When you're angry or sick
We burn with longing or passion,
Believe then you are still free
Be proud of your happiness.

The Biological and Psychological Significance of Emotions

Emotions, or emotional experiences, usually mean a wide variety of human reactions - from violent outbursts of passion to subtle shades of mood. Emotions are processes that reflect in the form of experiences personal significance and assessment of external and internal situations for human life. The most essential feature of emotions is their subjectivity. If such mental processes as perception and thinking allow a person to more or less objectively reflect the world around him and not dependent on him, then emotions serve to reflect the subjective attitude of a person to himself and to the world around him. It is emotions that reflect the personal significance of knowledge through inspiration, obsession, partiality and interest. About their influence on mental life, V. I. Lenin said this: “Without human emotions, there has never been, is not and cannot be a human search for truth.”

The structure of emotional processes differs significantly from the structure of cognitive ones. The diverse manifestations of a person's emotional life are divided into affects, emotions proper, feelings, moods and stress. The most powerful emotional reaction is affect. It completely captures the human psyche, as if fusing the main influencing stimulus with all adjacent ones and thereby forming a generalized affective complex that predetermines a single reaction to the situation as a whole, including accompanying associations and movements.

Distinctive features of affect are its situationality, generalization, high intensity and short duration. In affect, attention sharply changes, its switchability decreases, and only those objects that, in connection with the experience, have entered the complex, are retained in the field of perception. All other stimuli that are not included in the complex are not sufficiently realized, and this is one of the reasons for the practical uncontrollability of this state. In addition, concentration of attention is disturbed (it is difficult for a person to concentrate and foresee the results of his actions), thinking changes, forecasting operations worsen, and expedient behavior becomes impossible. At the same time, there may be an easing of the transition to uncontrolled actions, and a complete stupor. Since an affect captures a person as a whole, then if it gets an outlet in some activity that is not even directly related to the object of the affect, it is sometimes weakened to such an extent that there is a breakdown, indifference. The regulatory, adaptive function of affects consists in the formation of a specific response and a corresponding memory trace, which later determines selectivity in relation to situations that previously caused an affect.

Emotions proper, unlike affects, are longer states. They are a reaction not only to events that have taken place, but also to probable or remembered ones. If affects arise towards the end of the action and reflect the total final assessment of the situation, then emotions are shifted to the beginning of the action and anticipate the result. They are of a leading nature, reflecting events in the form of a generalized subjective assessment.

Feelings - even more than emotions, are stable mental states that have a clearly expressed objective character. They express a stable attitude towards any specific objects (real or imaginary). The concrete relatedness of a feeling is manifested in the fact that a person cannot experience a feeling in general, without regard, but only to someone or something. For example, a person is not able to experience the feeling of love if he does not have an object of affection or worship.

Mood is the longest or "chronic" emotional state that colors all human behavior. It is known, for example, that the same work in different moods can seem either easy and pleasant, or heavy and depressing. Mood is closely related to the relationship between a person's self-esteem and the level of his claims. Moreover, the source that determines this or that mood is not always realized.

And finally, stress. We will give a picture of this state separately. Here we only note that this is an emotional state that is caused by an unexpected and tense situation.

All emotional manifestations are characterized by direction (positive or negative), the degree of tension and the level of generalization. The orientation of the emotion is connected not so much with the result of the activity, but with the extent to which the result obtained corresponds to the motive of the activity, for example, to what extent the desired is achieved. It is important to emphasize that emotions are not only recognized and comprehended, but also experienced. Unlike thinking, which reflects the properties and relations of external objects, experience is a direct reflection by a person of his own states, since the stimulus that causes the corresponding emotion through a change in the state of the receptor apparatus is located inside the body. Since an emotion reflects a person's attitude to an object, it necessarily includes some information about the object itself, which is the objectivity of emotions. In this sense, the reflection of an object is the cognitive component of an emotion, and the reflection of a person's state at that moment is its subjective component. This implies a double conditionality of emotions: on the one hand, by the needs of a person, which determine his attitude to the object of emotions, and on the other hand, by his ability to reflect and understand certain properties of this object. The organic interconnection of the two main components of emotion - objective and subjective - makes it possible to implement their probabilistic and prognostic functions in the regulation of human behavior. A person always takes a certain position in relation to an event, he does not make a purely rational assessment, his position is always biased, including emotional experience. Reflecting probabilistic events, emotion determines anticipation, which is a significant link in any learning. For example, the emotion of fear makes a child avoid the fire with which he was once burned. Emotion can also anticipate favorable events.

