Emotions make excellent servants, but tyrannical masters - John Seymour
Notices |
It's difficult to objectively characterize emotion in any other way, as self-report simply isn't reliable (for any number of reasons). That said, how would an emotion be out of control without affecting behavior? In both academic literature and in personal experience, when emotions become out of control they produce behavioral effects; ergo, controlling one's emotions is controlling the behavioral response, and vice versa. Even in practical speech this becomes clear, as people talk about controlling emotions in behavioral terms (e.g: "get a hold of yourself") Again, I never said doing so was easy, simply that it is doable. Furthermore, if you care to re-read my previous post, I said: Thereby arguing that yes, Principle 3 is flawed, and there is a better way to phrase the essence of what the author appears to be communicating. |
Perhaps one disconnect, here, is in the difference between 'controlling emotion' as presented in the first article (fundamentally choosing whether and which emotions to feel at any given time) and 'keeping emotions under control' (choosing not to allow emotions to negatively impact one's life when possible, despite whether or not one is feeling them). From the forbes article: "For example, when faced with immense grief, the human mind has the power to choose between self-pity/alcoholism or refocus attention on creating a positive future. Yet, we forego this choice and allow ourselves to go deeper into our misery." '(re)focusing attention on creating a positive future' does not in itself remove the emotion of 'immense grief', and might ultimately fail due to factors entirely outside of the individual's control. Humans have the capability to influence their own emotions, mitigating the negative and reveling in the positive in turn, but the article's message of 'just choose to be happy' is offensive, misguided, and wrong. |
Originally Posted by Tedronai
As for the abstract, the link is no longer working for me, so I'll have to go from memory, but to (re)define emotion based solely on tendencies to action, even if doing otherwise is difficult, robs the concept and the experience of most of it's value and meaning.Just because I tend not to knock people's teeth out (or take whatever other course of action one might associate with extreme anger) does not, in fact mean that I am not extremely angry. Of the several 'stages' of emotional control in that abstract, only ONE pertains to, as I phrased above, 'controlling [one's] emotions'. I believe it was phrased 'changing cognition' or something of the sort. |
According to a process model of emotion regulation, emotion may be regulated at five points in the emotion generative process: (a) selection of the situation, (b) modification of the situation, (c) deployment of attention, (d) change of cognitions, and (e) modulation of responses. |