Assignments

I. Discuss the prominent psychologists’ statements:

1.“Emotions are the glue that holds the cells of the organism together.” - Candace Pert;

2.“An emotion occurs when there are certain biological, certain experiential, and certain cognitive states which all occur simultaneously.” - Jack Mayer;

3."There are a hundred or perhaps a thousand other emotions, or gradations, created by the mixing, blending, and overlapping of the basic ones." - Anabel Jensen.

II. Answer the questions:

1. How would you define human emotions?

2. How do different researchers define emotions?

3. Which negative emotions do you suppose to be the strongest?

4. On what levels do emotions operate?

5. When does an emotion occur?

6. What aspects do emotions have?

7. What areas of focus are taken into consideration to identify the core emotions?

8. What emotion is cognitively-saturated?

9. Where are emotions generated?

Text 2. Kinds of Emotions

If you were to do a survey, asking what makes a human being different from a computer, the chances are that most of the replies would mention the same thing: emotion. Human beings, as we all know, do not just act like machines. We have another dimension to our experience as well – we feel things. We become happy, or upset, or thrilled, or furious – and we are not always particularly rational about how we do it. In this unit, we will look at the psychology of a number of different emotions, and at how psychological knowledge has been used to help people to cope with anxiety and stress.

When we think of emotions, it is generally the unpleasant ones which come to mind: fear, anger, anxiety and so on. Partly, that is because we live in a society which tends to emphasise pessimistic ideas more than optimistic ones: films, news and TV dramas all dwell on negative emotions and ignore positive ones. So we tend not to notice the positive emotions that we feel, or to dismiss them as not really happening.

In reality, though, the positive emotions which we experience are just as rich and varied as the negative ones – if not more so. Argyle and Crossland (1987) explored some of the dimensions of positive emotions, by asking people to imagine themselves in each of 24 different situations. They were asked to describe how they would feel if they were in that situation, and to say whether the feeling produced by the situation was like the feelings produced by any of the other situations on the list.

By combining the different descriptions and analysing what they had in common. Argyle and Crossland found that there seemed to be roughly eight different kinds of positive emotions which were being described. Looking at these can make us realise just how varied our experiences can be. The first emotion on their list (although they were not arranged in any particular order) was the feeling of a sense of one's own potency – feeling capable, and able to do whatever is needed. A second one was a sense of spirituality or wonder, which might be part of the feeling involved in listening to a particularly beautiful piece of music, or enjoying nature. Feeling contentment was also on the list, as was the feeling of being relaxed, which is not the same thing at all.

Another positive emotion which people reported was referred to as self-indulgence by the researchers. We usually see self-indulgence as a selfish thing, but it is not always. The self-indulgence you experience when having a long hot bath or pampering yourself, for example, is not selfish in the sense of keeping something for yourself and not letting other people have it. But it is a pleasure which is personal, and not to do with sharing. Other kinds of positive emotions, though, are to do with sharing, or with caring for other people, and the researchers referred to these as altruism.

Being interested in something, or fascinated by a hobby, is also a kind of emotion which people enjoy experiencing. Argyle and Crosland referred to this as absorption. And the eighth positive emotion which they identified is that of exhilaration – the sort of emotion we would feel when we were excited about something, or thrilled by an unexpected pleasant experience.

(Nicky Hayes, Psychology. – Great Britain; Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1994, – 260p.)