Anxiety can be viewed as a reaction to an uncertain situation, potentially carrying a threat, danger. Sometimes weak anxiety plays the role of a mobilizing factor, manifested by concern for the outcome of the case, it enhances the sense of responsibility, that is, it acts as an additional motivating factor, in other cases it can disorganize behavior. Because the causes of anxiety are often unknown, the intensity of the emotional reaction can be disproportionately high compared to the actual danger. If anxiety is an emotional manifestation of uncertainty about the future, then carelessness is a manifestation of excessive confidence. It arises in a situation where success has not yet been achieved, but subjectively seems guaranteed. Despair is an emotional manifestation of confidence in the failure of the action to be taken. Hope on this scale of expectations is intermediate between anxiety and carelessness, and fear is between carelessness and despair.

When a person is emotionally aroused, his condition is accompanied by certain physiological reactions: blood pressure, sugar content in it, pulse and respiration rate, muscle tension change. James and G. N. Lange assumed that it was these changes that exhausted the essence of emotions. However, later it was experimentally shown that the deep organic changes that occur during emotional reactions do not exhaust the essence of emotions: when all their physiological manifestations were excluded in the experiment, the subjective experience was preserved. Therefore, the necessary biological components do not exhaust emotions. It remained unclear why the physiological changes were needed. Subsequently, it was found that these reactions are essential not for experiencing emotions, but for activating all the forces of the body for increased muscular activity (when fighting or fleeing), usually following a strong emotional reaction. Based on this, we came to the conclusion that emotions carry out the energy mobilization of the body. This view allows us to understand the biological value of innate emotions. In one of his lectures, I.P. Pavlov explained the reason for the close relationship between emotions and muscle movements as follows: “If we turn to our distant ancestors, we will see that everything was based on muscles ... One cannot imagine any beast, lying for hours and getting angry without any muscular manifestations of his anger. In our ancestors, every feeling passed into the work of the muscles. When, for example, a lion becomes angry, this takes the form of a fight, the hare’s fear immediately turns into a run, etc. And in our zoological ancestors, everything also poured out just as directly into any activity of the skeletal muscles: then they are in fear fled from danger, then in anger they themselves attacked the enemy, then they defended the life of their child.

A very expressive description of the physiological and behavioral components of joy, sadness and anger is given in the book by G. N. Lange. Joy is accompanied by an increase in innervation in the muscles of external movements, while small arteries expand, blood flow to the skin increases, it turns red and warmer, accelerated blood circulation facilitates the nutrition of tissues, and all physiological functions begin to perform better. A rejoicing person gesticulates, children jump and clap their hands, sing and laugh. Joy makes you younger, because a happy person, in a good mood, creates optimal conditions for nourishing all body tissues. Against, hallmark The physiological manifestation of sadness is its paralyzing effect on the muscles of voluntary movement, a feeling of fatigue arises and, as happens with any fatigue, slow and weak movements are observed. The eyes appear large as the muscles of the eye socket relax. As the muscles relax, the vasomotors contract and the tissues bleed. A person constantly feels cold and chills, warms up with great difficulty and is very sensitive to cold, while the small vessels of the lungs contract and, as a result, the lungs are emptied of blood. In this position, a person feels a lack of air, tightness and heaviness in the chest and tries to alleviate his condition with prolonged and deep breaths. A sad person can be recognized by his appearance: he walks slowly, his hands dangle, his voice is weak, soundless. Such a person willingly remains motionless. Sorrows make you very old, because they are accompanied by changes in the skin, hair, nails, teeth.

