The most general emotional state that colors all human behavior for a long time is called mood. It is very diverse and can be joyful or sad, cheerful or depressed, cheerful or depressed, calm or irritated, etc. Mood is an emotional reaction not to the direct consequences of certain events, but to their significance for a person's life in the context of his general life plans, interests and expectations.

Affect

S. L. Rubinshtein noted the peculiarities of mood in that it is not objective, but personal, and in that the most powerful emotional reaction is affect.

Affect(from Latin affectuctus - “mental excitement”) - a strong and relatively short-term emotional state associated with a sharp change in important life circumstances for the subject and accompanied by pronounced motor manifestations and a change in the functions of internal organs.

Affect completely captures the human psyche. This entails a narrowing, and sometimes even a shutdown of consciousness, changes in thinking and, as a result, inappropriate behavior. For example, with intense anger, many people lose the ability to constructively resolve conflicts. Their anger turns into aggression. A person screams, blushes, swings his arms, can hit the enemy.

The affect arises sharply, suddenly in the form of a flash, a rush. It is very difficult to manage and cope with this condition. Any feeling can be experienced in an affective form.

Affects have a negative impact on human activity, sharply reducing the level of its organization. In an affect, a person, as it were, loses his head, his actions are unreasonable, performed without regard to the situation. If objects that are not related to the cause of the affect fall into the sphere of a person’s actions, he can throw the thing that has come across in a rage, push a chair, slam on the ceiling. Losing power over himself, a person surrenders entirely to experience.

It would be wrong to think that affect is completely uncontrollable. Despite the apparent suddenness, affect has certain stages of development. And if at the final stages, when a person completely loses control over himself, it is almost impossible to stop, then at the beginning any normal person can do it. It certainly takes a lot of willpower. Here the most important thing is to delay the onset of affect, to “extinguish” the affective outburst, to restrain oneself, not to lose power over one’s behavior.

Stress

• Main article: Stress

Another vast area of ​​human states is united by the concept of stress.

Under stress(from the English stress - “pressure”, “stress”) understand the emotional state that occurs in response to all sorts of extreme influences.

Not a single person manages to live and work without experiencing stress. Everyone experiences severe life losses, failures, trials, conflicts, stress when performing hard or responsible work from time to time. Some people deal with stress more easily than others; are stress-resistant.

An emotional state close to stress is the syndrome “ emotional burnout". This condition occurs in a person if, in a situation of mental or physical stress, he experiences negative emotions for a long time. At the same time, he can neither change the situation nor cope with negative emotions. Emotional burnout is manifested in a decrease in the general emotional background, indifference, avoidance of responsibility, negativism or cynicism towards other people, loss of interest in professional success, limiting one's capabilities. As a rule, the causes of emotional burnout are the monotony and monotony of work, lack of career growth, professional mismatch, age-related changes and socio-psychological maladjustment. Internal conditions for the occurrence of emotional burnout can be character accentuations of a certain type, high anxiety, aggressiveness, conformity, and an inadequate level of claims. Emotional burnout hinders professional and personal growth and, like stress, leads to psychosomatic disorders.

frustration

Close in its manifestations to stress is the emotional state of frustration.

frustration(from Latin frustration - “deceit”, “disorder”, “destruction of plans”) - a person’s condition caused by objectively insurmountable (or subjectively perceived so) difficulties that arise on the way to achieving the goal.

Frustration is accompanied by a whole range of negative emotions that can destroy consciousness and activity. In a state of frustration, a person can show anger, depression, external and internal aggression.

For example, when performing any activity, a person fails, which causes negative emotions in him - grief, dissatisfaction with himself. If in such a situation the surrounding people support, help correct mistakes, the experienced emotions will remain only an episode in a person’s life. If failures are repeated, and significant people are reproached, shamed, called incapable or lazy, this person usually develops an emotional state of frustration.

The level of frustration depends on the strength and intensity of the influencing factor, the state of the person and the forms of response he has developed to life's difficulties. Especially often the source of frustration is a negative social assessment that affects significant relationships of the individual. The stability (tolerance) of a person to frustrating factors depends on the degree of his emotional excitability, type of temperament, experience of interaction with such factors.

Passion is a special form of emotional experience. In terms of intensity of emotional excitement, passion approaches affect, and in terms of duration and stability, it resembles mood. What is the nature of passion? Passion is a strong, persistent, all-encompassing feeling that determines the direction of a person’s thoughts and actions. The reasons for the emergence of passion are varied - they can be determined by conscious beliefs, they can come from bodily desires or have a pathological origin. In any case, passion is related to our needs and other personality traits. Passion, as a rule, is selective and subjective. For example, a passion for music, for collecting, for knowledge, etc.

Passion captures all the thoughts of a person, in which all the circumstances associated with the object of passion revolve, which represents and ponders the ways to achieve the need. What is not connected with the object of passion seems to be secondary, not important. For example, some scientists who are passionately working on a discovery do not attach importance to their appearance, often forgetting about sleep and food.

The most important characteristic of passion is its connection with the will. Since passion is one of the significant motivations for activity, because it has great power. In reality, the assessment of the significance of passion is twofold. Public opinion plays an important role in the assessment. For example, a passion for money, for hoarding is condemned by some people as greed, money-grubbing, at the same time, within the framework of another social group, it can be considered as frugality, thrift.

Psychological self-regulation: affect, stress, emotional burnout, frustration, passion

The inability to regulate one's emotional states, cope with affects and stresses is an obstacle to effective professional activity, disrupts interpersonal relationships at work and in the family, interferes with the achievement of goals and the implementation of intentions, and disrupts human health.

There are special techniques that help to cope with a strong emotion and prevent it from turning into an affect. To do this, it is recommended to notice and realize an unwanted emotion in time, analyze its origins, relieve muscle tension and relax, breathe deeply and rhythmically, attract a pre-prepared “duty image” of a pleasant event in your life, try to look at yourself from the outside. The affect can be prevented, but this requires endurance, self-control, special training, and a culture of interpersonal relationships.

