12-03-2025
EMOTIONS
Dr. Danie Kingsley J
Associate Professor
SBST
• American Psychological Association (APA), emotion is defined
as “a complex reaction pattern, involving experiential,
behavioral and physiological elements.”
• Emotions are how individuals deal with matters or situations
they find personally significant
• Emotions also influence cognitive processes like perception,
attention, learning, memory, reasoning, and problem solving
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• Emotions arise from activations of specialized neuronal
populations in several parts of the cerebral cortex, notably the
anterior cingulate, insula, ventromedial prefrontal,
• And subcortical structures, such as the amygdala, ventral
striatum, putamen, caudate nucleus, and ventral tegmental area.
• Feelings are conscious, emotional experiences of these activations
that contribute to neuronal networks mediating thoughts,
language, and behavior,
• Thus enhancing the ability to predict, learn, and reappraise
stimuli and situations in the environment based on previous
experiences.
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Limbic system
• Controls emotions and behaviors that help us survive,
like feeding, reproduction, and fight-or-flight responses
• Also helps form and store emotional memories
Amygdala
• Processes emotional responses, including fear, anxiety,
and aggression
• Controls instantaneous emotional responses
Hippocampus
• Plays a key role in consolidating memories, especially those
linked to intense emotions
• Sends memories to be stored in areas of the cerebrum
Hypothalamus
• Regulates body temperature, synchronizes sleep patterns,
controls hunger and thirst
• Also plays a role in some aspects of memory and emotion
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5 Basic Emotions
The building blocks of emotions start with the
following:
• Enjoyment.
• Sadness.
• Disgust.
• Fear.
• Anger.
Enjoyment
• Enjoyment is an emotion or feeling that many of us try to achieve in
different ways throughout our lives. When we feel enjoyment, we’re
relaxed and tend to smile and laugh.
• Enjoyment typically means we’re engaging in a behavior or activity
that gives us satisfaction. “The dictionary defines enjoyment as ‘the
state or process of taking pleasure in something,’”
• Enjoyment can be expressed in several ways such as a smile, a hug,
dancing, playing, jumping up and down for joy, verbalized with
shouts of joy or sitting in peace watching others enjoy themselves
and being happy about that
• What one person finds enjoyable, another person may not.
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Sadness
• If you’re sad, you may also feel the need to cry and withdraw
from others. You may be described as quiet and reserved.
• If your sadness is persistent or severe, it can turn into
depression.
• “We experience sadness differently for varied reasons. What
makes one person sad, may not make another person sad,”
• “Sadness too is expressed in a multitude of ways to include a
frown, tears, a solum look, desire to be alone, desire to be in
silence with someone or it could look like nothing at all.”
Disgust
• If you’re in an unwelcomed or unpleasant situation, you may
feel disgust. Disgust tends to happen because of something
you dislike
• In most cases, disgust is used to protect yourself from those
situations or things you want to avoid.
• But you need to be careful that disgust doesn’t become your
go-to reaction in situations that aren’t considered bad for you.
• “It can be expressed by a sound or look of disapproval.”
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Fear
• Fear emotion can range from mild to severe based on what and how you perceive a
threat.
• Fear is essential to our survival, kick-starting our sympathetic nervous system,
which is also known as our fight or flight response.
• When we experience fear, our bodies become tense, we may start to sweat, and we
can feel our heart rate increase. But we also become more alert as our body
prepares to run or react.
• “Fear is our body’s way of telling us something is wrong — not only is something
wrong, but I want to get out of here to avoid this thing,”
• “It can be expressed in many ways to include physical manifestations such as heart
palpitations, shaking hands, sweating, hypervigilance, crying or fleeing the
situation.”
Anger
• You can typically tell when someone is angry. You can spot aggressive
behavior like frowning or glaring at you and even yelling. Someone’s face
can even turn red, and they may kick, hit, punch or throw objects.
• And while anger is generally seen as a negative emotion, much like fear,
it’s part of our survival kit, playing a part in our fight-or-flight response
when we encounter a perceived threat.
• It can be very volatile and expressed by yelling, screaming, cussing,
throwing things, hitting, slapping and punching.
• It can be a look. I often say there is nothing wrong with anger, it’s what
you do with it that matters.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/emotions
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When we suppress our feelings
Increased stress
• Emotional suppression triggers the body’s stress response, releasing
cortisol and keeping the nervous system in a heightened state.
• This ongoing tension can lead to exhaustion, irritability, relational
challenges, and difficulty unwinding.
Emotional numbness
• Over time, avoiding uncomfortable emotions can dull your ability to
experience more positive ones like joy and connection.
• In other words, by blocking out sadness, anger, or fear, your client may
unintentionally cut themselves off from joy, love, and connection.
Health challenges
• The mind-body connection is powerful, and suppressed emotions often
contribute to physical symptoms like headaches, digestive issues, or high blood
pressure.
• In the long term, this strain may compromise immune system functioning and
overall health.
Strained relationships
• Suppression often leads to resentment or passive-aggressive behavior, creating
distance in relationships.
• Unspoken feelings can erode trust and make honest communication feel
increasingly difficult.
• Learning to acknowledge and express emotions gently is key to preventing
these negative outcomes.
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How can we express our feelings?
• Music
• Art
• Theatre and role play
• Writing
• Visual story telling
Psychological approaches to emotions
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a well-established psychological
therapy. It is practised by thousands of therapists worldwide and there is
extensive research evidence demonstrating that is an effective form of
treatment for a huge variety of problems.
• The ‘CBT way’ of understanding emotions says that what we feel is a result of
what we think and how we act. It suggests that if our goal is to manage how
we are feeling then we will need to make changes in our thinking and
behavior.
• CBT has a repertoire of techniques for exploring and changing the ways we
think and act.
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Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT)
• ACT is a more recent branch within the CBT ‘family’ of therapies, and it takes a
different stance towards emotion.
• ACT’s position is that problems occur when our emotions, or our attempts to
control them, get in the way of us living a life in accordance with our values. A
‘valued life’ is one that we find personally meaningful, but our struggles with
emotions often mean that we ‘drift off course’.
• ACT puts a different emphasis on what is important (living a meaningful life
rather than regulating how I feel). The focus of work in ACT is in “facilitating
individuals to more towards a more valued and personally fulfilling life, in a
context in which previously obstructive unpleasant emotions no longer serve as
obstructions”.
• ACT therapists often use metaphors that invite people to take control of the
direction of their lives, like ‘driving your own bus’ or ‘sailing your own ship’.
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