It is known, for example, that in defeating armies there is a much greater susceptibility to disease than in victorious armies.

However, the biological component of the adaptive function of such a complex mental process as emotion - to contribute to the timely and full energy mobilization of the body in extreme conditions - does not limit the role of emotions in human life. The theoretical provisions of P. K. Anokhin emphasize the stabilizing function of emotions and its deep connection with the processes of predicting the situation on the basis of memory traces. He believed that emotional experiences were fixed in evolution as a mechanism that keeps life processes within optimal limits and prevents the destructive nature of a lack or excess of vital factors. Positive emotions appear when ideas about the future useful result, retrieved from memory, coincide with the result of a perfect behavioral act. Mismatch leads to negative emotional states. Positive emotions that arise when a goal is achieved are remembered and, under the right circumstances, can be retrieved from memory to obtain the same useful result.

P. V. Simonov proposed a concept according to which emotions are an apparatus that turns on when there is a mismatch between a vital need and the possibility of satisfying it, that is, with a lack or significant excess of relevant information necessary to achieve a goal. At the same time, the degree of emotional stress is determined by the need and the lack of information necessary to satisfy this need. In normal situations, a person orients behavior towards signals of highly probable events, and thanks to such a strategy, it turns out to be adequate to reality and leads to the achievement of an adaptive effect. However, in special cases, in unclear situations, when a person does not have accurate information in order to organize his actions to satisfy an existing need, a different response tactic is needed, including an incentive to act in response to signals with a low probability of their reinforcement.

The parable of two frogs caught in a jar of sour cream is well known. One, convinced that it was impossible to get out, stopped resisting and died. The other continued to jump and fight, although all her movements seemed meaningless. But in the end, under the blows of the frog's paws, the sour cream thickened, turned into a lump of butter, the frog climbed on it and jumped out of the jar. This parable illustrates the role of emotions from this position: even seemingly useless actions can turn out to be saving.

Emotional tone accumulates in itself a reflection of the most common and frequently occurring signs of beneficial and harmful environmental factors that persist for a long time. Thanks to this, the body gains time and increases the speed of reactions, because due to its generalization, the emotional tone helps to make a preliminary, but quick decision about the meaning of a new signal instead of comparing the new signal with all known and stored in memory. An emotional tone allows a person to quickly respond to new signals, reducing them to a common biological denominator: useful - harmful.

Let us cite as an example the data of the Lazarus experiment, which indicate that emotion can be considered as a generalized assessment of the situation. The purpose of the experiment was to find out what the opinion of the viewers depends on - on the content, that is, on what is happening on the screen, or on the subjective assessment of what is being shown. Four groups of healthy adult subjects were shown a film about the ritual custom of Australian Aboriginal initiation - the initiation of boys into men, while creating three different versions of the musical accompaniment. The first one (with disturbing music) suggested an interpretation: inflicting ritual wounds is a dangerous and harmful action, and the boys may die. The second one (with major music) tuned in to the perception of what is happening as a long-awaited and joyful event: teenagers are looking forward to initiation into men; it is a day of joy and rejoicing. The third accompaniment was neutral narrative, as if an anthropologist impartially told about the customs of the Australian tribes unfamiliar to the viewer. And, finally, another option - the control group watched a film without music - silent. During the demonstration of the film, all subjects were monitored. During the minutes of difficult scenes depicting the ritual operation itself, the subjects of all groups showed signs of stress: changes in pulse, skin electrical conductivity, hormonal changes. The audience was calmer when they perceived the silent version, and it was most difficult for them with the first (disturbing) version of the musical accompaniment. Experiments have shown that the same movie may or may not cause a stress reaction: it all depends on how the viewer evaluates the situation on the screen. In this experiment, the assessment was imposed by the style of the musical accompaniment.

