Physical and emotional health: is there a connection?

Essence, components and functions of emotional states

Definition 1
Emotional states are reactions of the human psyche to various life circumstances that determine the direction of the individual’s activity.

The emotional state influences a person’s decision-making, his response to the behavior and actions of other people, well-being and productivity. If a person is not able to control his own experiences, then they begin to “control” him, that is, influence his actions, actions and behavior, which ultimately can lead to not the most pleasant consequences.

The emotional state is a rather complex mental process, which consists of three interrelated elements:

• The physiological component is an external reflection of what is currently happening in the body during the manifestation of a particular emotional state. For example, increased pulse and heartbeat, increased breathing rate, etc.
• The psychological component characterizes the emotions directly experienced by a person. For example, sadness, anger, joy, etc.
• Behavioral component - manifests itself in the form of gestures, facial expressions, various actions (activity, lethargy, crying, aggression, etc.).

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The physiological and psychological components represent the internal formation of a person’s emotional state, while the behavioral component characterizes its external manifestation.

Main characteristics of emotional states:

1. Polarity. Emotions can be positively or negatively colored. In addition, there is a mixture of emotions. For example, you can simultaneously love a person and feel anger or resentment towards him.
2. Energy charged. Based on tension, sthenic experiences and asthenic experiences are distinguished. Stenic experiences are experiences that cause an increase in activity in a person (delight, rage, inspiration, etc.). Asthenic experiences are experiences that reduce a person’s activity (fear, sadness, melancholy, etc.).
3. Integrity. Emotions have an impact on the entire human body, suggesting interaction between all psychophysical aspects of the personality, all this is manifested in movements, behavior, way of thinking, etc.
4. Inalienability. A person’s emotional state is closely related to all the processes occurring in his psyche. Emotions accompany not only the work of the senses, but also influence intellectual activity.

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Functions of emotional states:

• Subjective function - the emotional state influences the formation of a person’s own point of view, and also allows one to establish contacts and connections with the outside world.
• Communicative function - allows you to determine the mood of another person, which allows you to correctly establish contact with him, and in some cases, even manipulate behavior.
• Behavioral function - emotional state determines the direction of human behavior.

The influence of emotions on disease

Unfortunately, modern people have every chance of developing a psychosomatic illness from a young age. The fact is that emotions are proven! - affect the body.

Positive emotions improve well-being and reduce the time of illness.

Good feelings and psychosomatics

Which person and in which situation is less likely to get sick? Good and high-quality emotions are usually experienced when:

1. Happy, strong relationships or friendships (husband-wife, mother-child, human-pet).
2. Expecting something good (vacation, moving to a new apartment).
3. A stable life that completely suits a person.

Usually a person who has everything wonderful in life rarely gets sick. At the same time, he can have a lot of bad habits and still visit the doctor no more than once a year.

A person with a cold, having heard the long-awaited good news, is cured much faster. And communication with your favorite puppy can relieve your headache!

Important! The factors listed are just a small part. Each individual has his own understanding of happiness.

Bad emotions and psychosomatics

Negative feelings and thoughts have a negative effect on the body as a whole. A person who is constantly under stress risks getting:

• exhaustion of the body (loss of strength);
• hormonal imbalance;
• weakening of the immune system.

Relationships proven by doctors clearly demonstrate the harm from worries and anxieties. With constant fear, a stomach ulcer may develop. Uncontrolled anger provokes heart disease. Everyday stress is a direct road to poor digestion.

Classifications of the main types of emotional states

There are many different approaches to systematization and typology of types of emotional states.

The simplest and most common division is the following:

• Positive emotional states bring a person satisfaction, create a feeling of happiness and contentment from what is happening.
• Negative emotional states bring a person states of dissatisfaction and bad mood.
• Neutral emotional states do not have a direct impact on a person’s state, his behavior and actions.

Another popular classification of emotional states is Dodonov’s classification, in which states are divided into types depending on the functions performed:

1. Communicative - arise in a person in the process of communication.
2. Altruistic - are interconnected with the desire to bring benefit and joy to other people.
3. Practical - appear if a person successfully completes his plans and gets the expected result.
4. Gloric - associated with a person’s need to assert himself.
5. Traveling - associated with a craving for danger and risk.
6. Romantic - associated with the desire for the unusual, non-standard, new.
7. Aesthetic - arise in a person when interacting with the sphere of art.
8. Gnostic - due to the desire to learn new things.
9. Akizivnye - based on gathering and accumulation.
10. Hedonic – caused by experiencing pleasure from the activity being carried out or the result of one’s work.

