Chapter 8

Emotion in Interpersonal Communication

1. What is an Emotion?
a. Emotion: is the bodys multidimensional response to any event that enhances or inhibits a
persons goals.
b. Emotion is Different From Mood
i. Mood: is a feeling that has no specific identifiable cause.
1. Moods are more persistent, often lasting for days or weeks at a time.
ii. Emotion is a response to a specific event.
1. If you can identify the reason you feel good or bad, then youre probably
experiencing an emotion rather than a mood.
2. Emotions are relatively short-lived.
2. Joyful/Affectionate Emotions: Happiness, Love, Passion, and Liking
a. Happiness: state of contentment, joy, pleasure, and cheer.
i. One of the most easily and universally recognized emotions.
b. Love and Passion
i. Love: the emotion of caring, feeling attached to, and feeling deeply committed to
someone.
ii. Passion: A secondary emotion consisting of joy and surprise, plus experiences of
excitement and attraction for another.
1. Passion tends to fade as people get to know each other better.
c. Liking: a positive overall evaluation of another person.
d. The Health Benefits of Positive Emotion
i. The buffering effect means that when we are in a positive emotional state, were less
susceptible to events that would otherwise cause us stress.
ii. The recovery effect means that that when youre already in a stressful situation,
experiencing positive emotion will help you recover from it faster than you
otherwise would.
3. Hostile Emotions: Anger, Contempt, Disgust, Jealousy, and Envy
a. Anger: is an emotional response to perceiving that you have been wronged in some way.
i. Self-directed anger can be frustrating and can cause us to punish ourselves or put
ourselves down. Self-anger can also be useful, however, if it motivates us to change
our behaviors for the better.
b. Contempt: leads you to feel that youre better than someone else.
i. It is one of the most harmful emotions for personal relationships
ii. People express contempt by insulting or mocking other, putting others down, and
belittling or making fun of others.
c. Disgust: is the feeling of revulsion you experience when confronted with something you
find offensive or repellent.
i. Many researchers believe that disgust developed as an instinctive reaction to
prevent us from consuming food that is rancid or unclean
d. Jealousy: occurs when people feel that a third party threatens the existence or the quality of
an important relationship.
i. The experience of jealousy mixes three emotions: fear, anger, and sadness.
ii. We tend not to react with jealousy when unimportant relationships are threatened.
e. Envy: occurs when we want another person has.
i. When feel envious only when the object of our comparison is highly relevant to us.
ii. Envy isnt always negative. It can be a good motivator.
4. Sad/Anxious Emotions: Sadness, Depression, Grief, Fear, and Social Anxiety
a. Sadness and Depression
i. Sadness: means feeling unhappy, sorrowful, and discouraged, is most often the
result of some form of loss.
1. Two of the most common causes of sadness are the loss of a person and the
termination of a relationship.
ii. Depression: a medically diagnosed physical illness that can linger for months or
even years and is associated with symptoms such as excessive fatigue, insomnia,
significant changes in weigh, feelings of worthlessness, and recurring thoughts of
suicide or death.
b. Grief: the emotional process of dealing with profound loss.
i. Five Steps (not every grieving person experiences all five steps or goes through
them in the same order):
1. Denial: pretending the loss didnt occur and everything is find.
2. Anger: the grieving person is furious with whoever inflicted the loss, even if
that person has passed away.
3. Bargaining: means offering deals with a higher power to restore what was
lost.
4. Depression: entails feeling withdrawn or numb.
5. Acceptance: occurs when the anger, sadness, and mourning have tapered off
and the person accepts the reality of the loss.
c. Fear: the mind and bodys reaction perceived danger.
i. Fear causes immediate changes in our body that are largely controlled by a cluster
of neurons in the brain called the amygdala.
1. Heart rate rises, breathing gets faster, our pupils dilate, and our stress
hormones rise.
ii. The purpose of fear is to keep us safe from harm.
d. Social Anxiety: the fear of not making a good impression on others.
i. The behavioral tendency associated with social anxiety is to hide or avoid the
situation.
ii. Social Anxiety Disorder: a chronic mental condition that interferes with daily life.