How does a generalized assessment come about? V. K. Vilyunas believes that stable relationships to objects of vital importance are formed as a result of switching the focus of experience from the main property of the object of need to its entire integral image, i.e., with a peculiar spread of subjective relations in space and time. It is the qualities of generalization that explain the property of emotions to change a person’s perception of causal relationships, which is usually called the “logic of feelings”. So, a child at the sight of a person in a white coat is alert, perceiving his white coat as a sign with which the emotion of pain is associated. He extended his attitude towards the doctor to everything that is connected with him and surrounds him. The impact of emotion is generalized not only in space, but also in time, which is manifested in the conservatism of emotions. Emotional tone can be considered as a generalized cognitive evaluation.

Why did emotions arise, why nature “could not get by” with thinking? There is an assumption that emotions were once a preform of thinking that performed the simplest and most vital functions (55, 262). Indeed, a necessary condition for isolating relations between objects in pure form how it happens in the process advanced thinking, is decentration - the ability to move freely in the mental field and look at an object from different points of view. In emotion, a person still retains the umbilical cord of the connection of his position only with himself, he is still unable to isolate objective relations between objects, but is already able to isolate a subjective relationship to any object. It is from these positions that one can say that emotion is the most important step towards the development of thinking.

The experiential component of emotion provides a person with the opportunity to adapt to existence in an informationally uncertain environment. In conditions of complete certainty, the goal can be achieved without the help of emotions; a person will have neither joy nor triumph if, at a predetermined time, having performed several strictly defined actions, he will reach a goal, the achievement of which was obviously not in doubt.

Emotions arise when there is a lack of information necessary to achieve the goal, they contribute to the search new information and thereby increase the likelihood of achieving the goal. Usually people are forced to satisfy their needs in conditions of chronic lack of information. This circumstance contributed to the development of special forms of adaptation associated with emotions, which provide an influx of additional information by changing the sensitivity of sensory inputs. By increasing sensitivity, emotions contribute to responding to an expanded range of external signals. At the same time, the resolution of the perception of signals from the internal environment increases, and, consequently, more hypotheses are retrieved from memory stores. This, in turn, leads to the fact that unlikely or random associations can be used in solving the problem, which would not be considered in a calm state.

In conditions of lack of information necessary for organizing actions, negative emotions arise. According to P. V. Simonov, the emotion of fear develops with a lack of information necessary for protection. It is in this case that it becomes expedient to respond to an extended range of signals, the usefulness of which is not yet known. Like energy mobilization, such a response is redundant and irregular, but it prevents a really important signal from being missed, the ignoring of which can cost one's life.

The strongest negative emotion is fear, which is defined as the expectation and prediction of failure when performing an action that must be performed under given conditions. Repeated failures, combined with the need to repeat an unsuccessful action over and over again, lead to fear of this action. Awareness helps overcome fear. So, in competitions of sports teams of equal strength, as is known, the home team wins more often, that is, athletes performing in their sports hall, in their country. Preliminary awareness of athletes about the conditions of the competition, about rivals, about the country, its customs, helps to ensure that there is no place for ignorance in the minds of athletes, and at the same time anxiety, doubt and fear.

Very often, the fear that arises in unexpected and unknown situations reaches such strength that a person dies. Understanding that fear may be the result of a lack of information allows you to overcome it. There is an old parable about fear. “Where are you going?” the wanderer asked when he met the Plague. "I'm going to Baghdad. I have to kill five thousand people there.” A few days later, the same person met the Plague again. “You said you would kill five thousand, but you killed fifty,” he reproached her. “No,” she objected, “I killed only five thousand, the rest died of fear.” The courageous French doctor Alain Bombard, who took the trouble to understand the causes of the death of those in distress on the high seas and proved by personal example that it is possible to cross the ocean in a rubber lifeboat, came to the conclusion that main reason loss of life at sea is a sense of doom, horror of the elements. He wrote: “Victims of legendary shipwrecks who died prematurely, I know it was not thirst that killed you. Swinging on the waves to the plaintive cries of seagulls, you died of fear! .

