emotion essays

emotion essays Emotions and feelings are central to our life. They allow us to exist and achieve the fullness of our personality by motivating us towards that which is good. However, as a result of traumatic experiences, our emotional life can become disordered. This abnormal expression of emotion can only be understood and addressed by having an adequate understanding of how emotions work and develop within the person. This essay will seek to outline what emotions are, how they develop and how they relate to motivation and thought processes. A brief study of anxiety will seek to show how emotions can become disordered, and the ways in which emotional literacy provides a means of addressing this problem. While our whole life is built around emotion, many people do not understand what they are or how they develop. Every person has the ability to experience and express emotion. Since emotions are natural, the act of feeling emotion is morally neutral . Each person has some degree of control over what they feel and how they express and share their feelings . Emotional responses are both physiological and psychological. These responses influence perception, learning and performance. Emotions are instruments that aim at the possession of suitable objects, thus leading us to reach the perfection of our personality . In this sense, Arnold and Gasson define emotion as the felt tendency toward an object judged suitable, or away from an object judged unsuitable, reinforced by specific bodily changes according to the type of emotion . Perception must occur before an emotion can arise. The individual makes a judgement about the perceived object in relation to themselves after which the emotion if felt. This step between judgement and feeling the emotion is instantaneous, with no perceptible time interval. The emotion is then expressed through a pattern of physiological changes which lead the person to approac...