The nature of emotions
- Intellectualistic approach. Organic manifestations of emotions act as a consequence of mental phenomena.
- Theory I.F. Herbart. The scientist claims that the most important psychological fact is the representation, respectively, of feelings - this is the connection between existing ideas; they can be seen as a reaction to a conflict between ideas.
- Position of V. Wundt. Emotions represent certain changes that characterize the influence of feelings on the course of the ideas themselves.
Senses: mechanics and functions
Feelings, unlike emotions, are more complex and do not always play an adaptive or motivational role in a person’s life.
Higher feelings are inherent only to man. They are closely connected with his personality, with his attitude towards life, towards people, with his beliefs and views.
By their structure, feelings consist of two or more fundamental emotions and a logical algorithm that links them together. For example, the feeling of envy consists of the emotions of anger, resentment and contempt, and the connecting algorithm is comparison with a person who has achieved success in values that are significant to the envious person (material or spiritual), the desire to be in his place. At the same time, envy should not be confused with a feeling of healthy competition - the so-called white envy.
The same feeling can be experienced and manifested differently, depending on the emotional state a person is in at the moment. For example, the feeling of friendship can be accompanied at different times by emotions of joy, interest, resentment, shame and irritation.
Feelings manifest differently among people because each person has their own set of personality traits and traits that influence feelings.
All feelings can be divided into main types: moral, intellectual, aesthetic, social.
1 . Moral feelings express a person’s attitude towards people, towards society, towards his duties, towards himself (love, camaraderie, patriotism, sense of duty, honor, friendship, etc.)
2. Intellectual feelings arise in the process of mental activity and are associated with cognitive processes and creativity (curiosity, joy of discovery, doubt, etc.).
Intellectual feelings also include a sense of the comic, humor, irony, sarcasm, and cynicism.
The feeling of the comic is a sharp discrepancy between what any life phenomenon actually is and what it pretends to be.
Humor is a good-natured, mocking attitude towards something or someone. Humor combines laughter with sympathy for what it is aimed at.
Irony is a subtle mockery expressed in a hidden form, a sharply critical attitude towards the world, people, and oneself.
Sarcasm is a caustic mockery, angry irony.
Cynicism is a mockery, a mockery based on the feeling of a petty person’s bitterness towards everything that is better and higher than him. Cynics tend to humiliate others.
3. Aesthetic feelings are manifested when a person perceives or creates beauty. In other words, it is the love of beauty. Their objects are works of art, nature, people.
4. Social feelings are feelings of justice, honor, duty, responsibility, patriotism, solidarity, creative inspiration, work enthusiasm.
Feelings have many functions: adaptation, motivation for a certain activity, destruction, specific individual perception of reality, attitude towards something, awareness of reality deeper than logical thinking can allow.
However, the main functions of the senses are as follows:
1. Evaluating. Positive and negative feelings show how a person feels about something.
2. Encouraging. Feelings can motivate a person to act or, on the contrary, prevent it.
3. Direction of attention. What excites our senses we perceive more clearly and accurately.
Types of Social Emotions
Social emotions are usually divided into positive and negative.
- Positive/conjunctive. Positive social emotions appear when a group of people is aimed at achieving common goals, the result of which brings satisfaction to the participants. Typically, such social emotions can range from weak preference to deep affection. With the latter, exclusively positive intentions are attributed to the partner (in the case of love), which, of course, are often not so objective.
- Negative/disjunctive. Negative social emotions appear when a situation of competition arises: the success of one person entails the failure of another, which often leads to conflict. As a rule, a person can only notice in such an opponent what is unpleasant to him, ignoring his positive qualities.
How pride, compassion and gratitude work
Pride, compassion and gratitude increase self-control, causing us to prioritize the future. They level out what economics calls “time preference,” which in turn helps people choose broccoli over ice cream.
These emotions allow you to change desires instead of fighting them. In addition, they have a beneficial effect on the body: they reduce heart rate, improve sleep quality and strengthen the immune system.
Using David Brooks's terminology, these emotions eliminate the dichotomy between the desire to live "for the resume" (that is, to build a successful career) and "to live for the eulogy" (that is, to leave behind a good memory). Experiments show that the ability to self-control doubles when people feel gratitude.