It is assumed that the feeling of surprise is associated with the same conditions under which fear sometimes arises. The reaction of surprise is considered as a peculiar form of fear, which is proportional to the difference between the expected and actually received dose of information, only with surprise, attention is focused on the causes of the unusual, and with fear, on the anticipation of the threat. Understanding the relationship of surprise and fear allows you to overcome fear if you shift the focus from the results of the event to the analysis of its causes.

Pleasure, joy, happiness are positive emotions. Pleasure usually arises as a result of an action already in progress, while joy is more often associated with the expectation of pleasure with an increasing probability of satisfaction of some need. The emotion of pleasure is also inherent in animals, and joy and happiness arise only in a situation of human interpersonal relationships. The most powerful positive emotion is happiness. A person usually strives to choose for himself, if possible, such an activity that would give him the maximum of happiness attainable under the given circumstances in the sense that he understands it. K. Marx, for example, believed that the happiest person is the one who fights.

When does a person experience happiness? Then, when there comes a coincidence of what was conceived and achieved, or when this moment is approaching. Therefore, the path to happiness is in plans, ideals, goals and dreams. They are anticipated results not yet in reality. Without them, there would be no pleasant feelings. The closer and more accessible the goal was, the more modest the positive emotion. Thus, a person who wants to experience strong positive emotions, to fully understand what he is capable of, must set himself difficult and distant goals - it is their achievement that brings a feeling of happiness.

Great forces are born for a great goal: a person who has set himself a very difficult task becomes physically healthier and mentally more stable. Why? Imagine that you are walking, looking at a distant, but beckoning star, holding your head high. Then small obstacles on your way will not attract attention and small difficulties will not only not upset you, but you simply will not notice them. It's never too late to set a meaningful goal for yourself. So, the outstanding German scientist Albert Schweitzer at the age of 30 was already a professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and, in addition, a well-known organist in Europe. Nevertheless, he decides to become a doctor and enters the medical faculty of the same university. In this new field, Schweitzer won worldwide recognition.

Numerous facts illustrate the impact of the significance of the goal on increasing resilience to traumatic factors. For example, a special immunity to disease and fatigue in a mother whose child is in danger. If a goal set by a person is extremely significant on a universal scale, and not only on a personal level, cannot be realized even throughout a person’s life, then this does not reduce its stimulating effect. The history of mankind is full of examples of full disclosure creativity and the emergence of mental invulnerability in people who went to a noble and distant goal. And vice versa, if a person sets himself only close, easily achievable goals, then this can quickly lead him to disappointment in life and moral devastation. The greatest contribution to the future happy life of their child will be made by those parents who help their son or daughter form a distant and meaningful life perspective.

§ 14.1. HUMAN EMOTIONS AND FEATURES OF THEIR MANIFESTATIONS

In modern psychology, emotional phenomena are understood as subjective experiences by a person of his attitude to objects, phenomena, events, and other people. The word "emotion" itself comes from the Latin "emovere", which means to excite, excite, shock. Emotions are closely related to needs, because, as a rule, when needs are met, a person experiences positive emotions and, conversely, when it is impossible to get what he wants, negative ones.

For many years, scientists have contrasted emotions and processes associated with the cognition of the surrounding reality, considering emotions to be a phenomenon that we inherited from distant animal ancestors. To date, it is generally accepted that the structure of emotions includes not only a subjective component, i.e. a reflection of a person’s state, but also a cognitive component - a reflection of objects and phenomena that have a certain significance for the needs, goals and motives of a person experiencing emotions. This implies the dual conditionality of emotions - on the one hand, by the needs of a person, which determine his attitude to the object of emotions, and on the other hand, by his ability to reflect and understand certain properties of this object.

Each emotion is unique in its sources, experiences, external manifestations and methods of regulation. We know from experience how rich the repertoire of human emotions is. It includes a whole palette of various emotional phenomena. We can say that man is the most emotional of living beings, he has a highly differentiated means of external expression of emotions and a wide variety of internal experiences.