The means of preventing emotional burnout are the optimization of working conditions and psychological correction in the early stages of emotional disorders.

The stress factor also matters. Prolonged exposure to stress is especially dangerous. It has been noticed, for example, that for 10-15 years of work in extreme conditions, the human body wears out as if it had experienced a severe heart attack. And, on the contrary, short-term strong stress activates a person, as if “shakes” him.

• You should not strive, at all costs to avoid stress and be afraid of it. It is paradoxical, but true: the more you try to live and work “always measured and calm”, the more stress will destroy you. After all, instead of gradually and patiently gaining experience in self-management in stress, you will “run away” from it.

You can compare the methods of effective stress management with the actions of an experienced climber. If a person, seized with fear, turns his back on an avalanche and runs away from it, it will overtake him and destroy him. It is necessary to meet the danger face to face in order to know how to defend against it.

• In order to manage your stress, you need to use its beneficial features and exclude harmful ones.

• With constructive stress, the accumulated dissatisfaction of people with each other is discharged, an important problem is solved and mutual understanding between people improves.
• With destructive stress, relationships deteriorate sharply to a complete break, the problem remains unresolved, people experience severe feelings of guilt and hopelessness.

The most successful, both in the profession and in personal life, are people who have learned to control themselves, who have a developed psychotechnics of personal self-regulation. They know their strengths and weaknesses, they know how to restrain themselves, show patience, slow down their internal “explosions”.

• Action one: they do not blame anyone: neither themselves nor others. They do not suffer from “remorse of conscience” and do not “dump” their stressful energy on others.
• Action two: they strive to master themselves at the first stage of development of stress, when self-control is still preserved and the “stress element” has not completely captured. They strive to stop themselves in time. One leading specialist of a large commercial bank put it this way: “It is important not to hit point B.”
• Action three: they study themselves. People with developed self-regulation are well aware of how a stressful state begins to develop in them. In other words, they realize in time the change in their inner self-perception at the first stage of stress development.
• Step four and most important. People with developed self-regulation intuitively find the optimal strategy in stress. Those who successfully master stress are those who understand that “dumping” dark stressful energy on others is uncivilized and in a certain sense unprofitable. There is a loss of necessary business connections, personal relationships are destroyed. They also understand that directing destructive stressful energy at themselves, blaming themselves for their mistakes, is not constructive. Indeed, what changes from this? The matter is still standing, and the problem is not solved.

• correctly assess the significance of events;
• in case of defeat, act according to the principle “it didn’t hurt, and I wanted to”;
• increase physical activity (many women start doing laundry or other heavy housework);
• form a new dominant, i.e. get distracted;
• speak out, cry out;
• listen to music;
• cause a smile, laughter, humor is necessary for the fact that
• to perceive as comic what claims to be serious;
• implement relaxation.