Topic 2.4 Psychology of emotions, feelings and states

The student must:

-have an idea of ​​emotions, feelings, states;

-know the role and significance of states of emotional tension in effective professional activity;

-be able to use techniques for self-regulation of emotional states

Feelings and emotions. Mood. The state of emotional tension in professional activity. Stress. Mental self-regulation: ways to overcome negative mental states in professional activities. Will.

KEYWORDS:

The labor activity of catering workers engaged in service activities involves a high degree of mobilization of nervous processes (excitation and inhibition). External and internal irritations acting on the senses cause neuropsychic tension.

In the process of neuropsychic excitation, the nervous elements of the body come into an active state. There is an increasing mobilization of human information and energy potential. This manifests itself in increased attention and all analytical and synthetic activity of the brain, as well as in additional mobilization of excitation in the brain. The level of excitation of sensory (sensitive) and motor reflexes is also high at this moment.

Through the efforts of the brain it is not always possible to suppress (slow down) a huge number of nerve impulses, and then they manifest themselves in the form of emotions and feelings.

The simplest form of the emotional manifestations of the psyche under consideration are emotions (literally translated from Latin emoveo - I shake, I worry).

Emotion is a form of mental reflection of the surrounding world in the form of short-term experiences of a person, expressing his subjective attitude to what is happening. Emotions have a clearly expressed situational nature, i.e. express a person’s personal evaluative attitude towards emerging or possible situations. Moreover, the emergence of emotions is significantly influenced by the unusualness and novelty of these situations. Therefore, any new situation that is personally significant for the subject often acquires for him, to one degree or another, an emotionally charged tone.

Emotions are always associated with the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of some important needs for a person. Sometimes emotional reactions are of a rather vague, “diffuse” nature, mixing, partially changing, as a result of which new emotional states arise.

As a result of this, a person can experience a whole range of emotions, caused not only by the satisfaction of physiologically important needs for him, but also by various circumstances related to the conditions of his life. For example, emotions such as anger, disgust and contempt form a kind of emotional complex of hostility, which can develop into a feeling of hostility that underlies aggressive illegal behavior.

Long-term experience of emotions (emotional complexes), feelings often turns into quite persistent, complex, sometimes internally contradictory emotional states of the psyche (mental states), which are considered as holistic, dynamic, relatively stable personal formations, which largely determine the uniqueness of a person’s mental life at a certain stage his life path.

Emotional states form a mood that colors mental processes for a long time, determining the direction of the subject and his attitude towards ongoing phenomena, events, and people.

Some emotional states become leading, dominant in the personality structure and, because of this, can seriously influence the formation of character.

Emotions have a serious impact on the behavior and cognitive activity of people. It has long been known that emotions, like other motivational states, influence perception. A happy subject tends to perceive the world through rose-colored glasses. It is common for a person who is suffering or sad to interpret the comments of others as critical. A frightened subject tends to see only the frightening object (the effect of “narrowed” vision). An angry person only has “angry thoughts.”

The dynamics of emotional states have a phase character. Excitation and activation are replaced by inhibition, discharge, the degree of which depends on the nature of the influencing stimuli and on the characteristics of the individual.

In the event of a situation of an uncertain, contradictory nature, the subject may experience dual (ambivalent) emotional states, feelings that disrupt his usual activities, causing concern, increased anxiety. Such a mental state can be experienced, for example, by an employee when he experiences remorse, a feeling of guilt for what he has done and, at the same time, fear of exposure and the hope of avoiding responsibility due to the lack of proof of his involvement in the offense committed.

The simplest form of manifestation of emotions in the work of, for example, a waiter can be, for example, anxiety when the serving of dishes is delayed due to the fault of the cook working on the serving line. In this case, a mismatch occurs in the activity of the nervous system due to the fact that the intended goal - timely serving of dishes - was not achieved. The brain immediately notes the discrepancy between the prepared excitation and feedback, i.e., the results of the planned action and the already accomplished act (the fact of being late). As a result a negative emotion , and the irritant is an excess of nervous impulses. If, in our example, the serving of dishes is delayed or longer, the nerve impulses circulating in the brain increase, and their excess reaches significant proportions. Excessive nerve impulses move to the nerve centers of a particular emotion and manifest themselves in the form of activity of muscles and internal organs. But in a figurative comparison, emotions play a role similar in meaning to the action of a steam boiler valve that releases steam to eliminate excess pressure.

Emotions not only regulate neuropsychic tension. They help to rationally use all the mobilizing information and energy potential of the brain. The final result of this mobilization is self-assessment of one’s behavior.