There are many classifications of emotions. The most obvious division of emotions into positive and negative. Using the criterion of mobilization of the body's resources, sthenic and asthenic emotions are distinguished (from the Greek "stenos" - strength). Sthenic emotions increase activity, causing a surge of energy and elevation, while asthenic emotions act in the opposite way. According to needs, lower emotions associated with the satisfaction of organic needs, the so-called general sensations (hunger, thirst, etc.), are distinguished from higher emotions (feelings), socially conditioned, associated with social relations.

According to the strength and duration of manifestations, several types of emotions are distinguished: affects, passions, emotions proper, moods, feelings and stress.

Affect is the most powerful emotional reaction that completely captures the human psyche. It usually occurs in extreme conditions when a person cannot cope with the situation. Distinctive features of affect are situational, generalized, short duration and high intensity. There is a mobilization of the whole organism, movements are impulsive. Affect is practically uncontrollable and is not subject to volitional control.

Passion is a strong, persistent, long-lasting feeling that captures a person and owns him. By strength it approaches affect, and by duration - to feelings.

Emotions in the narrow sense are situational in nature, they express an evaluative attitude to emerging or possible situations. Actually, emotions can be weakly manifested in external behavior, if a person skillfully hides his emotions, then it is generally difficult to guess what he is experiencing.

Feelings are the most stable emotional states. They are subjective. It is always a feeling for something, for someone. They are sometimes referred to as "higher" emotions because they arise from the satisfaction of higher order needs.

Moods are the state that colors our feelings, the overall emotional state for a significant amount of time. Unlike emotions and feelings, mood is not objective, but personal; it is not situational, but extended over time.

In addition to changes occurring in the nervous, endocrine and other systems of the body, emotions are expressed in the expressive behavior of a person. At present, the main experimental study of emotions consists in studying the expressive component of emotions: facial expressions, pantomimes, intonation, etc.

Emotions are manifested in the so-called expressive movements (facial expressions - expressive movements of the face; pantomime - expressive movements of the whole body and "vocal facial expressions" - the expression of emotions in intonation and timbre of the voice).

A number of emotional states are clearly differentiated both in terms of external objective signs and in terms of the quality of subjective experiences. The general characteristics of emotions formed the basis for the creation of a number of scales of emotional states.

However, the topic of human emotions remains one of the most mysterious areas of psychology. The difficulty of the scientific study of emotions is associated with a high level of subjectivity of their manifestations. We can say that emotions are the most psychological of all identified processes.

There is no consensus among scientists dealing with the problem of emotions regarding the question of their role in the implementation of life processes. Even in the days of ancient philosophy, opinions were expressed both about the disturbing, disorganizing influence of emotions on behavior, and that they represent the most important stimulating and mobilizing effect.

To date, it is customary to distinguish several basic functions of emotions: adaptive, signaling, evaluative, regulatory and communicative. Emotions reflect the significance and evaluation of different situations by a person, so the same stimuli can cause the most dissimilar reactions in different people. It is in emotional manifestations that the depth of a person's inner life is expressed. Personality is largely formed under the influence of lived experiences. Emotional reactions, in turn, are due to the individual characteristics of the emotional sphere of a person.

Without emotional manifestations, it is difficult to imagine any interaction between people, so one of the most important is the communicative function of emotions. By expressing his emotions, a person shows his attitude to reality and, above all, to other people. Mimic and pantomimic expressive movements allow a person to convey his experiences to other people, to inform them about his attitude to phenomena, objects, etc. how many emotions.

Psychological studies have shown that a person receives most of the information in the process of communication through non-verbal means of communication. With the help of the verbal (verbal) component, a person transmits a small percentage of information, while the main load in the transfer of meaning lies with the so-called "extra-linguistic" means of communication.

For a long time, expressive movements were considered only as an external accompaniment of experience, where the movement itself acted as something accompanying emotional experiences.

