7: Emotions
- Identify the dimensions of emotions and summarize their impact on interpersonal communication.
- Analyze emotional intelligence and its importance within communication competence.
- Apply communicative skills to understanding, expressing, and responding to emotions.
- Implement key strategies to manage debilitative emotions and how to foster facilitative emotions (managing emotions).
- Construct ways that help to cope with challenging emotions during difficult times.
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- 7.1: Introduction to Emotions
- From our internal communication to external communication with others, emotions are used to create, interpret and inform our understanding of relationships more deeply. We will start by examining what emotions are, and move into understanding how we utilize emotions in our everyday communication experiences. We will end the chapter by discussing ways in which we can positively impact our emotional perspectives in order to manage them effectively.
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- 7.2: What Are Emotions?
- Emotions are not synonymous with feelings. Emotions are more than the feelings we experience, although feelings are a big part of emotions. Feelings can be fleeting and while emotions are not fleeting and tend to be accompanied with physiological and nonverbal changes. Emotions can change over time and context, and are connected to physiological dimensions, cultural dimensions, cognitive interpretations, personality, and expression.
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- 7.3: Influences on Emotional Expression
- Emotions are an important aspect in how we build our social interactions with people around us. Our interactions with others help to shape our own emotions as well as aspects of our personalities and moods. But what is the difference between these terms? We’ve defined emotion earlier in this chapter, but how do we know the distinction between what is an emotion, what is a mood, and what is part of our personality?
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- 7.4: Emotions in Relationships
- Emotions are deeply rooted within our relationships. In some relationships certain language is faux pas, whereas in another relationship the language is acceptable or even wanted. In this section we discuss the role of emotional intelligence, emotional awareness, emotional contagion, how we manage our emotions, and guidelines to communicating effectively in our relationships.
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- 7.5: Managing Emotions
- Choosing how we react to our emotions instead of allowing our emotions to overcome us is an important aspect of being a competent communicator. Being able to know what emotions are facilitative, or helpful, versus what emotions are debilitative, or harmful, allows us to be able to understand that our emotional reactions do not just impact ourselves and our internal dialogue but also the way in which we interact and engage with others around us.
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- 7.6: Guidelines for Communicating Emotions Effectively
- We’ve spent a majority of this chapter looking at the various ways in which we are effected and affected by our emotions. Emotions are powerful parts of our identities and there are many ways in which our emotions positively and negatively impact our life experiences. Being able to distinguish our emotions from one another, anticipating when debilitative emotions may arise, and recognizing the power we hold in order to change our emotional reaction based on our perceptions is the next step in im
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- 7.7: Coping with Challenging Emotions
- Through this chapter we have explored the variety of ways our emotions can manifest themselves, ways to understand where our emotions stem from both internally as well as within our social environments. One thing has been made clear throughout each section of this chapter, and that is that emotions are challenging at times, and being able to control our emotions is an essential part of our communication and interpersonal relationships. When we are in tune with ourselves and have emotional awaren
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