Classification of emotional states. Emotional states have very different manifestations. In terms of intensity and
duration, they can be long, but weak (sadness), or strong, but short-lived (joy).
According to the subjective experience, the whole variety of emotions can be divided into 2 categories: positive emotions associated with the satisfaction of a person’s vital needs and therefore giving pleasure, and negative emotions associated with the dissatisfaction of vital needs and therefore causing displeasure. According to the content, emotions can be classified into simple and complex, depending on what level of needs are satisfied in a person. The simpler ones include anger, fear, joy, grief, envy, jealousy, while the more complex ones include a moral feeling, an aesthetic feeling, a feeling of patriotism, etc.
Finally, according to the form of flow, all emotional states are divided into sensual tone, mood, emotions, affect, stress, frustration, passion, higher feelings.
Sensual tone. The simplest form of emotional experience is the so-called sensual or emotional tone. Under the sensual tone is understood the emotional coloring of the mental process, prompting the subject to preserve or eliminate it. It is well known that certain colors, sounds, smells, by themselves, regardless of the memories associated with them, can cause us a pleasant or unpleasant feeling. So, good music, the smell of a rose, the taste of an orange are pleasant, have a positive emotional tone. If the negative sensual tone turns into a painful disgust, then one speaks of idiosyncrasy.
Sensual tone, as it were, accumulates in itself a reflection of useful and harmful factors of the surrounding reality. Due to its generality, the feeling tone helps to make a preliminary and quick decision about the meaning of a new stimulus, instead of comparing it with all the information stored in memory. Sensual tone is often subjective and depends on how the activity proceeds: a partner who constantly loses to us seems more attractive than one who wins us all the time. Despite its external insignificance, knowledge and purposeful use of sensual tone allows you to influence a person’s mood, improve labor productivity, study intensity, etc.
Mood. Mood is understood as a general emotional state that colors all human behavior for a long time. Mood is an emotional reaction not to immediate events, but to their significance for a person in the context of his general life plans. This is not a special experience, timed to coincide with some particular event, but a diffuse, general state.
The mood is very diverse and can be joyful or sad, cheerful or depressed, cheerful or depressed, calm or
irritated, etc. The reasons for this or that mood are not always clear to the person experiencing them. No wonder they talk about unaccountable sadness, causeless joy, and in this sense, mood is an unconscious assessment by a person of how favorable circumstances are for her. But this reason is always there and can be determined. It can be the surrounding nature, events, activities performed. The mood significantly depends on the general state of health, on the work of the endocrine glands and, especially, on the tone of the nervous system.
Moods can vary in duration. The stability of mood depends on many reasons: the age of a person, the individual characteristics of his character and temperament, willpower, the level of development of the leading motives of behavior.
A prolonged mood can color a person's behavior for days or even weeks. Mood can become a stable personality trait - on this basis, people are divided into optimists and pessimists.
At the same time, the mood can be of a short-term nature, which is especially pronounced in childhood. Without an established hierarchy of motives, children are easily amenable to mood changes: any emotional impression gives rise to unstable, variable, capricious moods. With age, the mood becomes more stable - significant influences for the personal sphere cause a change in mood.
Emotions. Emotions are the immediate, temporary experience of some feeling. So, for example, the feeling of love for football is not an emotion. Emotions will be represented in the stadium by the state of admiration that a fan experiences when watching a good game of athletes or by the emotion of indignation, indignation at a lazy game or inexperienced refereeing.
Emotions can be triggered by both real and imaginary situations, are able to anticipate events that have not actually occurred yet, and arise in connection with ideas about previously experienced or imaginary situations.
From the point of view of influence on human activity, emotions are divided into sthenic and asthenic. Euphoria, mania, anger, anxiety are among the sthenic (or "hypersthenic") emotions; among the "asthenic" - sadness, melancholy, apathy, fear.
Stenic emotions stimulate human activity, encourage him to actions, statements. And, conversely, asthenic emotions are characterized by stiffness, passivity. Therefore, depending on the individual characteristics of a person, emotions can affect behavior in different ways. Thus, in a person experiencing feelings of fear, an increase in muscular strength is possible and he can rush towards danger. The same feeling of fear can cause a complete breakdown, fear can "bend your knees." Grief can
cause apathy, inactivity in a weak person, while a strong person doubles his energy, finding solace in work and creativity.
Emotional experiences can be ambiguous, contradictory. This phenomenon is called ambivalence (duality) of feelings. Usually, ambivalence is caused by the ambiguity of the object itself (for example, you can respect someone for their ability to work and at the same time condemn them for their temper). Ambivalence can also be generated by a contradiction between stable feelings towards an object and situational emotions (for example, love and hate are combined in jealousy).
The basic, fundamental emotions include pleasure, joy, suffering, surprise, disgust, anger, contempt, shame, interest, fear.
The oldest in origin, the simplest and most common form of emotional experience among living beings is the pleasure derived from the satisfaction of organic needs (or the displeasure associated with the dissatisfaction of organic needs). Almost all organic sensations have their own emotional tone. The close connection that exists between emotions and the activity of the body is evidenced by the fact that any emotional state is accompanied by many physiological changes in the body.
Joy is a positive emotional state associated with the ability to sufficiently fully satisfy an urgent need, the probability of which up to this point was small or uncertain.
Suffering - a negative emotional state associated with the information received about the impossibility of satisfying the most important vital needs, which up to this point seemed more or less likely, most often occurs in the form of emotional stress.
Surprise is an emotional reaction that does not have a clearly expressed positive or negative sign to sudden circumstances. Surprise inhibits all previous emotions, directing attention to the object that caused it, and can turn into interest.
Disgust - a negative emotional state caused by objects, contact with which conflicts with
ideological, moral or aesthetic principles of the subject. Disgust, when combined with anger, can motivate aggressive behavior in interpersonal relationships.
Anger is a negative emotional state that proceeds in the form of an affect and is caused by the sudden appearance of a serious obstacle to satisfying an extremely important need for the subject.
Contempt is a negative emotional state that occurs in interpersonal relationships and is generated by a mismatch between the life positions of the subject and the life positions of the object of feeling. The latter are presented to the subject as base, not corresponding to accepted moral standards and aesthetic criteria.
Shame is a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the inconsistency of one's own actions and appearance with the expectations of others or one's own ideas about appropriate behavior and appearance.
Interest (as an emotion) is a positive emotional state that promotes the development of skills and abilities, the acquisition of knowledge, and motivates learning.
Fear is a negative emotional state that appears under the influence of information about a possible real or imagined danger. In contrast to the emotion of suffering caused by direct blocking of the most important needs, the emotion of fear is caused only by a probabilistic forecast of possible trouble.
Each of these emotions can be manifested by a whole range of states that differ in severity (for example, joy can be manifested by satisfaction, delight, exultation, ecstasy, etc.).
From the combination of fundamental emotions arise such complex emotional states as, for example, anxiety, which can combine fear, anger, guilt and interest.
Affect. In critical conditions, when the subject is unable to find a quick way out of a dangerous situation, a special kind of emotional processes arises - affect. This is the most powerful of the considered emotional reactions. Affect
- a strong and short-term emotional state, accompanied by pronounced motor manifestations and a change in the functions of internal organs.
Any feeling can be experienced in an affective form. This includes cases of affective delight at the performance of a favorite ensemble, and affective anger of fans at the stadium, and religious ecstasy, etc. Sometimes the affect is manifested in the intense stiffness of movements, posture, speech. Such can be horror, despair. Or, if a person suddenly receives good news, he is lost, does not know what to say.
One of the essential functions of affect is that it represents stereotyped actions fixed in evolution, a way of “emergency” resolution of situations: flight, stupor, aggression, etc.