Without emotions, human creative activity is impossible. Through emotions, a person rejects some actions and decisions and focuses his efforts on others that ensure success at work. In the subcortical regions of the brain there are nerves with certain emotional reactions: pleasure, fear, anger, aggression, etc. Moreover, each human emotion has a certain facial expression. Its content in the form of sensory behavior is expressed, for example, in the form of vascular spasms (sadness) or their dilation (joy), muscle relaxation (fear), an increase in blood sugar (anger), etc.

Thanks to emotions, we constantly evaluate our own behavior, the success or incompleteness of our activities. Depending on this, our neuropsychic state is positive or negative. Emotions determine the direction of the search, the choice of ways to achieve the goal and successfully solve the problem.

Emotional manifestations in the labor process are rich and varied. If you like the profession, a person works with pleasure, inspiration and ease, without stress. The positive emotions that appear in him only help in his work. This happens because the body has special nerves - sympathetic, which, when irritated, restore spent reserves of efficiency. The excitement that arises from positive emotions, acting through the sympathetic nervous system, activates all nervous processes.

Negative emotions among catering workers most often arise in cases where they are placed under time pressure or are in an unfavorable psychological microclimate. Poor sanitary and hygienic conditions are also a negative factor. The unfavorable effect of these factors is that there is an additional waste of energy resources due to the impact of emotional arousal on internal organs. Therefore, when a person displays negative emotions, fatigue develops much faster, performance decreases, and the need for rest increases.

Emotional states are experiences that take possession of a person: mood, affect, passion, state of emotional tension, frustration.

Mood is a weakly expressed emotional state of a person that affects his work activity. Mood can be transient (short-term) or persistent (long-term). Mood, depending on any reasons, is expressed in the form of a positive or negative experience, joy or sadness. Positive experiences stimulate activity, negative ones, on the contrary, reduce activity.

In the work of a catering company employee, mood plays a huge role. When working with people, there are often preconditions for emotional breakdowns. In particular, communication between a waiter and a visitor is the most difficult part of his work from a psychological point of view. Visitors, as you know, can have different characters - hot-tempered, unbalanced, with inflated claims, aggressiveness. Emotional and psychological “injections” on their part can be far from harmless. Reacting to them, the waiter will constantly be in a bad mood. The art of behavior in this case is to develop immunity to unpleasant situations and show the visitor an example of calm. If you are in a bad mood, you need to learn not to show it and, of course, not to take it out on your visitors. It is best in this case to switch to pleasant thoughts or, if possible, to physical labor, in which the passive, inhibitory state of the nervous system changes to an active, active one.

Affect is a rapidly occurring short-term emotional outburst (intense anger, despair, horror).

A state of affect, for example, in a waiter may, for example, arise as a result of a conflict with visitors or overwork. As a rule, affects occur with a loss of consciousness. At this moment, the waiter's sequence of operations is disrupted, the pace of their execution slows down and his actions occur as if in slow motion. The scope of attention is narrowed, and difficulties arise in its distribution and switching. His behavior loses its plasticity and is characterized by stubbornness and unwillingness to understand the visitor’s point of view.

A state of passion most often occurs in unbalanced people. They are contraindicated to work in the service sector, since they cannot always stop the affect at the very beginning, as soon as they feel a fit of anger.

Stress is an emotional state caused by unusual situations (under great mental or physical overload, under risk conditions, etc.). The doctrine of stress was developed by the Canadian scientist Hans Selye.

Like affect, stress is an extremely undesirable state for workers, since it negatively affects the quality of their work. For example, a hall worker (waiter) may experience stress in cases where the head waiter entrusts him with a responsible task that is difficult to complete due to insufficient qualifications. In relationships with visitors, a stressful situation can be caused by the tension of the conflict. Severe stress leads to behavioral disruptions. At the same time, perception, memory, attention, thinking, and coordination of movements deteriorate. Therefore, the waiter, like the bartender and bartender, should not focus his attention on annoying little things.

The ability to switch from negative emotions to positive ones is of great importance in working with people. Liberation, even for a short time, from negative emotions, as it were, charges a person with new strength, giving him the opportunity to successfully resist the adverse effects on his nervous system.

At the same time, weak, barely expressed stress can intensify human activity. A strong-willed person becomes more focused and organized under stress.

Frustration is an emotional state of a person that arises in the presence of real or imaginary obstacles on the way to a goal, which he perceives as very difficult or insurmountable.

