Emotion: Psychology and Emotion Essay

Submitted By ELAINEDAI
Words: 1608
Pages: 7

Name: YILING DAI (Elaine)

Title: Everyone has different emotions in specific situations, whether the good mood or the bad mood, it do affect the people’s acts and life. Evaluate to what extent this is true.

Class: E3

Tutor’s name: IAN GLENCROSS

Date: 06/02/2013 Word account: 854

Subtitle: Emotion and emotional effects & health
Emotions exert comprehensive influence on human beings. Emotion is generally be considered as a convoluted situation, it lead to the changes both physically and mentally which can impact the thoughts and behavior. As David G, Meyers mentioned in Emotion chapter of the book ‘Psychology’, “…physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience” are included in human emotion. Emotion is the language which represents the mental status of a person, and it is the human nature that experiencing development since the infant period. Also, there are external influence that lead to people acting differently. Furthermore, people’s emotional health is fairly important to their performance. So as a indispensable factor，the methods of being in healthy emotion will be discussed in the essay.

Main Body:
Development of emotions
At the first stage, the emotion just split into two parts pleasant and unpleasant. Referring to The Expression of the Emotions In Man and Animals, Charles Darwin suggested that emotions were maintained during period of time of human revolution. All the emotions can be expressed before two years old. Parrot (2001) declared that love, joy, surprise, anger, sadness and fear are basic emotions of humanity. While every single basic emotions is linked to a family of associated states (Friesen 1975, cited in Ekman 2008). Scherer (2005) states the components to process the model of emotion: Cognitive appraisal, helps people to analyze things they have met, and Bodily symptoms, the component for emotional experience in mentally. Action tendencies is the component that motivates direct response. Facial and vocal expression shows the reaction and intention for the actions. And the last one is feelings, a personal experience of emotional state.

In addition, emotional expressions has been controlled by the adults and become specific in several countries. For example, Chinese show surprise by stick out their tongue.

The major influences on emotion.
To begin with, it is the external stimulus which can be first, culture. Situational and degree of expression differences can lead to different performance on emotion. Also, the ethnicity can be a sector of influence as the gap the religion.
Second, it is social conventions. Compared with the direct expression of emotions in the United States, Japanese represent their emotion in an indirect way. Next is emotional contagion. It is defined as one becomes influenced by the emotions of others around them (Hatfield, E et al, 1993). In another word, people’s mood can impact other people around.

On the other hand. There are internal elements. They can be concluded as personality, biological sex and gender and fear of disclosure.

Emotions affect humans both mentally and physically.
In terms of mentally, Elizabeth D. Krause (2003) claimed that psychological problems like anxiety or depression may due to the emotional inhibition. Harvard Health Publications and the faculty of Harvard Medical School reported that “strains of life situation” may bring about the emotional and mental health issues. Nevertheless, emotions can be useful to some extents. Students are panic about the exams in school, it is the emotion that motivate them to work harder to overcome this. People feel guilty after they done something they do not supposed to do, and they may do their utmost to make up for that.

Furthermore, emotional suppression increases risk of physical problems such as, cancer, asthma, heart disease (DeAngelis, 1992). If negative emotions maintain in mind for a long time, it may cause imbalance in body energy…