Affect arises as a result of an already committed action and expresses its subjective emotional assessment in terms of achieving the set goal. The development of affect is subject to the following law: the stronger the initial motivational stimulus of behavior and the more effort had to be expended to implement it, the smaller the result obtained as a result of all this, the stronger the affect that arises.
The cause of affect can be a conflict, a contradiction between a person’s strong desire for something and the objective impossibility to satisfy the impulse that has arisen, and the person is not able to realize this impossibility or cannot reconcile with it (anger, rage). The conflict may also consist in increased requirements for a person at the moment, and his experiences, lack of confidence in his abilities, underestimation of his capabilities.
A distinctive feature of affect is the weakening of conscious control, the narrowness of consciousness. Affects, as a rule, interfere with the normal organization of behavior, its rationality. At the same time, thinking changes, a person loses the ability to foresee the results of his actions. In an affect, a person, as it were, loses his head, his actions are unreasonable, performed without regard to the situation. Losing power over himself, a person, as it were, surrenders entirely to experience.
In addition, the main characteristics of attention change, only those objects that correspond to experiences are kept in the field of perception. All other stimuli are insufficiently realized, and this is one of the reasons for the practical uncontrollability of this state.
Affects are able to leave strong and lasting traces in long-term memory. In contrast to affects, the work of emotions and feelings is associated primarily with short-term and short-term memory. The affect arises sharply, suddenly in the form of a flash, accompanied by strong and erratic motor activity, there is a kind of discharge in action. Emotional tension accumulated as a result of affective situations can be summed up and lead to a strong and violent emotional discharge, which, relieving tension, often leads to a feeling of fatigue, depression, and depression.
emotional stress. Emotional stress is
a state of excessively strong and prolonged psychological stress that occurs in a person when his nervous system receives an emotional overload. Emotional stress appears in situations of threat, danger, resentment, etc. Stress disorganizes human activity, disrupts the normal course of his behavior. Stress, especially if it is frequent and prolonged, has a negative impact not only on the psychological state, but also on the physical health of a person. They are the main "risk factors" in the appearance and exacerbation of diseases such as cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases.
G. Selye identified 3 stages in the development of stress. The first stage is the alarm reaction - the phase of mobilization of the body's defenses, which increases resistance to a specific traumatic effect. In this case, the body's reserves are redistributed: the solution of the main task is provided at the expense of secondary tasks. A person copes with the load with the help of
functional mobilization, without structural adjustments. At the second stage - the stage of stabilization, all the parameters, brought out of balance in the first phase, are fixed at a new level. External behavior differs little from the norm, everything seems to be getting better, but internally there is an overexpenditure of adaptive reserves. If the stressful situation continues to persist, the third stage begins - exhaustion, which can lead to a significant deterioration in well-being, various diseases and even death.
The data obtained by British researchers are indicative in this respect. They found high mortality from coronary heart disease among executives, test pilots, surgeons, jet pilots, city bus drivers. It is a constant stay in a stressful situation that shortens the lives of people in these professions.
Human behavior in a stressful situation depends on many conditions, primarily on the psychological characteristics of a person. People with different characteristics of the nervous system react differently to the same psychological stress. In some people, there is an increase in activity, mobilization of forces, and an increase in the efficiency of activity. Danger, as it were, spurs a person on, makes him act boldly and courageously. On the other hand, stress can cause disorganization of activity, a sharp drop in its effectiveness, passivity and general inhibition.
Frustration. Frustration is a psychological state of frustration, depression, caused by objectively insurmountable (or subjectively perceived as such) difficulties that arise on the way to achieving the goal. Frustration is accompanied by a whole range of negative emotions, anger, depression, external and internal aggression.
The level of frustration depends on the strength and intensity of the influencing factor, the state of the person and the forms of response he has developed to life's difficulties. Especially often the source of frustration is a negative social assessment that affects significant relationships of the individual. The stability (tolerance) of a person to frustrating factors depends on the degree of his emotional excitability, type of temperament, experience of interaction with such factors.
Passion. Passion is another type of complex, qualitatively peculiar and found only in humans emotional states. In terms of intensity of emotional excitement, passion approaches affect, and in terms of duration and stability, it resembles mood. Passion is a strong, persistent feeling that determines the direction of thoughts and actions of a person.
The reasons for the formation of passion are quite diverse - they can be determined by conscious beliefs (for example, the passion of a scientist in science), they can come from bodily desires or have a pathological origin (as happens with paranoid personality development). Passion is organically connected with needs, selective and always objective - aimed at a certain type of activity or subject. Such, for example, are the passion for knowledge observed in people, the passion for music, the passion for collecting, etc.
The most important characteristic of passion is its connection with the volitional sphere. Passion is one of the essential motivations for activity. Estimating the meaning of passion is quite subjective. Passion can be accepted, sanctioned by a person, or it can be condemned by it, experienced as something undesirable, obsessive. Public opinion plays an important role in the assessment. So, for example, within one culture, the passion for hoarding is condemned as greed, but can be positively assessed within another social group as thrift.
Higher feelings. Higher senses represent a special form of experience. Feelings are personal formations. They characterize a person socio-psychologically. Emotions are relatively weakly manifested in external behavior, sometimes from the outside they are generally invisible to an outsider. They, accompanying this or that behavioral act, are not even always realized, although any behavior is associated with emotions, since it is aimed at satisfying a need. Human feelings, on the contrary, are outwardly very noticeable.
Depending on the subject area to which they relate, feelings are divided into moral, aesthetic, intellectual.
Moral (moral) are the feelings experienced by people when they perceive the phenomena of reality and compare these phenomena with the norms developed by society. Moral norms depend on traditions, customs, religion, the dominant ideology accepted in society.
The actions and deeds of people that correspond to the views on morality in a given society are considered moral, ethical; actions that do not correspond to these views are considered immoral, immoral. Moral feelings include a sense of duty, humanity, benevolence, love, patriotism, sympathy, etc. Greed, selfishness, cruelty, gloating, etc., can be attributed to immoral.
Intellectual feelings are called experiences that arise in the process of human cognitive activity. Intellectual feelings include surprise, curiosity, inquisitiveness, a feeling of doubt about the correctness of the decision, etc. Success or failure, ease or difficulty of mental activity causes a whole range of experiences in a person.
The most typical situation that generates intellectual feelings is a problem situation. Intellectual feelings not only accompany human cognitive activity, but also stimulate, enhance it, affect the speed and productivity of thinking, the content and accuracy of knowledge.
Intellectual feelings also include a generalized sense of the new. It
It is expressed in the constant search for something new both in the field of knowledge and in practical activities. This feeling is connected not just with the need to receive any new information, but with the need for "cognitive harmony", i.e. in finding the familiar, the familiar in the new, the unknown.
Aesthetic feelings are the emotional attitude of a person to the beautiful in nature, in life and in art. A person experiences aesthetic feelings when perceiving works of fiction, musical, visual, dramatic and other types of art. Aesthetic feelings are a fusion of moral and intellectual feelings. The complexity of the problem also lies in the fact that the aesthetic attitude is manifested through other feelings: delight, joy, contempt, disgust, suffering, etc.
It should be noted that the considered division of feelings is rather conditional. Usually, the feelings experienced by a person are so complex that it is difficult to put them into any one category. So, the work of a scientist is a kind of fusion of intellectual, moral and aesthetic feelings with a predominance of intellectual ones, and the work of an artist is, apparently, also an fusion of these feelings, but with a predominance of aesthetic ones. Differences in the sensual sphere leave a deep imprint on the entire warehouse of a person's spiritual life.

