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What are emotions made of? keys to understanding and 'tasting' them

2021-09-09T09:48:55.422Z


The psychologist and mindfulness instructor Martín Reynoso offers guidelines that help to become a 'sommelier of emotions'.


Martin Reynoso

09/09/2021 6:01 AM

  • Clarín.com

  • Good Life

Updated 09/09/2021 6:01 AM

Serena Williams celebrates a key point in the match against Venus, her sister, in the final of the United States Open tournament that she finally won in 2002.

In that frozen image in a photo, he is like a little ball, crouched and squatting, making a

very visceral gesture of discharge

.

If we asked what emotion a group of people feel, what would they say?

joy?

relief?

passion?

What could we call that emotion?

For Feldman Barret, an American researcher who years ago developed the constructivist paradigm of emotions, defending the hypothesis that emotions are not universal but are crossed by culture but especially by

very marked individual and subjective traits

, we cannot find a precise name for what Serena feels.

Actually, if we asked him, he might tell us all that: joy, relief, passion, appreciation, euphoria, and something else.

Something that ends up forming a

unique cocktail

that has to do with several things.

With which?

We will see that now.

Body state, context and language 

For this author, the first thing that gives rise to the genesis of an emotion is what she calls the "nuclear affect" or also

"body budget"

, that is, the level of energy and its valence (positive or negative) that we have.

Physical pain, bodily discomfort or discomfort clearly predisposes to unpleasant emotions.

Chronic pain, for example, causes many

emotional states of irritability and anger

in people who suffer from it.

Energy also predisposes to certain emotions. Fatigue and physical exhaustion skew emotional expression especially towards emotions such as

laziness, annoyance, and torpor

. Vitality predisposes to empathy, optimism and hope. Relaxation after a yoga class invites us to

love, balanced joy and calm

. Likewise, what will lead the emotional genesis towards an emotion is the context.

The context is both the external situation that is presented to us (ecological factor) and our general mental state.

Both are going to "push" towards certain types of emotions.

There, then, what we call “categorization” will take place, which is the attribution of meaning to external and visceral signals.

Knowledge and memory are

involved in this process

.

Language is the third element to consider.

Based on how we conceptualize this felt reality, we will finish modeling our emotion.

“What people understand by 'fear', 'anger', 'joy' (the concepts of emotions) are

dynamic and variable mental representations

, constructed as a collection of situated conceptualizations.

Thus, the concept 'anger' can include both attack and avoidance behaviors, and even a wry smile.

The anger experienced at the disappointment of a friend is not the same as at the orders of a boss ”, says Sol Fittipaldi, an expert on the subject.

Emotions are dynamic and variable representations.

Photo Shutterstock.

A method to understand emotions

From the above we can rescue a couple of things: emotions are

quite subjective and not universal

and they are also built according to the aforementioned elements: body state, context and language.

But this does not seem to help us much in their understanding when we feel them.

That is why we can approach another way of looking at the variability of emotions to better understand them and be, as I like to say, a

sommelier of emotions

: taste them, feel them deeply, connect with them.

In our emotional well-being training we suggest approaching the traditional cultural definition of emotions (anger, fear, sadness, etc.) but in terms of “mosaics” that are built, where variability and heterogeneity abound.

Discovering the granularity of emotions

My daughter's first outing situation at 15 years old.

A basketball friend's party.

I offer to take her and some colleagues in the car and on the trip they take over the stereo and the internal climate with their laughter and their chorus in "portuñol" of trendy songs.

I feel

a strange well-being

.

It is not only joy: there is camaraderie, a lot of empathy and tenderness to see them grow.

We

can call this

variable texture of an emotion

that is made up of many sensations "emotional granularity."

And the more we discover its composition, the more we will understand each other.

Maybe we can make an outline with the composition of that emotional cocktail.

This is how it occurs to me to describe that composition:

joy is at least 50%

of the emotion, the camaraderie, the tenderness and my pride as a father in almost equal parts the rest.

It is a good way to get closer to what I feel and, from what our participants in the groups report, very useful to understand each other.

Understand our basic traits, key to being aware of our emotions.

Photo Shutterstock.

A second aspect: emotion, state and trait

Another way to understand ourselves is to know the difference between an ephemeral emotion, a state (a little more lasting, hours or days) and the trait, a permanent and difficult to modify emotional characteristic.

Understanding our basic traits and the state in which we are allows us to

be aware of the emotions

that are arising.

An example: suppose we have an anxious base trait and an emotional state of several days of

worry and negativism

, it is highly probable that this facilitates the appearance of emotions of this type: uncertainty, distrust, fear, anguish, all of them are much more prone to appear.

If we have an optimistic personality trait and we are going through a difficult and challenging time in our life that makes us feel a state of anxiety and uncertainty, something strange for us (not usual), we may have a greater chance of

modifying it with the days

of having That upbeat grassroots bra.

This idea of ​​traits and states helps us

understand

ourselves

much better

and take care of our emotional expression: knowing our predisposition to feel certain types of emotions we can be attentive to the contexts and experiences we have so as not to have such a bad time.

We already have some more tools to understand this beautiful internal landscape that are emotions.

I invite you to reflect and use them to make

your life more conscious

and, hopefully, happy.

* Martín Reynoso is a psychologist, director of Train Your Brain Argentina and author of "Mindfulness, scientific meditation".

Look also

Do you take 10 minutes of meditation a day to feel better?

6 keys to achieving true well-being (and not falling for false promises)

Source: clarin

All news articles on 2021-09-09

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