Emotional reactions can feel very different to us, based on how long they last, how intense they are, and how they affect our bodies.
Emotional Phases
Goleman describes 4 different phases of emotional response: impulses, moods, temperaments, and on the extreme end, chronic disorders. We can distinguish between these phases primarily based on how long they last.
Emotional impulses are strong and immediate, but only last a few seconds. These are the knee-jerk reactions that happen before our conscious mind understands what’s going on. (Shortform note: Think of “crimes of passion”--most of them were probably committed in these few, brief seconds where the emotional mind is in complete control.)
Moods are muted forms of emotions and last for much longer than the immediate emotional impulse. You’ve probably never been in a full, terrifying rage for a whole day -- but you might have been grumpy all day, where normal things make you angry that much faster. That’s a mood.
Then, there’s temperaments. Goleman suggests that temperaments are a product of nature, a predisposition from birth based on brain activity patterns, and that people generally fall into one of four temperaments: timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy.
- Timid people have amygdalas that are more responsive to even low-level stress. They avoid new or unfamiliar situations and dislike uncertainty.
- Bold people have a higher threshold for arousal, and can withstand more stress and uncertainty. They don’t scare easily, have no trouble meeting people, and seek out new things.
- Upbeat people have more activity in their left frontal lobes than their right. These people enjoy meeting others and seeing what life brings, and rally quicker after setbacks.
- Melancholic people have more activity in their right frontal lobes. They’re more frequently in bad moods and generally take a negative view of life. Because they have a hard time avoiding anxiety and depression, they are more easily defeated by difficulty.
- (Shortform note: Goleman touches on this very briefly, and does not address some basic questions about them, such as whether they’re genetic or can be influenced by early interactions, or whether people can be combinations of the four.)
Finally, chronic disorders occur when someone is trapped in a negative temperament or mood and most likely needs medication or therapy to help balance their emotions.
Physiological Symptoms
Different emotions cause different reactions in the body, usually in preparation for whatever the emotion might make us do:
- When we’re angry: blood flows to our hands so we can grab a weapon easier or hit someone; our heart rate increases in preparation for a fight; adrenaline courses through our body to pump us up.
- When we’re afraid: blood goes away from our face (thus the “white as a sheet” cliché) to our legs and arms so we can run or fight; our bodies freeze up to see if hiding will work, or to be able to hear better without the sound of our own movement; hormones flood our system that put us on red alert.
- When we’re happy: increased activity in our brain center inhibits negative feelings and increases our energy; our bodies relax.
- In love: we experience a parasympathetic arousal -- that is, a general state of calm and contentment, the opposite of fight or flight, that makes us want to stay where we are and cooperate with our partners.
- When we’re surprised, our eyebrows fly up, opening our eyes wider to take in more visual information.
- Disgust elicits the same response in people around the world: the curling of the upper lip and the wrinkling of the nose might have been to close our nostrils to whatever bad smell we encountered, or might have been preparation to spit out whatever bad food we were eating.
- Sadness causes a significant drop in our energy, slows our metabolism, and creates an aversion to pleasant things -- essentially, our body forces us to mourn and take time to adjust to whatever loss we’ve experienced.