The Nature of Emotion
1. Emotions Are Multidimensional
a. Emotions Are Physiological
i. When you experience emotions you body reacts in pattered, predictable ways.
ii. The main reason emotions such as fear, joy, sadness, and jealousy feel so distinct
from one another is that they cause different physical changes in the body.
1. Each emotion causes responses that help the body first to deal with that
specific emotion and then to restore itself to a natural, balanced stated.
b. Emotions Are Cognitive
i. Different emotions can arouse some the of the same physical sensations.
1. You notice how youre feeling physically, and your mind uses the available
information to identify the emotion you must be feeling.
2. A classic 1974 study showed that the arousal produced by fear ban be
mistakenly attributed to sexual attraction, and example of the fact the people
put cognitive labels on their arousal.
c. Emotions Are Behavioral
i. Action Tendencies: biologically based motives toward specific behavioral responses
to emotions.
1. Ex: the action tendency associated with fear is self-protection
2. Action tendencies relate to the specific behavioral patter that an emotion
motives us to engage in, but we dont necessarily always follow that pattern.
d. Emotions Are Social and Cultural
i. The emotions we feel in a given situation are shaped, in may ways, by our societys
beliefs about the situation.
1. Ex: people raised as Hindus would feel similar disgust at the thought of
eating hamburger.
2. Emotions Vary in Valence and Intensity
a. Emotions Vary in Valence
i. Valence: the positivity or negativity of an emotion.
1. We can classify most emotions as either positively or negatively balanced,
but not all.
a. An exceptions is the emotion of surprise, which is generally
considered to have a neural valence.
b. Emotions Vary in Intensity
i. When emotional experiences become overly intense, they can be debilitating
(impair our ability to function).
1. Extreme emotional intensity rarely lasts for long, so if you have someone
who can help you through the emotional experience, youll soon find that you
are no longer debilitated.
3. Emotions Come in Primary and Secondary Forms
a. Primary Emotions: distinct emotional experiences not consisting of combinations of other
emotions.
i. People experience and express them in fundamentally the same way across cultures.
1. Research has also found that the primary emotions have fundamentally the
same causes everywhere. This research suggests that primary emotions are
not strongly influenced by culture.
ii. Ekman has proposed six emotions are primary: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise,
and disgust.
b. Secondary Emotions: emotions composed of combinations of primary emotions.
i. Ex: jealousy (anger, fear, and sadness), remorse (sadness and disgust), contempt
(disgust and anger), and awe (surprise and fear)
4. Sometimes Emotions Are Meta-Emotions
a. Meta-Emotion: an emotion about an emotion
i. Ex: experiencing joy because of the controlled fear induced by a scary movie.
ii. Include how we feel about other peoples emotions as well as our own.
iii. Important because the help us understand ad reflect on the emotions that others or
we are experiencing or not experiencing.
1. Ex: not feeling guilt when you think you should

Influences of Emotional Experience and Expression
1. Culture
a. Even though people around the world experience the same range of emotions, cultural
practices shape the expression of some emotions.
i. Ex: collectivistic cultures such as India and Japan discourage people from expressing
negative emotions towards member of their own culture, but they often condone
negative emotions directed at people form other cultures. This pattern is reversed
for individualistic cultures.
b. Geography
i. Research found that people form southern parts of countries are more emotionally
expressive than those from northern regions.
1. Montesquieu explained that warm weather causes the skin to relax, allowing
nerve ending to become exposed to sensations., which makes people more
attentive to what the are feeling and therefore more likely to express it.
ii. Within the United States, people from the South touch each other more frequently
than do people from the North.
c. Co-Cultures
i. Some co-cultures encourage people to examine their emotions directly and express
them freely.
1. Ex: artistic co-cultures (theater, sculptors, etc.)
ii. Other co-cultures discourage people from dealing openly with their emotions.
1. Ex: military personnel returning from active combat avoid seeking treatment
for PTSD because they perceive that the military co-culture stigmatizes such
treatment.

