For those driven by logical reasoning, the study of emotional psychology allows researchers to dive into what makes humans react as they do to certain stimuli and how those reactions affect us both physically and mentally. How we interpret and respond to the world around us makes up who we are and contributes to our quality of life. That is why it so important to manage emotions in a healthy manner in children as their well being throughout their life is dependent upon this.
Emotions are often confused with feelings and moods, but the three terms are not interchangeable. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), emotion is defined as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements.” Emotions are how individuals deal with matters or situations they find personally significant.
Feelings arise from an emotional experience. A mood is described by the APA as “any short-lived emotional state, usually of low intensity.” Moods differ from emotions because they lack stimuli and have no clear starting point. For example, insults can trigger the emotion of anger while an angry mood may arise without apparent cause.
Emotion affects our whole demeanor and our health. Emotions and feelings help us decide the best course of action. It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good bad or indifferent. Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need.
Yes, emotions are created by our brain. It is the way our brain gives meaning to bodily sensations based on past experience. Your brain (locked in its dark, silent box we call the skull) tries to figure out what these bodily sensations mean based on both the information it receives from the outside world through your senses and based on past experience. So if the past experience of a similar situation is good, it will release positive reactions, if it is bad it will release negative patterns. Remember, emotions trigger a series of bodily changes (read hormonal releases) in fractions of seconds, even before you respond to them. Whilst emotions trigger behavioural and physical changes, the only best way for parents/ child caregivers to understand children emotions is through conversations.
Source: https://www.howitworksdaily.com/the-science-of-emotions/
The most ancient parts of the human brain developed as responses to various emotional triggers our ancestors, forefathers used. The most primary of them was based on the principle that we must survive. We evolved emotions as a means of communicative function and to help us navigate social interactions and our environment safely: they are designed to protect us.
Our fear responses were originally a survival tactic that warned us of potential dangers, such as our innate unease around spiders and snakes. Then there is the feeling of disgust, which warns of foods or other substances that may be dangerous. Our other emotions are responses to social interactions that keep us part of a group because we are fundamentally a social species, and throughout our evolution have relied on our tribe to help us survive by working together to find food and shelter.
There are several different systems in the brain that connect a stimulus with an emotional value. These systems are also highly connected with motivation, as our emotions often lead us to action.
The initial reflexive emotional response to something in our environment occurs very quickly and often eludes conscious control. These responses occur in an ancient part of our brain known as the limbic system.
Dr. Robert Levenson once defined emotions as “short-lived psychological-physiological phenomena that represent efficient modes of adaptation to changing environmental demands.” Emotion orchestrates a variety of bodily and neurological responses including sensations in the viscera (or “gut”), expressions in the face and body, and altered attention and thought.
We do ourselves a disservice when we think of human beings as exclusively logic- or knowledge-driven, and fail to pay attention to the role of the emotions. The two systems are enmeshed because that is the way our brain and bodies have been put together by evolution.
Download our Emotions toolkit to help your children learn all about emotions, including signals and strategies to deal with various emotions. Enrol your child for any one of our programs where we teach children how to acknowledge and deal with emotions, how to make positive choices, how our thoughts lead to everything that happens in our life and much more.
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