One of the earliest approaches to understanding the role of expressive movements was proposed by W. James and K. Lange, who formulated the so-called peripheral theory of emotions. They believed that emotions are due only to peripheral changes and, in fact, are reduced to them. In their opinion, the expression of emotions is a purely reflex reaction that causes changes in the body, and only their subsequent awareness constitutes the emotion itself. They reduced emotions exclusively to peripheral reactions and, in connection with this, turned the conscious processes of a central nature into a secondary one, following the emotion, but not included in it and its non-determining act.

However, expressive movements are a component of emotions, an external form of their existence or manifestation. Expressive movement and emotional experience form a unity, interpenetrating each other. Therefore, expressive movements and actions create the image of the character, revealing his inner content in the outer action.

Ch. Darwin made an important step in understanding the nature of the expression of emotions by applying biological and social approaches to their study. Ch. Darwin's research, systematized in the work "Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals", led him to the conviction that many manifestations of emotions in gestures and facial expressions are the result of an evolutionary process. He found that the movements of the muscles with which a person expresses his emotions are very similar and originated from similar motor acts of our ancestors - monkeys.

Modern researchers agree with Ch. Darwin that facial expressions arose in the evolutionary process and performs an important adaptive function.

Almost from the first minutes of life, the baby shows emotional reactions. The presence of identical emotional expressions in blind and sighted children confirmed the fact of a genetic component in emotional manifestations.

Studies of the behavior of people belonging to different cultures have found that in the field of expression of emotions there are both universal types of reactions and specific to individual cultures.

§ 14.2. RECOGNITION OF EMOTIONS BY FACE EXPRESSION

Full-fledged communication between people is impossible without understanding, mutual influence, mutual evaluation of each other. In any interaction of people, first of all, it is necessary to correctly understand the reactions of another person, to have the means to distinguish between the properties and states of partners.

All human relationships are based on emotions, and emotions are discovered by others mainly through external expressions. Facial expression is central to expressive behavior. The face as a channel of non-verbal communication is the leading means of communication, conveying the emotional and meaningful subtext of speech messages, it serves as a regulator of the very procedure of communication between partners.

If, in Darwin's words, "expression is the language of emotions," then the movement of the facial muscles can be considered the ABC of this language. V. M. Bekhterev also noted that, unlike pantomimic movements and gestures, facial expressions are always emotional and, first of all, are a reflection of the speaker's feelings. Many scientists have observed that the complex play of facial muscles expresses the mental state of the subject more eloquently than words.

Interest in the study of the face as a source of information about a person arose in ancient Greece. This led to the creation of a whole science of the face, called physiognomy. Throughout the history of physiognomy from Aristotle to the present day, people believed in the existence of a direct relationship between facial features and a person's character. With the help of various recommendations, each sought to penetrate the thoughts of the interlocutor, based on the features of the structure and expression of the face.

However, to date, the dependence of a person’s character and his appearance (body structure, face) has not received convincing scientific confirmation. It is generally accepted that the main role in expressive facial expressions is played by the central nervous system person. The relationship between facial muscle contractions and the appearance of certain facial expressions was experimentally confirmed. Experiments have shown that artificially induced changes in the face after stimulation of facial muscles with the help of electrodes are similar to natural reactions that occur with certain emotions. Thus, human facial expressions are considered as a product nervous activity, as a response to signals from the corresponding parts of the central nervous system. The connection of facial expression with the cerebral cortex allows a person to be aware and direct his facial reactions, as a result of which human facial expressions have become the most important tool for communication.

The importance of mimic activity in comparison with pantomimic activity in emotional communication increases with phylo- and ontogenetic development. In phylogenesis, these changes parallel the evolution of facial musculature. Thus, invertebrates and lower vertebrates do not have superficial facial muscles at all and their repertoire of emotions is minimal. Further development of facial muscles is observed in vertebrates, reaching a high level of development in higher primates.

Numerous studies have led to the conclusion that the neuromuscular mechanisms of the face, necessary for performing basic facial expressions, form a sequence of development from higher primates to humans. Indeed, the higher the position of an animal in the evolutionary series, the more emotions it can show. By nature itself, a person has a special role in biocommunicativeness.