2. Display Rules: unwritten codes that govern the ways people manage and express their emotions.
a. Intensification: exaggerating your emotions to appear as though you are experience it more
intensely than you are.
b. De-Intensification: downplaying an emotion to appear as though you are experiencing is
less intensely than you are.
c. Simulation: acting as though youre feeling an emotion that you actually arent
experiencing.
d. Inhibition: acting as though youre indifferent or emotionless when youre actually
experiencing an emotion.
e. Masking: expressing one emotion when you are actually experiencing a completely
different one.
3. Technology
a. Technology helps us compensate for the limitations of channel-lean forms of
communication on the expression of emotion.
b. We experience and share emotions about technology itself.
c. Increases opportunities for sharing emotions and discussing emotionally challenging
experiences.
i. Ex: Facebook, Support Groups, Chat Rooms
4. Emotional Contagion
a. Emotional Contagion: the tendency to mimic emotional experience and the expressions of
others.
i. Some research has suggested that the emotional contagion effect is more powerful
for negative emotions than for positive ones, but other studies have found that
positive and negative emotions are equally contagious.
b. Emotional Contagion in Cyberspace
i. Although computer-mediated communication blocks access to some of the
nonverbal cues that we use to communicate emotion, studies such as this one
suggest that we are able to overcome those limitations well enough to be
susceptible to emotional contagion in cyberspace.
5. Sex and Gender
a. Sexual Difference in Jealousy?
i. In personal relationships, men are more likely than women to experience sexual
jealousy (stemming from a partners sexual interaction with another person)
whereas women are more likely than men to experience emotional jealousy
(stemming from a partners emotional connection with another person).
ii. Some research has found that men are more likely than women to express their
jealousy through behaviors such as confronting the rival, becoming sexually
aggressive, or promiscuous with other, wooing the partner back with gifts, or
breaking of the relationship.
1. Women tend to express their jealousy through behaviors such as improving
their own physical appearance, seeking support from other, demanding
increased commitment from the partner, and trying to make the partner
jealous himself.
b. Gender Roles and Emotional Expression
i. There is evidence that gender roles affect not only the expression of emotion but the
experience of it as well.
1. Masculine women and feminine men reported more positive emotions.
ii. Research indicates that individuals who classify themselves as androgynous are
more emotionally expressive than are individuals who classify themselves as only
highly masculine.
1. Androgynous people have also been shown to be more expressive than
people who are highly feminine when it comes to certain emotions such as
happiness, sadness, and disgust.
6. Personality
a. Research suggests that three particular aspects of personality affect the emotion
experience: agreeableness, extroversion, and neuroticism.
i. Agreeableness relates to how pleasant, accommodating, and cooperative you are.
1. Highly agreeable people are happier and are better at managing both stress
and emotions in general. They are more likely to use constructive styles for
managing conflict and more willing to lose an agreement to preserve a
relationship with someone.
ii. Extroversion refers to how sociable and outgoing you are.
1. Extroverted people enjoy social interaction and are often talkative, assertive,
and enthusiastic. Tend to focus on positive aspects of other people or
situations.
iii. Neuroticism is the tendency to think negative thoughts about one-self.
1. People who are highly neurotic tend to see the worst in situations and to
focus much of their attention on negative events. They also manage their
emotions less successfully.
7. Emotional Intelligence
a. Emotional Intelligence: refers to a persons ability to perceive and accurately express
emotions, to use emotion to facilitate thought, to understand emotions, and to manage
emotions for emotional growth.
i. Women score higher than men on measures of emotional intelligence.
ii. People with high emotional intelligence are aware of their own emotions as well as
the emotions of others and pay attention to their emotions when making decisions
about how to act.
b. One condition that inhibits emotional intelligence is alexithymia, a personality trait
characterized by a relative inability to understand, process, and describe emotions.


Sharpening Your Emotional Communication Skills
1. Identifying Emotions
a. People who can accurately identify which emotion theyre feeling are best equipped to
manage emotions in productive ways.
b. Listen To Your Body
c. Pay Attention To Your Thoughts
d. Take Stock of the Situation
2. Reappraising Negative Emotions
a. Emotional Reappraisal: involves changing the way you think about the situation that gave
rise to the negative emotion so that the effect of the emotion is reduced.
3. Accepting Responsibility for Emotions
4. Separating Emotions From Actions