Emotion is one of several psychological states of a person. The emotional and mental state of a person depends on the environment and looks like a spiritual experience.

Emotions

Feelings are the consequences of experiences from human emotions. For example, if a person likes another person - these are emotions, when he fell in love with him - these are already feelings.

Emotions are divided into several states:

• mood;
• affects;
• stress;
• frustration;
• passion.

Mood is the main strongest emotional state, a person experiences it for a certain period of time. Mood emotion arises suddenly, unexpectedly, sharply or slowly, gradually. The mood is good or bad, long-term or short-term.

A good mood creates a positive energy balance for a person. He readily sets to work, household chores or other duties. In the end, everything works out, and the process is actively carried out with a high percentage of quality. Bad mood has the opposite result. The energy tone is lowered, there is no desire to act, the quality of the work performed is poor.

Mood is individual. Someone experiences a good mood all the time, for someone it changes from good to bad very often.

Change of mood depends on temperament, which is divided into several types:

• sanguine;
• choleric;
• phlegmatic person;
• melancholic.

It turns out that sanguine people are more positive personalities and their mood is always in a positive tone.

Cholerics are subject to frequent changes and emotional ups and downs of their mood. During the day, his mood can change several times.

Phlegmatic people can be attributed to cold-blooded and calm people. Their self-confidence allows them to control the change of emotions, keep themselves in control all the time and almost never lose their temper.

And the melancholic experiences the most negative emotions. Changes in life situations and environments have a bad effect on their mood. This knocks them out of balance and disturbs peace.

What determines the mood? There can be many factors influencing this. The main ones can be success at work, achieving goals, surprises, gifts, news, health status.

Experiencing positive or negative emotions, a person can transfer them to another person.

Affect

The next emotional state is affect (abruptly arising emotion). It has a strong effect on the human psyche. This condition has a negative character, in which a person's behavior changes for the worse, makes him nervous and uncontrollable. This leads to the destruction of the psyche and violates the state of mind of the individual.

A person in this state is unable to perform reasonable actions and may later regret his actions. It is impossible to stop the affect, but you can try to control your actions and deeds so that this state does not occur. To do this, you need to switch your attention from the situation that caused the affect to neutral actions. Psychologists recommend distracting yourself by counting numbers. This process helps to direct mental activity in a different direction and forget the problems that have arisen.

Most often, choleric people and people with a low level of intelligence, unable to cope with emotions, are affected.

Next comes stress. This is a condition that occurs during dangerous factors, during which there is a possibility of losing a life or getting injured and mutilated. Stress is an emotion similar to affect. It has a high mental impact on the human nervous system. But stress has many differences from affect. If affect arises unexpectedly, stress appears during an extreme situation. Affect turns off the body's brain activity, and stress, on the contrary, can help make the right decision at a crucial moment.

Stress affects the human body both positively and negatively. A bad effect is due to a load on the nervous system, which leads to a decrease in immunity and the threat of disease. A good effect is due to an increase in the activity of the whole organism.

The behavior of a person under stress can be different. A person may be lost and unable to deal with the problem that has arisen, while someone, on the contrary, becomes more active, ready to act.

frustration

Another emotion is frustration. This is a very emotional experience, arising from the background of bad success. Expressed in the form of anger, despair, apathy. Active actions that will bring success will help to get out of this state.

Passion

What is passion? It turns out that this is a state that completely absorbs and begins to control all the desires and needs of a person. Passion requires constant satisfaction of its needs. They are material and spiritual, positive and negative.

If a person is seized with a passion to create and express his desires, then this is considered a normal manifestation of emotions. But if the individual does not want to reckon with anyone and does things that are beneficial only for him. In addition, all human desires are associated with the desire to satisfy their needs, that is, in this case, they talk about the negative effect of passion.

When people experience feelings. Feelings are:

• moral;
• moral;
• intellectual;
• cognitive;
• aesthetic.

A person experiences moral feelings when he worries about the opinion that people have about him.

The concept of "emotional states"

Emotional states are mental states that arise in the process of the subject's life and determine not only the level of information and energy exchange, but also the direction of behavior.

Emotions control a person much more than it seems at first glance. Even the absence of emotion is an emotion, or rather a whole emotional state, which is characterized by a large number of features in human behavior.

His life, his health, his family, work, his entire environment depend on the emotional state of a person, and a change in the emotional state of a person leads to fundamental changes in his life.

The main emotional states distinguished in psychology:

• 1. Joy (satisfaction, fun);
• 2. Sadness (sadness, depression);
• 3. Anger (aggression, anger);
• 4. Fear (anxiety, fear);
• 5. Surprise (curiosity);
• 6. Disgust (contempt, disgust).

Usually a person is well aware of his emotional state and carries out a transfer to other people and for life. The higher the emotional state of a person, the easier it is for him to achieve his goals in life. Such a person is rational, reasonable, therefore he is happier, more alive, more confident. The lower his emotional state, the more a person's behavior is under the control of his momentary reactions, despite his education or intelligence.

Emotional states include: mood, affect, stress, frustration and passion.

Mood is the longest emotional state. This is the background against which all other mental processes proceed. It is very diverse and can be joyful or sad, cheerful or depressed, cheerful or depressed, calm or irritated, etc. The mood can arise slowly, gradually, or it can take over a person quickly and suddenly.

Mood is an emotional reaction not to the direct consequences of certain events, but to their significance for a person's life in the context of his general life plans, interests and expectations.

A positive mood makes a person energetic, cheerful and active. Any business goes well with a good mood, everything turns out, the products of activity are of high quality. In a bad mood, everything falls out of hand, work is sluggish, mistakes and defects are made, products are of poor quality.

Mood is personal. In some subjects, the mood is most often good, in others - bad. Temperament has a great influence on mood.

