General characteristics of emotions. Main types of emotions

HUMAN EMOTIONS AND FEATURES OF THEIR MANIFESTATIONS

In modern psychology, emotional phenomena are understood as a person’s subjective experiences of his relationship to objects, phenomena, events, and other people. The word “emotion” itself comes from the Latin “emovere”, which means to excite, excite, shock. Emotions are closely related to needs, since, as a rule, when needs are satisfied, a person experiences positive emotions and, conversely, when it is impossible to get what he wants, negative emotions.

For many years, scientists contrasted emotions and processes associated with the knowledge of the surrounding reality, considering emotions to be a phenomenon inherited from our distant animal ancestors. Today, it is generally accepted that the structure of emotions includes not only a subjective component, i.e. a reflection of a person’s state, but also a cognitive component - a reflection of objects and phenomena that have a certain significance for the needs, goals and motives of the person experiencing emotions. This implies a double conditionality of emotions - on the one hand, by the needs of a person, which determine his attitude towards the object of emotions, and on the other, by his ability to reflect and understand certain properties of this object.

Each emotion is unique in its sources, experiences, external manifestations and methods of regulation. From our experience we know how rich the repertoire of human emotions is. It includes a whole palette of different emotional phenomena. It can be said that man is the most emotional of living beings; he has highly differentiated means of external expression of emotions and a wide variety of internal experiences.

There are many classifications of emotions. The most obvious division of emotions into positive and negative. Using the criterion of mobilizing the body's resources, sthenic and asthenic emotions are distinguished (from the Greek “stenos” - strength). Thenic emotions increase activity, causing a surge of energy and uplift, while asthenic emotions act in the opposite way. According to needs, lower emotions associated with the satisfaction of organic needs, the so-called general sensations (hunger, thirst, etc.), are distinguished from higher emotions (feelings), socially conditioned, associated with social relations.

Based on the strength and duration of manifestations, several types of emotions are distinguished: affects, passions, emotions themselves, moods, feelings and stress.

Affect is the most powerful emotional reaction that completely captures the human psyche. Usually occurs in extreme conditions when a person cannot cope with the situation. The distinctive features of affect are situational, generalized, short duration and high intensity. The whole body is mobilized, movements are impulsive. Affect is practically uncontrollable and is not subject to volitional control.

Passion is a strong, persistent, long-lasting feeling that captures a person and owns him. In strength it is close to affect, and in duration - to feelings.

Emotions in the narrow sense are situational in nature, expressing an evaluative attitude towards developing or possible situations. Emotions themselves can be weakly manifested in external behavior; if a person skillfully hides his emotions, then it is generally difficult to guess what he is experiencing.

Feelings are the most stable emotional states. They are substantive in nature. It is always a feeling for something, for someone. They are sometimes called “higher” emotions because they arise when higher-order needs are satisfied.

Moods are states that color our feelings, our overall emotional state, over a significant period of time. Unlike emotions and feelings, mood is not objective, but personal; it is not situational, but extended over time.

In addition to changes occurring in the nervous, endocrine and other systems of the body, emotions are expressed in the expressive behavior of a person. Currently, the main experimental study of emotions consists of studying the expressive component of emotions: facial expressions, pantomimes, intonation, etc.

Emotions are manifested in so-called expressive movements (facial expressions - expressive movements of the face; pantomime - expressive movements of the whole body and “vocal facial expressions” - expression of emotions in the intonation and timbre of the voice).

A number of emotional states are clearly differentiated both in terms of external objective signs and in terms of the quality of subjective experiences. General characteristics of emotions formed the basis for the creation of a number of scales of emotional states.

However, the topic of human emotions remains one of the most mysterious areas of psychology. The difficulty of scientific research of emotions is associated with the high level of subjectivity of their manifestations. We can say that emotions are the most psychological of all identified processes.

There is no consensus among scientists dealing with the problem of emotions regarding the question of their role in the implementation of life processes. Even in the times of ancient philosophy, opinions were expressed both about the disturbing, disorganizing influence of emotions on behavior, and about the fact that they represent the most important stimulating and mobilizing effect.

Today it is customary to distinguish several main functions of emotions: adaptive, signaling, evaluative, regulatory and communicative. Emotions reflect the significance and assessment of various situations by a person, so the same stimuli can cause very different reactions in different people. It is in emotional manifestations that the depth of a person’s inner life is expressed. Personality is largely formed under the influence of lived experiences. Emotional reactions, in turn, are determined by the individual characteristics of a person’s emotional sphere.

Without emotional manifestations it is difficult to imagine any interaction between people, therefore one of the most important is the communicative function of emotions. By expressing his emotions, a person shows his attitude to reality and, above all, to other people. Mimic and pantomimic expressive movements allow a person to convey his experiences to other people, inform them about his attitude to phenomena, objects, etc. Facial expressions, gestures, postures, expressive sighs, changes in intonation are the “language” of human feelings, a means of communicating not so much thoughts , so many emotions.

Psychological studies have shown that a person receives most of the information in the process of communication using non-verbal means of communication. With the help of the verbal (verbal) component, a person transmits a small percentage of information, but the main burden in conveying meaning lies on the so-called “extra-linguistic” means of communication.

For a long time, expressive movements were considered only as an external accompaniment of experience, where the movement itself acted as something accompanying emotional experiences.

One of the earliest approaches to understanding the role of expressive movements was proposed by W. James and K. Lange, who formulated the so-called peripheral theory of emotions. They believed that emotions are caused only by peripheral changes and, in fact, are reduced to them. In their opinion, the expression of emotions is a purely reflexive reaction that causes changes in the body, and only their subsequent awareness constitutes the emotion itself. They reduced emotions exclusively to peripheral reactions and, in connection with this, turned conscious processes of a central nature into a secondary act that follows the emotion, but is not included in it and does not determine it.

However, expressive movements are a component of emotions, the external form of their existence or manifestation. Expressive movement and emotional experience form a unity, interpenetrating each other. Therefore, expressive movements and actions create the image of the character, revealing his inner content in external action.

Charles Darwin made an important step in understanding the nature of the expression of emotions by applying biological and social approaches to their study. Charles Darwin's research, systematized in his work “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,” led him to the conviction that many manifestations of emotions in gestures and facial expressions are the result of the evolutionary process. He discovered that the muscle movements with which a person expresses his emotions are very similar and originated from similar motor acts of our ancestors - monkeys.

Modern researchers agree with Charles Darwin that facial expressions arose in the evolutionary process and perform an important adaptive function.

Almost from the first minutes of life, the baby shows emotional reactions. The presence of identical emotional expressions in blind and sighted children confirmed the fact of a genetic component in emotional manifestations.

Studies of the behavior of people belonging to different cultures have found that in the sphere of expression of emotions there are both universal types of reactions and specific to individual cultures.