Have you ever noticed that when you are happy, you feel excited and this motivates you to perform a particular task more actively? 

On the other hand, when you are sad, you feel frustrated. Even sometimes feeling of sadness prevents you from performing activities that you have once enjoyed most.

Interestingly, emotional experiences have a substantial influence on motivating action and therefore, related to several aspects of human life, from survival to social relationships and evolution. With or without self-awareness, humans often display their emotions in behaviour when aroused. 

Yes, it is widely accepted that all aspects of human behaviour have some form of emotional connection. In fact, emotions are considered as a key determinant of human behavior that gets revealed through facial expression and body movements. 

The power of emotions

Basically, emotions are some sort of feelings experienced by a person for a particular time period. Happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger are six basic emotions, which are universally experienced in all human cultures and strongly affect human behaviour. 

Happiness is a pleasant emotional state characterized by feeling of contentment, joy, excitement, satisfaction, and well-being. Achieving certain things in life such as scoring good marks, buying a home or car, having baby and getting well-paid jobs will result in happiness. 

Happiness makes you to smile, maintain relaxed posture and communicate in pleasant tone of voice. When you are happy, you always have a zest for life that makes you to indulge in creative thinking and explore new areas of life.

Also Check : The Secret To Happiness

Contrary to happiness, sadness is a transient emotional state characterized by feelings of disappointment, grief, hopelessness, disinterest, and dampened mood. 

When you are stressed out due to certain reason, you may experience sadness that gets reflected in the form of low mood, lethargy and lack of interest. 

Loss of job, financial crises, failure of plans, broken relationship and unexpected happenings usually evoke sadness in life. When you are unable to cope with sadness, you become least interested in daily activities of living considering them worthless. 

When you are sad, strained facial look hits towards a possibility of serious issues in your life. You might have a hard time to interact appropriately with others that result in social withdrawal. 

When the feeling of sadness stays for a longer period, you struggle to adapt well to everyday life that may result in depression and loneliness. 

With constant negative thoughts coming in mind, you find a world as a difficult place to survive that could result in self-harm tendencies.

When we talk about basic emotions, anger is one of the strong emotions. It is characterized by feelings of hostility, agitation, frustration, and antagonism towards others. Perhaps it is an emotional reaction to stress, failure or injustice. 

Anger is usually expressed as frowning or glaring, body language such as taking a strong stance or turning away from someone and increased tone of voice, screaming or yelling.

On most of the occasion, anger is associated with physiological responses such as sweating or turning red. 

In the time of emotional intensity, anger gets expressed in unhealthy ways resulting in aggressive behaviours including hitting, kicking, or throwing objects or violence.

Repeated aggression could increase a likelihood of unhealthy behaviours such as aggressive driving, alcohol consumption, and smoking.

For human, like anger fear is another strong emotion experienced in daily life.

When you experience the danger, you feel afraid and act accordingly. 

Isn’t it ?

This implies the emotion of fear to an immediate threat or danger in surrounding.

For example when you see snake across the road, your body’s fear mechanism initiates fight or flight response characterized by tense muscles, increase in heart rate and respiration. Such kind of response makes you more alert preparing your mind on decision of  either running from the danger or standing and fight. This response helps ensure that you are prepared to effectively deal with dangers in your environment.

Fear is usually expressed in the form of facial expressions such as widening the eyes and pulling back the chin, attempts to hide or fly from the threat. 

For some people, fear is uncomfortable and crippling. Past horrifying events can leave permanent bad memories that can create constant worry and insecurities. For others, fear is just an imagination of worst-case scenario due to uncertainty of future. In both cases, fear prevents you from taking right decisions related to life.

In this continuation, another emotion experienced in daily life is disgust.

This emotion of disgust is about all toxic things that are distasteful, immoral, or evil. 

Disgust comes in response to all toxic things including people, places, food etc. Disgust is sensed in a number of ways like turning away from the object of disgust, physical reactions such as vomiting or retching and facial expressions such as wrinkling the nose, rise of eyebrows and curling the upper lip.

And last but easily recognizable basic emotion is a surprise.

Surprise is a physiological startle response following something unexpected happenings. It arises when you encounter sudden and unexpected situation. 

Surprise is usually associated with startle expressions such as raised eyebrows, widening the eyes, and opening the mouth. Moving the head, bringing the hands up to the face and stepping backwards away from surprising object are common postural movements associated with surprise. 

When associated with excitement, surprise is expressed as verbal reactions such as yelling, screaming, or gasping.

This clearly shows that emotions affect human behaviour in ways beyond our imagination.

Thus, a proper balance of both positive and negative emotions helps to control your behaviour. For this reason, emotional regulation is immensely necessary to enrich our lives.

Also Check : Navigating A World Of Emotions

Disclaimer

Mediclin Brain Health’s content is for informational and educational purposes only. Our website is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.