In sanguine people, the mood is always cheerful, major. In choleric people, the mood often changes, a good mood suddenly changes to a bad one. In phlegmatic people, the mood is always even, they are cold-blooded, self-confident, calm. Melancholic people are often characterized by a negative discord, they are always afraid and afraid. Any change in life unsettles them and causes depressive experiences.

Any mood has its own reason, although sometimes it seems that it arises by itself. The reason for the mood can be the position of a person in society, the results of activities, events in his personal life, health status, etc.

The mood experienced by one person can be transmitted to other people (A.I. Kravchenko "Psychology and Pedagogy" textbook).

Affect - is a rapidly and violently flowing emotional process of an explosive nature, which can give a relaxation in actions that is not subject to conscious volitional control. It is affects that are predominantly associated with shocks - shocks associated with the disorganization of activity, which is expressed in the disorganization of motor reactions and inhibition of conscious activity (E.V. Ostrovsky, L.I. Chernyshova "Psychology and Pedagogy" textbook).

In a state of passion, a person cannot reasonably control his behavior.

Overwhelmed by affect, he sometimes commits such actions, which he later bitterly regrets.

It is impossible to eliminate or slow down the affect.

However, the state of affect does not release a person from responsibility for his actions, since each person must learn to control his behavior in a given situation. To do this, it is necessary at the initial stage of affect to switch attention from the object that caused it to something else, neutral.

Since in most cases the affect manifests itself in speech reactions directed at its source, instead of external speech actions, one should perform internal ones, for example, count slowly to 20. Since the affect manifests itself for a short time, by the end of this action its intensity decreases and the person will come to a calmer condition.

The affect is predominantly manifested in people of the choleric type of temperament, as well as in ill-mannered, hysterical subjects who do not know how to control their feelings and actions.

Stress is an emotional state that suddenly arises in a person under the influence of an extreme situation associated with a danger to life or an activity that requires great stress.

Stress, like affect, is the same strong and short-term emotional experience. Therefore, some psychologists consider stress as one of the types of affect. But this is far from the case, since they have their own distinctive features. Stress, first of all, occurs only in the presence of an extreme situation, while affect can arise for any reason.

The second difference is that affect disorganizes the psyche and behavior, while stress not only disorganizes, but also mobilizes the organization's defenses to get out of an extreme situation.

Stress can have both positive and negative effects on personality.

A positive role is played by stress, performing a mobilization function, a negative role is having a harmful effect on the nervous system, causing mental disorders and various kinds of diseases of the body.

Stress conditions affect people's behavior in different ways. Some, under the influence of stress, show complete helplessness and are unable to withstand stressful influences, while others, on the contrary, are stress-resistant individuals and show themselves best in moments of danger and in activities that require the exertion of all forces.

Frustration is a deeply experienced emotional state that arose under the influence of failures that took place with an overestimated level of personality claims. It can manifest itself in the form of negative experiences, such as: anger, annoyance, apathy, etc.

There are two ways to get out of frustration. Either a person develops vigorous activity and achieves success, or reduces the level of claims and is content with the results that he can achieve to the maximum.

Passion is a deep, intense and very stable emotional state that captures a person completely and completely and determines all his thoughts, aspirations and actions. Passion can be associated with the satisfaction of material and spiritual needs. The object of passion can be various types of things, objects, phenomena, people that a person seeks to possess at all costs (RS Nemov "General Foundations of Psychology" textbook).

Depending on the need that caused passion, and on the object through which it is satisfied, it can be characterized either as positive or negative.

A positive or sublime passion is associated with highly moral motives and has not only a personal but also a social character. Passion for science, art, social activities, protection of nature, etc., makes a person's life meaningful and intense. All great things were done under the influence of great passion.

Negative or base passion has an egoistic orientation and when it is satisfied, a person does not consider anything and often commits antisocial immoral acts.

Emotional states can manifest themselves in a person in any kind of his activity and become his character trait. Emotional processes cause changes in the human body: in the nervous system, cardiovascular activity, respiratory organs, and digestion. Emotional states cause changes in pulse, pressure, dilated pupils, increased sweating, discoloration of the skin, increased blood flow to human organs.

Conducting electrophysiological studies has shown the importance of special formations of the nervous system for emotional states, which are determined by the functions of the thalamus, hypothalamus and limbic system.

There are found centers of positive and negative emotions. From the state of the reticular formation, this set of nerve structures located in the central parts of the brain stem (medulla oblongata and midbrain, visual tubercles) depends on the emotional tone of a person, his reactions to stimuli.

One of the forms of violation of the normal life of a person is the tension caused by the emotional state of a person. Often, increased tension is accompanied by fears, anxiety, fears and develops into a stable state of anxiety.

Any, including cognitive need, is given to a person through emotional experiences.

Emotions are elementary experiences that arise in a person under the influence of the general state of the body and the course of the process of meeting actual needs. Such a definition of emotions is given in a large psychological dictionary.

In other words, “emotions are subjective psychological states that reflect in the form of direct experiences, sensations of pleasant or unpleasant, a person’s attitude to the world and people, to the process and result of his practical activity” .

A number of authors adhere to the following definition. Emotions are a mental reflection in the form of direct, biased experience, the vital meaning of phenomena and situations, due to the relationship of their objective properties to the needs of the subject.

According to the authors, this definition contains one of the main features of emotions, which distinguishes them, for example, from cognitive processes - the direct representation in them to the subject of the relationship between the need and the possibility of satisfying it.

A.L. Groisman notes that emotions are a form of mental reflection, standing on the verge (to the content of the cognizable) with a physiological reflection and representing a kind of personal attitude of a person both to the surrounding reality and to himself.

Types of emotions

Depending on the duration, intensity, objectivity or uncertainty, as well as the quality of emotions, all emotions can be divided into emotional reactions, emotional states and emotional relationships (V.N. Myasishchev).

