Emotions have many important functions. However, let’s start by defining them – an emotion is a short-lived mental state that triggers a readiness to act, accompanied by changes in expression, behaviour and sensations in the body (Frijda).
Emotion versus mood
Emotion differs from mood mainly in duration. This is because mood is a longer-lasting mental state in which emotions are of lesser intensity. For example: when a threatening, barking dog is running towards us – there is a strong fear, which subsides when the threat stops. This is when we speak of an emotion.
A mood is a state in which the feeling is not as strong, but at the same time not as short-lived as the aforementioned fear. We will call a mood a prolonged moderate sadness, anxiety etc. Mood, unlike emotion, is not a reaction to one particular object or event.
What are the basic emotions?
Psychologist Paul Ekman identified six basic emotions in the ’70s. His research showed that these emotions are common across all human cultures.
The emotions he identified were happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise and anger.
He later expanded his list of basic emotions to include emotions such as pride, shame, embarrassment and excitement. As the psychologist Robert Plutchik later proved, emotions can combine to form feelings, for example, by mixing the basic emotions of joy and trust we get love.
Now that we know what emotions are, let us move on to analyse their function.
What do we actually have emotions for?
Informational function – emotions tell us what is important to us. They are a huge and important source of information. This is because emotions are most often the result of an evaluation of a particular event.
This evaluation can be both conscious and partly unconscious. A perceived emotion will be interpreted and read as positive, in a situation where the evaluated event is in line with the individual’s goals and interests, and negative in a situation where the person does not go along with the situation – it will be a kind of obstacle to the goals and interests.
Emotions will also provide information about what we want and what we don’t want, e.g. in social situations the emotions felt will be a signpost as to whether we want to develop a relationship or stay at a safe distance. Similarly, at work – certain activities trigger more positive emotions – this is important information for each of us about what makes us happy.
I use the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ here deliberately, but psychologists do not distinguish between emotions in this way. All emotions are fine as long as they perform their functions adaptively.
Action function – emotions lead to action. In other words – they motivate you to perform different actions. Let’s go back to the situation with the threatening dog described earlier. The strong fear that arises tells us “it’s time to run away!”. This is, of course, an extreme example.
In everyday life, emotions will lead us to take different actions – for example, those related to deepening a particular friendship, looking for a job that suits our preferences, looking for those stimuli that arouse the desired emotion, such as in the situation of choosing a hobby. We decide and take action based on the emotions we feel.
Communicative function – emotions are also expressed behaviourally: physiological reactions (blushing, pallor, so-called ‘goosebumps’, tears and many others), gestures, facial expressions or through the way we move. All this is important information – about the state our interlocutor is in, they are also a reaction to what we are saying at the moment.
In a word – emotions help us to communicate efficiently. Not only does clearly communicating in response to the question “how are you feeling?” say something about the emotional state. The pandemic and the need to communicate remotely has meant that by failing to read these reactions we have distanced ourselves from other people and communication has become verbal.
Anyone who has met online colleagues for even a moment has wondered – what kind of reactions does this actually elicit in interlocutors? This is the result of a lack of complete information coming from non-verbal communication.
Emotions have a number of other, equally important functions – they allow us to empathise with other people, for example. Emotions also define us as people – they tell us who we are, creating our individuality.
Myths about emotions
A popular myth about emotions is that we need to… hold them back. Of course – there are situations where showing emotions is not advisable, but in many situations we even suppress them. It is an important but difficult skill to stay in touch with one’s emotions. However, it guarantees a life in harmony with oneself.
Author: mgr. Anna Walter, Psychologist