Emotional Dynamics: Understanding the Hidden Impact |
Emotional dynamics must be understood to grasp the function and utility of emotions.
There can be no conscious meaning without emotion.
Feelings seize conscious attention by amplifying and magnifying change within the self or the environment.
Emotional dynamics include the function and utility of emotions. Awareness of emotional dynamics can help us avoid conflicts within ourselves and with other people.
Emotions create importance. To paraphrase Silvan Tomkins:
With an emotional response anything can be important; without one, nothing is.There can be no conscious meaning without emotion.
With an emotional response anything can be important; without one, nothing is.There can be no conscious meaning without emotion.
Amplify, Magnify, Distort
Feelings seize conscious attention by amplifying and magnifying change within the self or the environment. This hyper-focus evolved to motivate action. But it unavoidably distorts whatever triggered the feeling.
The distortion effect of feelings is how the stronger ones, such as anger, make us do and say things we don’t believe. With an angry response, we’re usually wrong even if we’re right. We can start out factually right, until the distortion effect of anger blows things out of proportion, and we end up wrong.
The function of emotions as an alarm or early-warning system gives them priority and great speed of brain processing. A startle response, measured in milliseconds, can occur 5,000 times faster than one can say, “I feel afraid or angry.”
This built-in mechanism counteracts the power of........