It is often said that frustration is resentment against oneself. A person loses faith in his abilities, “everything falls out of his hands.” Frustration often occurs in people who are unable to learn from their own experience and who cannot admit that others are right. On the contrary, they tend to look for the people around them to blame for the failure that befell them. Having found such a “guilty person,” they consider him the cause of their apathy and bring down their irritability and aggressiveness on him.

Human emotions, depending on their influence on the tone of mental experiences, can be divided into sthenic (tonic) and asthenic (depressing).

Stenic emotions excite the central nervous system, activating the work of all physiological systems of the body. Thanks to them, a person’s speed of mental reactions increases. At this moment, for example, the manager is able to make faster and more accurate decisions. So, when preparing for an official banquet, he gives clear explanations and clarifications: how to decorate the hall, at what time to serve food and drinks, depending on whether the banquet participants will make toasts and speeches; how many guests will one waiter serve; how waiters should be dressed.

A person with sthenic emotions feels a surge of mental and physical performance, vitality, and the desire to overcome difficulties and obstacles.

Asthenic emotions adversely affect all functions of the body. They are characterized by partial inhibition of nerve cells in the brain. Therefore, there is a decrease in mental and physical performance.

Asthenic emotions are closely related to emotional tension. The latter occurs in difficult working conditions. For example, when there is a large influx of visitors, a bartender does not have time to prepare cocktails as quickly as visitors would like. Under these conditions, the emotional tension that appears in him can aggravate the situation. In particular, the pace of labor operations slows down and the quality of their implementation deteriorates. However, in some cases the pace of work may become faster, but the employee will immediately feel fussiness in his movements and a large number of rash actions. All this significantly worsens his functional abilities, reduces the qualitative and quantitative level of professional activity.

From the point of view of labor physiology, emotional tension appears as a result of significant consumption of energy resources that exceeds the limit of human performance. As a result, an inhibition process is formed, which tends to reduce the load on performance at the neurophysiological level, i.e., reduce the influx of nerve impulses to the nerve centers that function during the working activity of the human body. As a result, it now takes longer to complete a work operation. At the same time, the performer is forced to make short pauses in the work process.

A side effect resulting from the process of emotional tension is an increased sensitivity to extraneous stimuli that interfere with the perception of useful stimuli. For example, a bartender, when pressed for time, even acutely perceives the noise of a refrigeration unit, although under optimal conditions he does not notice this interference due to the phenomenon of adaptation.

Another side effect is premature fatigue. Suppressing the need for rest, the employee does not notice how his neuro-emotional tension increases, which is expressed not only in a feeling of fatigue, but also in irritability, which causes various negative emotions and can become a cause of conflict.

Due to the extreme need for rest (this can be observed with a total working day lasting about 12 hours), the recovery system is excited. For this reason, the brain is forced to turn on a stronger means of forcing rest: with the help of inhibition, it seeks to turn off the generator of nerve impulses itself. As a result of this inhibitory process in the brain, a person falls asleep. To force oneself to continue working under these conditions, a very intense volitional effort is required from the employee.

To relieve emotional tension in service work at public catering establishments, and, consequently, to prevent neurotic breakdowns and mobilize the forces of psychology, it is recommended to conduct psychoregulatory training. They are intended for absolutely healthy people who, under conditions of hard work, want to improve their well-being.

The first stage of training is calming (strengthening the nervous system, relieving excitement, restoring strength through self-control, rest), the second is mobilizing (reasonable organization and raising potential forces).

This type of training is called autogenic, that is, it occurs in the body itself. Exercises are carried out daily, their duration is 10 - 15 minutes. The simplest of them is sleep-rest. If during the lunch break the employees of the restaurant sales floor rest for at least half an hour, their fatigue will be significantly reduced.

A more capacious and more socially and intellectually rich manifestation of the psyche compared to emotions are feelings , which, like emotions, are one of the forms of mental reflection of reality, expressing a person’s attitude to the world around him. However, if emotions are most often situationally conditioned, then feelings, in contrast to them, are to a greater extent determined by social, moral, socio-historical conditions that influence the formation of personality, and are characterized by greater stability, depth, and duration of experiences. That is why we are not talking about emotions, but about feelings of patriotism, love, compassion, moral duty, etc.

Feelings serve only to regulate a person’s relationships with other people, with society.

Intellectual feelings are a person’s emotional attitude to the knowledge of natural phenomena and social life. The manifestation of these feelings can be curiosity, doubt, surprise.

Aesthetic feelings are a person’s emotional attitude to beauty in nature, life, society, and art. These feelings are necessary for understanding the beautiful and the ugly in art, nature, and activity.

