How Important Emotions Are - Essay Example

? EMOTIONS Emotions Emotions are one of the most essential parts of one’s personality. They are at the centre of social psychology and are partly the reason due to which social psychology is so fascinating. While studying social psychology, I have come to realize that my emotions, affect my social world to a large extent. Not only have they affected me, but they have affected others around me as well. These emotions are mostly negative due to various reasons. It is very important for social psychology to study emotions as it can find out the factors causing these emotions and can thus help to predict their future occurrences. There are so many emotions that exist-positive emotions such as happiness, satisfaction, excitement, and negative emotions such as anger, sadness and grief. One cannot choose their emotions. According to me, emotions are the phenomena that both happen ‘in’ us as well as ‘to’ us. They are known to involve sensations or feelings which are ‘about’ things that are positive as well as negative. For example, “I am sad” is not complete- there has to be something which is causing the emotion. “I am sad because I got low grades in my examination” is much more complete, as it states the cause of the emotion (Rorty 1980). There is no certain place or time when one gets an emotion. According to what I have experienced, emotions can take place in both cultural and institutional contexts. Every culture has different ways of perceiving and expressing emotions. I perceive and express emotions a lot in my everyday life-if instances which I like occur, I am filled with and show positive emotions and if instances which I do not like occur, I am filled with and show negative emotions. There are times when emotions occur in institutional contexts as well. For instance, I have some problems studying effectively at my university because I am not familiar with the language (which is English) used there. Due to this, I feel tensed and helpless-both of which are negative emotions-while struggling to study. Moreover, I had never used a computer before. Thus, when I used it for the first time at my university, the experience invoked many negative emotions such as confusion and agitation (Emmerling et al 2008). My emotions have affected me on a personal level to a large extent. My emotions focus on my individual targets which have been either achieved or blocked. For instance, due to my broken English, I am unable to talk freely, especially when I am in front of a group. I become extremely nervous and my tongue gets ‘tied’ due to my nervousness. Furthermore, my hands start to shake a bit out of nervousness on being addressed. This has greatly lowered my confidence. I avoid speaking due to this and due to my fear of stumbling upon my words and thus getting embarrassed in front of everyone. These emotions further lead to other negative ones such as anger at the society and my circumstances for my weak English language skills. Not only have I experienced emotions subjectively, but I have experienced them objectively as well. My peers have always told me that I am a bit aggressive and get angry at the smallest of things. I believe that this is because of me feeling inferior to them and thus being jealous of their skills. They have observed my emotions largely from my facial expressions and my actions. My violent outbreaks have also cost me many friends. These kinds of emotions play a very negative role in my life as well in society. My anger and jealousy of my peers’ English language and computer skills tend to cloud my judgment of them. For instance, if any one of peers comes to me and offers to help, my negative emotions will make me think that my peer is making fun of me, even though he/she genuinely wants to help. Due to my negative emotions, I have also developed a habit of giving short and rude replies whenever I am addressed by others. I highly doubt that anyone would want to become friends with someone who is full of negative emotions. It does not matter what the cause of those negative emotions are. Thus, one can see how important emotions are. They are so powerful that they have the ability to change one’s personality. They even have the power to shape societies. Studying emotions is certainly not a piece of cake. Due to the existence of so many emotions, it is difficult to sort out their consistencies and the similarities between them. Moreover, there are cultural differences in emotions as well. This is where social psychology comes in; it makes matters easier by organizing the emotions. Social psychology is completely based on emotions. There might not be a single social psychology book that does not concern emotions in some form. Social psychology also studies their causes. By doing so, it attends to these occurrences in a mechanistic manner and tries to find out ways to predict such occurrences later in the future. Almost every action is connected to one or more than one emotions. For example, my violence is linked to anger in the same way as my silence is linked to nervousness. Social psychology weighs these as well as other aspects of emotion, such as its nature and the different ways in which it influences social phenomena such as social perception, social contagion and facial expressions (Parrott 2001). Emotions are phenomena which involve feelings that occur ‘to’ us as well as ‘in’ us. According to my experiences, emotions occur in cultural as well as institutional aspects. They invoke positive and negative feelings. However, I have mostly experienced negative emotions due to my weak English language and computer skills. Other than experiencing them subjectively, I have experienced these emotions objectively as well, based on feedback by my friends regarding my behavior. These negative emotions have had an adverse impact on my life and society-so much so that they have made me into an aggressive and unpleasant person. Due to these and many other reasons, I believe that it is very essential for social psychology to study about emotions. Bibliography Emmerling, Robert J, Vinod K. Shanwal, and Manas K. Mandal. Emotional Intelligence: Theoretical and Cultural Perspectives. New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2008.  Parrott, W G. Emotions in Social Psychology: Essential Readings. Philadelphia: Psychology Press, 2001. Print. Rorty, Ame?lie. Explaining Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Print. Read More