us affect our perception of the world.
It is not necessary to know the danger to be afraid. The unknown dangers, in fact, are precisely those that are most frightening.
Disgust
Disgust is our emotional response to what causes us aversion or triggers an unpleasant feeling.
- The reactions of disgust felt by our body are the most evident because they are very intense and difficult to hide.
- The survival function of disgust has the job of protecting us from possible intoxication or poisoning, while feeling disgust for foods that are not toxic has more to do with the association between certain tastes and unpleasant experiences or thoughts.
- We don't just feel disgusted with food or the smells of different substances, but also for the moral ideas that are unpleasant to us, and the people who represent these ideas trigger the same emotion in us.
We all have a scale of what we consider unpleasant, ranging from what disgusts us a little to what we consider utterly repulsive, even difficult to tolerate. Roger-Pol Droit
Video del film Disney Inside-Out