Moral feelings are a manifestation of an emotional attitude towards the behavior of other people and towards one’s own. These feelings reflect the requirements of public morality (for example, hostility towards truants and marriage makers, remorse for one’s wrongdoing).

Practical feelings are those that arise in a person during his work activity. They depend on the nature of the work and the right choice of profession.

Overcoming negative emotional states often requires volitional efforts.

Mechanisms of volitional behavior. At the level of everyday psychology, each of us does not find it difficult to determine phenomena related to volitional phenomena. We include all actions that we perform not out of inner conviction, but out of necessity. We call volitional actions related to overcoming difficulties encountered along the path of life. Finally, we designate a whole series of human qualities as volitional (focus, perseverance, endurance, patience, etc.).

Psychologists consider will among the stimulants of behavior, often identifying it with the desires of the subject. The internal kinship of the will with the needs, motives, and goals of a person is emphasized. S.L. Rubinstein believed that the rudiments of will are already contained in needs as the initial motivations of a person to action. Volitional regulation is connected with the motivation of human behavior, but this connection is not a given, but a given, and it requires its own explanation.

To understand the psychology of will and its mechanisms, it is fundamentally important to highlight the stage at which the direct initiation of activity occurs and its maintenance during implementation - the process of forming a situational impulse. The impulse is the initiating beginning of a specific activity unfolding at a given moment and in a given situation. The emergence of motivation is associated with the consistent formation of individual moments of motivation: attitudinal readiness for activity, its direction, choice of means and methods of action, creation of confidence in success and correctness of action.

The main mechanism of volitional behavior, according to V.A. Ivannikov, is “a change or creation of an additional meaning of an action, when an action is performed not only for the sake of the motive for which the action was taken for implementation, but also for the sake of a person’s personal values ​​or other motives involved in a given action.” Volitional regulation in its developed forms is the connection of a directly unimportant, but obligatory action to the semantic sphere of the individual, the transformation of a given action into a personal one, the connection of the required behavior with moral motives and values.

Will is a person’s ability to consciously act in accordance with a predetermined goal, overcoming difficulties along the way. With volitional effort, a person consciously carries out or inhibits certain actions.

Overcoming difficulties is the main sign of volitional action. Difficulties can be external (physical, social) and internal (psychological, moral). External difficulties, as a rule, are associated with the responsibility of the work, the pace, the social environment and the complexity of communication. Internal difficulties are most often individual difficulties, such as an employee’s uncertainty about his business qualities, doubts about the correctness of his chosen profession.

For catering workers, will is a necessary personality quality. With its help, they manage their behavior and actions, control them, and show activity and organization when serving visitors. It is difficult for a person who is weak-willed, easily susceptible to the unfavorable influences of others or, conversely, intolerant of the opinions of other people, to cope with work such as service. It has been established that will often serves as the basis for performing highly qualified work. Of course, for cultural service in a restaurant, a well-developed will alone is not enough. It is also necessary that it be aimed at cultural interaction with the visitor.

The psychological literature describes examples of volitional behavior, which contain a description of ways to voluntarily change the impulse through changing the meaning of the action. Changing the meaning of an action can be achieved through:

- reassessment of the significance of the motive;

- changing the role and position of a person in the community;

- anticipation and emotional experience of the results of one’s actions;

- turning to symbols and rituals to strengthen actions;

- connection of a given action with other, higher motives (duty, honor, responsibility).

High professionalism presupposes that an employee has the following strong-willed qualities: endurance (self-control), independence, determination, perseverance, discipline.

One of the forms of manifestation of will is endurance, i.e. the ability to distribute one’s own forces to complete a task or control one’s emotions in a difficult situation.

Independence is the ability to set a goal and achieve it, guided by one’s own beliefs, knowledge and ideas. Decisiveness is the ability to make well-thought-out decisions in a timely manner and without unnecessary hesitation.

Perseverance is a strong-willed personality quality, the essence of which is the ability to direct one’s energy for a long time and purposefully to achieve some goal. Perseverance should not be confused with stubbornness, i.e. a person’s reluctance to give up his erroneous decision or view of some phenomena or objects. Stubbornness, sometimes senseless, makes it difficult to get out of a difficult situation. A strong-willed personality is also characterized by such positive qualities as discipline and diligence.

Thus, overcoming difficulties is the main sign of volitional actions.

Questions for self-control:

1. List the types of feelings

2. How do emotional states affect the performance of a catering worker?

3. How to relieve emotional stress?

4. What behavior is called volitional?

5. What personality traits are strong-willed?