Etymologically speaking, emotions “move” us, but where they move
us depends on our appraisals—thoughts guiding emotions. If you think that
I deliberately stepped on your foot, you might become angry. If you think
that I stepped on your foot because I lost my balance due to a small brain
seizure, you might feel pity.
Psychologists study how we appraise situations in order to better
understand human emotion, thought, and behavior. That effort has yielded
some interesting insights that can guide us in making healthful lifestyle
decisions. Let’s consider a couple of them.
People often experience multiple simultaneous emotions. When
you are nervous, instance, you are more likely to be irritable as well.
And when you feel hopeful, you usually are cheerful.
Eddie Tong and Lile Jia (2016) explored the overlap among emotions
in an attempt to determine why they co-occur. Apropos our present
discussion, they concluded that emotions occur together when a situation is
appraised in ways that support both. To return to our previous examples,
you may be anxious and irritable because you perceive a situation as
threatening and unfair. And you may be hopeful and cheerful because you
believe that something good will happen and you imagine its benefits. So,
appraisals explain why some emotions tend co-occur and why some do not, whether
those emotions are positive or negative.
Emotions often exert their most powerful effects in interpersonal
settings where one expression promotes contentment and/or goal attainment, and
another does not. In addition, our allies can facilitate our efforts
and our enemies can stifle them. Therefore, to get along and to reach our
goals sometimes we must control emotions and controlling them is effortful.
Is the effort worthwhile?
Having studied 115 Swiss employees who reported their social
encounters over one full week, Elena Wong and her colleagues (2016) answered in
the affirmative. They found that while emotional self-control exacted a
well-being price in short-term, the workers’ longer term well-being was
facilitated if self-control was rewarded by goal attainment. Here
the appraisal was not an appraisal of emotion, but an appraisal of desired
outcome.
Since the workers in Wong’s study were mostly in lower power
positions, it is reasonable to expect that their well-being was sensitive to
interpersonal pressures as well as to goal achievement. How about work
leaders? Conventional wisdom is that persons having objectively greater
power experience more positive and less negative emotions. However,
studies have yielded mixed results, and that inconsistency inspired the Bombari
group (2016) who structured experimental situations to induce “position power”
or “felt power.” As the names suggest, the former referred primarily to a
job title whereas the latter concerned the individual’s actual feeling of power
in their given situation, regardless of their title. After analyzing
their data, Bombari and his group discovered no significant relationship
between an individual’s position power and their good or bad
feelings. However, their felt power did correlate positively with
both positive and negative emotion such that, in general, those with greater
felt power experienced more good feelings and less bad feelings even if they lacked
position power.
Your health then is “moved” by your emotions and
thoughts. You continually appraise your feelings, ideas, and
situations. When you appraise feelings, ideas, or situations as
being similar, they tend to occur together, for you either in fact or in your
mind. And your behavior will be influenced by the “felt” similarity
rather than by the exclusively objective similarity. For instance, if you
feel that a particular person causes you to fail, the person and failure become
fused in your mind, reinforcing your felt similarity between
them. Should that person be a co-worker, you need to expend
additional energy to control your emotions in order to reach goals influenced
by that co-worker. Finally, whether at work or at home, your well-being
is affected by the amount of power you feel, rather than by some hierarchically
defined symbol of power. You therefore benefit when you appraise
situations in ways that provide you some measure of felt power.
Imagine receiving a cancer diagnosis. Almost everyone
feels weak initially. You need to find authentic strength in the
face of the illness. For instance, you correctly might feel that you
have the power to take your medications and other therapies, to maintain
healthful diet and exercise, and to associate with other optimistic cancer
patients for mutual
support.
References
Wong, E., Tschan, F.,& Semmer, N. (2016).
Effort in Emotion Work and Well-Being: The Role of Goal Attainment.
Emotion, July. No Pagination Specified. .http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000196
Tong, E. & Jia, L. (2016). Positive Emotion,
Appraisal, and the Role of Appraisal Overlap in Positive Emotion
Co-Occurrence. Emotion, July. No Pagination Specified.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000203
Bombari, D., Schmid M., & Bachmann, M. Felt Power
Explains the Link Between Position Power and Experienced Emotions.
Emotion, July. No Pagination Specified
.http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000207
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