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Emotional dynamics include the function and utility of emotions. Awareness of emotional dynamics can help us avoid conflicts within ourselves and with other people.
Importance
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.
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.
Priority, Speed
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.”
Signal Retreat
This built-in mechanism counteracts the power of emotions to dominate and overwhelm us. Emotional signals become weaker as the change they signal becomes familiar. This explains why the bad gets better, or at least more tolerable, as people adapt to horrific conditions of poverty and prison. It’s also how the good gets boring. Sadly, much of the grief in marriage is due not to loss of love, but to loss of simple interest. The culprit is not a boring partner but blaming partners who misunderstand signal retreat.
Negative Bias
Negative feelings produce much greater effects on meaning than positive ones. Negative emotions (particularly anger, fear, disgust, and distress) are more urgently related to survival.
The brain is a better safe than sorry system. It would rather be wrong 999 times thinking your spouse is a saber-toothed tiger than be wrong once thinking a saber-toothed tiger is your spouse.
Loss is more salient than equivalent gain. Having a meal is enjoyable but, in most cases, incomparable to the distress of having to skip one. Finding $1,000 will be pleasant for a day or so; losing $1,000 can ruin a week. More poignantly, having a child is a joyous occasion, until fatigue sets in; losing a child takes a lifetime of recovery.
Expansion
Emotions expand beyond the change that triggered them. When we get angry at our spouses or children, we tend to be irritable the whole day. Things like bills, unexpected expenses, falling stock markets, and threats to job security or other loss of income make us worry about everything. A job promotion makes the day seem sunnier, warmer, and more promising. We commonly describe the effects of this law as “being in a good or bad mood.” But in this modern era of blame, we often shorten the good and prolong the bad.
Incompatibility
Emotions with approach-motivation are incompatible with those that motivate attack or avoidance. We cannot experience incompatible emotions at the same time, although we often experience them in rapid sequence. For example, compassion and anger are incompatible, not because of the arousal or feelings that go with them or even the thoughts and language that express them. Their incompatibility owes to their respective motivations. Compassion motivates approach (heal, improve, correct), and anger motivates attack (punish, put down, prove wrong).
The law of incompatibility is especially relevant to emotion regulation. It’s much easier to change the motivation of emotions from avoid and attack to heal, improve, correct, connect, than to wade through virulent feelings and the contradictory meanings that attach to them.
How Emotions Dominate Thinking
Possibility over probability. Emotions signal what might be happening or what might happen in the future or what might have happened in the past. It’s up to the adult brain to interpret and assess the probability of that which the emotion signals.
For many people, the adult brain justifies emotional signals, rather than test their accuracy. This habit of automatic justification forms early in life when the immature brain must process intense emotional signals with its limited interpretive and regulatory capacity. In the toddler brain, if it’s possible, it’s real.
Emotional self-validation. Intense emotions self-validate: “If I’m angry, you must be doing something wrong.” Or, “If I’m fearful, you must be threatening.”
The threshold of emotional self-validation has lowered considerably in our modern era of blame and external regulation of emotions. “Uncomfortable” is the watchword now; i.e., “If I’m uncomfortable, you must be insensitive, rude, aggressive, or abusive.”
Enhancement and disorganization. Enhancing emotions reinforce meaning and make behavior more decisive, though not always advantageous. The major enhancing emotions are interest, excitement, and anger. They increase energy and focus, reduce doubt, and strengthen resolve. They make us certain, though often wrong. They strengthen confidence and morale:
“I’m right, this is really good.”
“I’m right, this is really bad.”
Disorganizing emotions disempower with global doubt and uncertainty. They deplete energy and concentration, diminish confidence, morale, resolve, and the spirit to go on. They make it impossible to think straight and to take decisive action. That is their purpose. They abruptly disorganize meaning and behavior before things get worse. Shame, humiliation, sorrow, and anguish are the major disorganizing emotions.
Understanding the dynamic properties of emotions can eliminate overreactions and underreactions.
Regulating dynamic properties of emotions can make our lives better.