Pride, gratitude and compassion are not the only useful emotions, but they are the most useful in terms of developing self-control.
One significant difference between these emotions and positive emotions like joy is that they are directly related to social life. Joy does not only appear as a result of interaction with other people.
Pride seems to many to be unnecessary in this trio: it turns into narcissism when we exaggerate our abilities or begin to believe that we are good at everything.
The secret is to take pride in the skills you have or are trying to develop. Then it can become a powerful source of motivation: you will begin to improve the skills that others admire, that is, develop what makes you valuable to others.
But you need to learn to be proud of small things, and not just the fact that you were able to achieve your goal.
Here are some tips on how you can develop these emotions in yourself.
Keep a gratitude journal
It's important to pay attention to the little things. Even moderate feelings of gratitude are beneficial. Think about those who held the door for you, showed you the way, and gave up their seat in the transport. Thinking about little things like this every day increases your level of gratitude.
Research has shown that people with stronger feelings of gratitude in a situation like the marshmallow experiment demonstrate higher levels of self-control.
Meditate and put yourself in someone else's shoes
As for compassion, there are two ways to develop it. The first is mindfulness meditation.
Numerous experiments confirm that the practice of meditation increases feelings of compassion for oneself and others. Even 10-minute daily exercises produce positive results.
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It should be noted that the principle of compensation is central to individual psychology. According to Adler, the main factor in personality development should be considered the presence of a conflict between the feeling (complex) of inferiority and the desire for superiority generated by it. The latter is determined by the child in the form of a goal that guides his thoughts and actions. A person’s desire to overcome feelings of inferiority often leads to inappropriate actions on his part. Hence the goal of education according to Adler is to neutralize feelings of inferiority by directing its compensation in a useful direction. This leads us to another basic concept of individual psychology - a sense of community (social feeling).
It is the development of social feeling that, according to Adler, is the most important condition for a child to overcome his existing inferiority and superiority complexes. Moreover, he argues that developing a sense of community can help humanity in eradicating war and crime. Social feeling, as Adler argued, is a kind of indicator of normality in the development of a child. It was on this principle that Adler built his pedagogical technology. Every violation that leads to a decrease in social feeling causes enormous harm to the child’s development.
It should be noted that Adler came to the concept of social feeling much later. At first his concept of man was mechanical. If S. Freud exaggerated the importance of sexual desire, Adler attached too much importance to the tendency to aggression and the desire for superiority as the main driving forces of personality development, as well as to the factor of an inferiority complex with the concept of compensation and overcompensation derived from this.
The concept of social feeling gained real strength among Adler only in the thirties during the period of American creativity. For the sake of objectivity, it should be pointed out that discussions regarding the definition of a sense of community as an idea and reality coincided with the introduction and scientific use of the philosophical concept of “social a priori” (sozial a-priori), although Adler himself was reluctant to confirm the connection between these concepts.
The sense of community, according to Adler, is of decisive importance for the individual, since the feeling of inferiority that never leaves a person, which should lead to the achievement of perfection, “turns” towards the desire for personal significance and personal power. Two forces are constantly fighting in man - the sense of community and the desire for superiority. These influential forces for a person determine his actions and actions.
In many of his books, A. Adler comments on various situations that “tempt” a child to abandon courage itself and use its substitute. When a child loses faith in himself, Adler believes, he chooses the path of the fastest psychological success from his point of view, striving to achieve significance and superiority even in useless ways. This is a kind of “escape into the world of fiction”, which provides an explanation for erroneous human behavior. Life constantly presents a person with tasks of varying complexity. Anyone whose feelings of inferiority or lack of sense of community have caused him to lose courage does not consider it possible to overcome them. Remaining on the side of the useful, he begins to gradually retreat from these tasks, becomes indecisive, hesitant, or, succumbing to temptation, hastily crosses the border of two worlds and settles in the world of fiction.
Thus, individual psychology considers the starting point of escape into the world of fiction to be the individual’s erroneous opinion about the impossibility of overcoming the tasks set before him by life. And if at least once a person takes an erroneous position, this can have dire consequences for him. He is drawn deeper and deeper into the swamp of delusion and controversial actions.
The greater the lack of social feeling in a child, the more unproductive his form of “I”.
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