Identifying our emotions is an immensely important act for all of us. We can use different techniques to do so, including monitoring our physiological signs, listening to our own thoughts as and watching our actions as though we were a psychologist (i.e. cognitively and nonverbally). Once we have recognized our emotions, we can quantify them in intensity as either a facilitative emotion or debilitative emotion (i.e. makes life easier or causes problems in life). By looking at our emotions in this objective fashion, we can observe what we believe to be the cause of our emotion and decide if we are subscribing to a fallacy in some form. Emotions are easier to identify in some instances than others, especially depending on the techniques used. Here are two examples which demonstrate this principle. The first example is one in which I found it remarkable easy to identify my emotion. It was Thursday morning. I was running late for class, and I got bogged down in I-5 traffic. Right then I could hear myself worrying about what was going to happen to my grade if I was late to class, and I could see the disgust of being parked on the freeway less than a half mile from my exit, with traffic at a standstill and the speed limit being 60 miles per hour. I was drumming my fingers on the wheel, and tapping my feet on the floorboards. In this instance I used cognition to identify the emotion, as I recognized my thoughts on the subject, and I also used nonverbal signs, as watched myself with the finger and foot tapping.
The second example of identifying emotions is one in which it was much more difficult. It was the end of the day on Saturday, 8 PM, and I had been at the home show since 10 o’clock that morning. At 8 PM I wanted to go to some quiet place, just kick myself flat on my back and just shut off my brain, because I was just so shot. What emotion is that? It was tough for me to name it. Those which felt close were relief, elation, and freedom. I just felt ready to cheer, but wanted to melt into a puddle on the floor. Cognitively I found myself bouncing between these different emotions. I don’t think I had nonverbals here, but if I did, they would have included eye squinting, slack face, totally relaxed shoulders, slouch, and blank expression.
The width and depth of emotion I experience on a regular basis is pretty strong. According to the emotional circle, I’ve got them all covered except for the grief and anger pieces of the pie, which brings in a lot of width. That includes the disgust and apprehension I felt on I-5 in traffic, that includes the relief, joy and freedom after the home show, and that includes the surprise I felt when Prof Kosloski told me being late that Thursday morning didn’t hurt my grade at all! The intensity of these emotions varied a lot, which I feel is a good thing. On I-5, the disgust I felt was up at about a 3 on a 1-5 scale. The relief and freedom after the home show was also at a 3. When my aunt from Sweden called, with whom I hadn’t spoken in months, that registered as a 5 on the surprise and happiness scale! She’s just such a fun person, it was great to hear from here. An example of where I had a more mild emotion was Sunday morning, when I was to go to the home show after church, I realized I had forgotten my exhibitor pass at home. If felt like a fool, at about a 2 on the emotional scale. The majority of my emotions I feel like are very mild. It’s just that the ones I wrote about here are the ones which I could easiest put a finger on, which were a little stronger than usual. That being said, the emotions described herein I believe do represent a typical sample of my life.
Most of my emotions are facilitative, not debilitative, or help make life easier, not more difficult. Looking through my paper, I would classify relief, joy, surprise (in the case of the call from my aunt), and freedom as facilitative emotion. Of the emotion described in the paper here, only the apprehension and disgust were