Emotional reactions are characterized by a high rate of occurrence and transience. They last minutes, are characterized by their sufficiently pronounced quality (modality) and sign (positive or negative emotion), intensity and objectivity. The objectivity of an emotional reaction is understood as its more or less unambiguous connection with the event or object that caused it. An emotional reaction normally always arises about events produced in a particular situation by something or someone. This may be fright from a sudden noise or scream, joy from hearing words or perceived facial expressions, anger due to an obstacle that has arisen or about someone's act, etc. At the same time, it should be remembered that these events are only a triggering stimulus for the emergence of an emotion, while the cause is either the biological significance or the subjective significance of this event for the subject. The intensity of emotional reactions can be different - from barely noticeable, even for the subject himself, to excessive - affect.

Emotional reactions are often reactions of frustration of some expressed needs. Frustration (from Latin frustatio - deceit, destruction of plans) in psychology is a mental state that occurs in response to the appearance of an objectively or subjectively insurmountable obstacle to satisfying some need, achieving a goal or solving a problem. The type of frustration reaction depends on many circumstances, but very often it is a characteristic of the personality of a given person. It can be anger, frustration, despair, guilt.

Emotional states are characterized by: a longer duration, which can be measured in hours and days; normally, less intensity, since emotions are associated with significant energy expenditure due to the physiological reactions that accompany them; the reason and the reason that caused them are hidden, as well as some uncertainty in the modality of the emotional state. According to their modality, emotional states can appear in the form of irritability, anxiety, complacency, various shades of mood - from depressive states to euphoria. However, most often they are mixed states. Since emotional states are also emotions, they also reflect the relationship between the needs of the subject and the objective or subjective possibilities of their satisfaction, rooted in the situation.

In the absence of organic disorders of the central nervous system, the state of irritation is, in fact, a high readiness for anger reactions in a long-term situation of frustration. A person has outbursts of anger for the smallest and most diverse reasons, but they are based on the dissatisfaction of some personally significant need, which the subject himself may not know about.

The state of anxiety means the presence of some uncertainty about the outcome of future events related to the satisfaction of some need. Often, the state of anxiety is associated with a sense of self-esteem (self-esteem), which may suffer from an unfavorable outcome of events in the expected future. The frequent occurrence of anxiety in everyday affairs may indicate the presence of self-doubt as a quality of personality, i.e. about unstable or low self-esteem inherent in this person in general.

A person's mood often reflects an experience of success or failure already achieved, or a high or low probability of success or failure in the near future. A bad or good mood reflects the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of some need in the past, success or failure in achieving a goal or solving a problem. It is no coincidence that a person in a bad mood is asked if something has happened. A long-term low or elevated mood (over two weeks), which is not characteristic of a given person, is a pathological sign in which an unmet need is either really absent or is deeply hidden from the subject's consciousness, and its detection requires special psychological analysis. A person most often experiences mixed states, such as low mood with a touch of anxiety or joy with a touch of anxiety or anger.

A person can also experience more complex conditions, an example of which is the so-called dysphoria - a pathological condition lasting two or three days, in which irritation, anxiety and bad mood are simultaneously present. A lesser degree of dysphoria can occur in some people and is normal.

Emotional relationships are also called feelings. Feelings are stable emotional experiences associated with a particular object or category of objects that have a special meaning for a person. Feelings in a broad sense can be associated with various objects or actions, for example, you can not like a given cat or cats in general, you can like or dislike doing morning exercises, etc. Some authors propose that only stable emotional relationships with people be called feelings. Feelings differ from emotional reactions and emotional states in duration - they can last for years, and sometimes for a lifetime, for example, feelings of love or hatred. Unlike states, feelings are objective - they are always associated with an object or an action with it.

Emotionality. Emotionality is understood as stable individual characteristics of the emotional sphere of a given person. V.D. Nebylitsyn proposed to take into account three components when describing emotionality: emotional susceptibility, emotional lability and impulsivity.

Emotional impressionability is a person's sensitivity to emotional situations, i.e. situations that can evoke emotion. Since different people are dominated by different needs, each person has their own situations that can trigger emotions. At the same time, there are certain characteristics of the situation that make them emotional for all people. These are: unusualness, novelty and suddenness (P. Fress). Unusualness differs from novelty in that there are types of stimuli that will always be new to the subject, because there are no “good answers” ​​for them, these are loud noise, loss of support, darkness, loneliness, images of the imagination, as well as combinations of the familiar and unfamiliar. There are individual differences in the degree of sensitivity to emotional situations common to all, as well as in the number of individual emotional situations.

Emotional lability is characterized by the speed of transition from one emotional state to another. People differ from each other in how often and how quickly their state changes - in some people, for example, the mood is usually stable and does not depend much on small current events, in others, with high emotional lability, it changes several times for the slightest reasons. in a day.

Impulsivity is determined by the speed with which emotion becomes the motivating force of actions and actions without their preliminary consideration. This quality of personality is also called self-control. There are two different mechanisms of self-control - external control and internal. With external control, not emotions themselves are controlled, but only their external expression, emotions are present, but they are restrained, a person “pretends” that he does not experience emotions. Internal control is associated with such a hierarchical distribution of needs, in which the lower needs are subordinate to the higher ones, therefore, being in such a subordinate position, they simply cannot cause uncontrollable emotions in appropriate situations. An example of internal control can be a person’s dedication to business, when he does not notice hunger for a long time (“forgets” to eat) and therefore remains indifferent to the type of food.

In psychological literature, it is also common to divide the emotional states experienced by a person into emotions, feelings and affects proper.

Emotions and feelings are personal formations that characterize a person socio-psychologically; associated with short-term and short-term memory.

An affect is a short-term, rapidly flowing state of strong emotional arousal that occurs as a result of frustration or some other reason that strongly affects the psyche, usually associated with the dissatisfaction of very important human needs. Affect does not precede behavior, but forms it at one of its final stages. In contrast to emotions and feelings, affects proceed violently, quickly, and are accompanied by pronounced organic changes and motor reactions. Affects are able to leave strong and lasting traces in long-term memory. The emotional tension accumulated as a result of the occurrence of aphetogenic situations can be summed up and sooner or later, if it is not given time to release, lead to a strong and violent emotional discharge, which, relieving tension, often entails a feeling of fatigue, depression, depression.

