Speaking the language of emotions …

As I’ve been working with neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s definition of emotions as action-requiring neurological programs, I created a flowchart to help you understand the difference between feelings and emotions. This is my simplified flowchart:

An emotionally evocative stimulus occurs → The stimulus evokes a specific emotion → You utilize your ability to feel that emotion → You name that emotion → You act on the information the emotion provides

As we all know, this flowchart can break down at any point in its progression. First, a person can misinterpret the emotionally evocative stimulus. Second, the evoked emotion may be unstable (for instance, some people move to rage, depression, or anxiety whenever any problem, large or small, occurs). Third, a person may not be tuned into his or her intrapersonal capacity to feel emotions — and may not know which emotion has been evoked. Fourth, a person may misidentify the emotion or ignore it completely. And fifth, a person may act on the emotion without thinking.

The work in The Language of Emotions exists to help you become more intelligent in each step of this process, from stimulus to emotion to action. But because there can be such trouble in the emotional realm, I’ve inserted a crucial step between the naming and the acting, which is cognitively questioning the emotion in a way that supports it. With this step, you become able to behave in truly rational ways that make you more intelligent about and with your emotions. When you question your emotions, you don’t fight with them. You turn toward them, and you work with them:

An emotionally evocative stimulus occurs → The stimulus evokes a specific emotion → You utilize your ability to feel that emotion → You name that emotion → You question that emotion → You act on the information that emotion provides, or you decide not to act because the stimulus is invalid

This might look like an involved process, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very quick — and it helps you learn to work with your emotions in focused and rational ways.

Becoming a stimulus for other people

In social relationships, we often work to evoke specific emotions in other people. For instance, in the area of happiness, I’d like you to think about the amount of time and energy you spend trying to make other people feel happy. If you think about this, you may be struck by the absurdity of the situation, because if you try to make someone else feel happy, you almost have to stop being a person in order to become a happiness-evoking stimulus.

Your needs and your private life sort of have to be set aside as you focus on the needs and emotional states of other people. This is, of course, a part of belonging to a social species. If you don’t pay any attention to the needs of others, you will become a socially unsuccessful outcast.

However, you can benefit from looking at your need to make other people feel specific emotions, because while we can assume that being surrounded by upbeat and contented people is more comfortable than being surrounded by angry, anxious, or depressed people, I’d like to question that assumption. That assumption treats the emotions of other people as something we need to manage or control. In fact, it treats the emotions of other people as our personal liability; it treats the emotions of other people as a part of our work.

Understanding emotion work

In her excellent 1983 book, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, sociologist Arlie Hochschild described what she termed “emotion work,” or the way that our emotions and emotional states are a part of what we offer (and what is expected from us) in the workplace. For instance, flight attendants must not only understand the intricacies of their physical work on airplanes, but they must also display an open and welcoming demeanor to passengers. Even when passengers are bad-tempered or clingy, part of the work of a flight attendant is to continually offer a calm, helpful, accepting presentation of self that is intended to evoke happiness and contentment in others (unless Alec Baldwin is on board; then all bets are off).

This concept of the presentation of self is important in sociology, because it identifies humans as skilled behavioral performers in our various social worlds. Especially at work, we all learn to adopt a type of behavioral performance that is quite different from the performances we give at home, with our family, or with our friends. In each different social world, we learn to behave differently: we speak, dress, interact, gesture, and emote differently depending upon the demands of each social world we inhabit.

Hochshild’s concept of emotion work really helps us look at the behavioral rules that are expected in the workplace (but rarely stated outright) – at how we must manage our own emotions and intentionally evoke or soothe the emotions of others in order to get our jobs done.

For instance, if airline passengers are rude, a good flight attendant won’t generally snap at them or ignore their requests – as he might if his friends or family treated him rudely.  In fact, his normal human reactions would be frowned upon by the airline; therefore, part of his job description (though it may not be written down in black and white) is to deal with rudeness and bad behavior in unusual or even counter-productive (to him) ways. When a passenger does something that normally evokes frustration, anxiety, or anger, a good flight attendant will not display those normal human emotions. Instead, he may ignore his own emotional state and actually work to evoke calm and happiness in the offending passenger (some frequent flyers understand these unspoken emotion-work rules and behave inexcusably on flights because they know they can usually get away with it).

This is emotion work. It’s a part of our social contract with each other, and though it’s not given as much importance as other areas of a job description, emotion work is possibly the most important job skill you possess.

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