Reaction Paper - Assignment Example

Emotional Reactions We often try to take control over our emotions for different reasons and we do it almost on daily basis. We can manipulate peopleby showing our real feelings more, or we can make attempts to hide our frank emotions in order not to reveal ourselves to others. There are a lot of situations where I applied both ways of emotion demonstration but the following two are the most demonstrative.Usually, when I show more emotions than I really feel I realize that I’m doing it in order to provoke someone’s certain reaction, which literally means that I use this approach to manipulate people in some way.

This looks more like some game where demonstration of emotion is supposed to help you to get what you want from the particular situation. The most popular way to do it is to make a scandal. Once my parents refused to buy me a new fancy laptop, which was really expensive though. I realized that it was quite too much for my family’s expenses for that period, but I wanted the laptop so badly that I decided to get it whatsoever. I started crying and yelling at them, blaming them for not loving me, I even broke something in the house.

Though, during the hysteric scene I was absolutely calm inside, observing their reaction. I definitely didn’t feel all the complexity of the feelings like anger, despair, and sadness presented in my hysteric. I could probably be partially mad at them for making me do it because I didn’t like scandals, but in general the scene was a true hypocrisy of mine. Eventually, they gave up and I got what I wanted. The situations when we hide our emotional reactions are the most common because people often try to protect themselves from outside world and to reveal not too much of personal feelings to others.

Once I had a better mark than everyone in my class and teacher praised me, saying that I was the best in front of the entire class. I was very proud of myself and felt a step ahead my classmates. I saw them being envy about this and they asked me how was it, being the best. I told them that I didn’t care about the marks and tried to look as much indifferent as possible, but in fact I was very excited about the regard. That day when I was talking to my friends about how dissatisfied they were about their marks I tried hard to pretend like my mark was nothing and I even said I had been overestimated unfairly (which obviously wasn’t true at all, because I felt that my mark was fair).

In many of the conversations I was trying to suppress my smile concerning my triumph and probably it was quite evident. In most situations the attempts to inhibit our emotional reactions is a kind of falsehood we use in order not to hurt people, or vice versa we hide our emotions to show our indifference or over-demonstrate them in order to manipulate others. Even though emotions are difficult to be controlled, still sometimes we can use them in order either to get certain reaction from others or to avoid it.

Still I believe that frank emotions can’t be controlled fully and it is quite obviously when we hide them. Though when we over-express our emotions like in the first situation it can also sometimes look too histrionically.