One of the most common types of affects today is stress - a state of mental (emotional) and behavioral disorder associated with a person's inability to act expediently and reasonably in the current situation. Stress is a state of excessively strong and prolonged psychological stress that occurs in a person when his nervous system receives an emotional overload. Stress is the main "risk factor" in the manifestation and exacerbation of cardiovascular and gastrointestinal diseases.

Thus, each of the described types of emotions within itself has subspecies, which, in turn, can be evaluated according to different parameters - intensity, duration, depth, awareness, origin, conditions for the emergence and disappearance, effects on the body, development dynamics, focus (on oneself , on others, on the world, on the past, present or future), by the way they are expressed in external behavior (expression) and by the neurophysiological basis.

The role of emotions in human life

For a person, the main significance of emotions lies in the fact that, thanks to emotions, we better understand others, we can, without using speech, judge each other's condition and better tune in to joint activities and communication.

Life without emotions is just as impossible as life without sensations. Emotions, according to Charles Darwin, arose in the process of evolution as a means by which living beings establish the significance of certain conditions to meet their actual needs. Emotionally expressive human movements - facial expressions, gestures, pantomime - perform the function of communication, i.e. giving a person information about the state of the speaker and his attitude to what is happening at the moment, as well as the function of influence - exerting a certain influence on the one who is the subject of perception of emotional and expressive movements.

Remarkable, for example, is the fact that people belonging to different cultures are able to accurately perceive and evaluate the expression of a human face, to determine from it such emotional states, such as, for example, joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise. This fact not only convincingly proves the innate nature of the basic emotions, but also "the presence of a genetically determined ability to understand them in living beings." This refers to the communication of living beings not only of the same species with each other, but also of different species among themselves. It is well known that higher animals and humans are capable of perceiving and evaluating each other's emotional states by facial expressions.

Not all emotionally expressive expressions are innate. Some of them have been found to be acquired in vivo as a result of training and education.

Life without emotions is just as impossible as life without sensations. Emotions, according to Charles Darwin, arose in the process of evolution as a means by which living beings establish the significance of certain conditions to meet their urgent needs.

In higher animals, and especially in humans, expressive movements have become a finely differentiated language with which living beings exchange information about their states and about what is happening around. These are expressive and communicative functions of emotions. They are also the most important factor in the regulation of cognitive processes.

Emotions act as an internal language, as a system of signals through which the subject learns about the needful significance of what is happening. “The peculiarity of emotions lies in the fact that they directly deny the relationship between motivations and the realization of activity corresponding to these motives. Emotions in human activity perform the function of evaluating its course and results. They organize activity, stimulating and directing it.”

In critical conditions, when the subject is unable to find a quick and reasonable way out of a dangerous situation, a special kind of emotional processes arises - affect. One of the essential manifestations of affect is that, as V.K. Vilyunas, "by imposing stereotyped actions on the subject, is a certain way of "emergency" resolution of situations that has been entrenched in evolution: flight, stupor, aggression, etc." .

The important Russian psychologist P.K. Anokhin. He wrote: "Producing almost instantaneous integration (combining into a single whole) of all functions of the body, emotions in themselves and in the first place can be an absolute signal of a beneficial or harmful effect on the body, often even before the localization of effects and the specific mechanism of the response are determined. organism".

Due to the timely arisen emotions, the body has the ability to adapt extremely favorably to environmental conditions. He is able to quickly, with great speed, respond to external influences without having yet determined its type, form, and other private specific parameters.

Emotional sensations are biologically, in the process of evolution, fixed as a kind of way to maintain the life process within its optimal boundaries and warn of the destructive nature of a lack or excess of any factors.

The more complex a living being is organized, the higher the step on the evolutionary ladder it occupies, the richer the range of emotional states that an individual is able to experience. The quantity and quality of human needs corresponds to the number and variety of emotional experiences and feelings characteristic of him, moreover, “the higher the need in terms of its social and moral significance, the higher the feeling associated with it” .

The most ancient in origin, the simplest and most common form of emotional experiences among living beings is the pleasure received from the satisfaction of organic needs, and the displeasure associated with the impossibility of doing this when the corresponding need is exacerbated.

Almost all elementary organic sensations have their own emotional tone. The close connection that exists between emotions and the activity of the body is evidenced by the fact that any emotional state is accompanied by many physiological changes in the body. (In this paper, we partially try to trace this dependence.)

The closer to the central nervous system is the source of organic changes associated with emotions, and the fewer sensitive nerve endings it contains, the weaker the resulting subjective emotional experience. In addition, an artificial decrease in organic sensitivity leads to a weakening of the strength of emotional experiences.

The main emotional states that a person experiences are divided into emotions proper, feelings and affects. Emotions and feelings anticipate the process aimed at meeting the needs, they are, as it were, at the beginning of it. Emotions and feelings express the meaning of the situation for a person from the point of view of the actual need at the moment, the significance of the upcoming action or activity for its satisfaction. “Emotions,” A.O. Prokhorov, - can be caused by both real and imaginary situations. They, like feelings, are perceived by a person as his own inner experiences, are transmitted to other people, empathize.

Emotions are relatively weakly manifested in external behavior, sometimes from the outside they are generally invisible to an outsider if a person knows how to hide his feelings well. They, accompanying this or that behavioral act, are not even always realized, although any behavior is associated with emotions, since it is aimed at satisfying a need. The emotional experience of a person is usually much broader than the experience of his individual experiences. Human feelings, on the contrary, are outwardly very noticeable.

Feelings are objective in nature, associated with the representation or idea of ​​some object. Another feature of feelings is that they are improved and, developing, form a number of levels, starting from direct feelings and ending with your feelings related to spiritual values ​​and ideals. Feelings play a motivating role in the life and activities of a person, in his communication with other people. In relation to the world around him, a person seeks to act in such a way as to strengthen and strengthen his positive feelings. They are always associated with the work of consciousness, they can be arbitrarily regulated.