It is known that facial expressions and gestures as elements of expressive behavior are one of the first systems acquired in childhood. The appearance in a child without special training of understandable gestures and facial expressions indicates that the ways of expressing emotions are genetically inherent in a person.

Scientists have found that all the muscles of the face necessary to express various emotions are formed during the 15-18th week of embryogenesis, and changes in the “facial expression” take place starting from the 20th week of embryonic development. Thus, both mechanisms by which faces are recognized as important categories of stimuli and themselves express certain emotions are already sufficiently formed by the time of a person's birth, although, of course, they differ in many respects in terms of the possibilities of functioning from the face of an adult. In other words, facial expression is an important communication system capable of functioning from birth.

Expressive manifestations are partly innate, partly developed socially, by imitation. One of the proofs of the innateness of some manifestations of emotions is that in young children - blind and sighted - facial expressions are the same. For example, raising the eyebrows in surprise is an instinctive act and is also found in those born blind. However, with age, the facial expressions of the sighted become more expressive, while in the blind-born it not only does not improve, but evens out, which indicates its social regulation. Consequently, mimic movements have not only a genetic determinant, but depend on training and education.

The development and improvement of facial expressions goes along with the development of the psyche, starting from infancy, and with the weakening of neuropsychic excitability in old age, facial expressions weaken, retaining the features that are most often repeated in life and therefore cut deeper into the external appearance of the face.

Acquiring a certain experience of communicating with people from early childhood, each person can, with varying degrees of certainty, determine the emotional states of others by their expressive movements and, above all, by facial expressions.

It is known that a person can control his expressive movements, therefore, manifestations of emotions are used by people in the process of communication, acting as non-verbal communication means. There are great differences between people in the possibility of mastering emotional manifestations (from complete non-mastery (with mental disorders) to perfection in talented actors).

During a person's life, a certain system of standards is formed, with the help of which he evaluates other people. Recent studies in the field of emotion recognition have shown that a number of factors influence a person’s ability to understand others: gender, age, personality, professional characteristics, as well as a person’s belonging to a particular culture.

A number of professions require a person to be able to manage his emotions and adequately determine the expressive movements of the people around him. Understanding other people's reactions and responding to them correctly in a collaborative environment is an integral part of success in many professions. Failure to agree, understand another person, enter into his position can lead to complete professional incompetence. This quality is especially important for people in whose professions communication occupies an important place (for example, doctors, especially psychotherapists, leaders, teachers, trainers, investigators, diplomats, social workers, managers, etc.). The ability to understand the numerous nuances of emotional manifestations and reproduce them is necessary for people who have devoted themselves to art (actors, artists, writers). Understanding and the ability to reproduce is the most important stage in teaching actors the art of intonation, facial expressions, gestures, the need for which was mentioned by K. S. Stanislavsky.

The modern practice of psychological preparation of people for various types of activities, their social training, for example, with the help of various training programs, allows developing skills of competence in communication, the most important component of which is the perception and understanding of each other by people.

§ 14.3. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

The relationship of emotions with cognitive processes has long been of interest to psychologists, many experiments have been devoted to this issue, but this topic is still the subject of great debate. Points of view vary from the complete reduction of emotions to the processes of cognition (S. L. Rubinshtein) to the recognition of the secondary nature of emotions in relation to cognition and rigid dependence on the cognitive sphere. In addition, the traditions of separating emotions from the sphere of cognition with the presentation of emotions as an independent entity and the opposition of emotional and cognitive processes are still preserved.

In our national school, the informational theory of emotions, developed by the Moscow psychologist P. V. Simonov, is best known. He proposed to consider any emotion in accordance with the formula

where emotion is a function of the actual need and the difference between the information needed to satisfy that need and the information available in this moment time. Thus, according to Simonov, any emotion is primarily determined by information (cognitive) processes. If at the level of cognition we lack information about the possibility of satisfying a need, we experience negative emotions, and, conversely, the presence of the necessary information even at the level of anticipation gives a positive emotion.

For a long time, intelligence was reduced to a set of cognitive processes, and for many people this term is still associated only with the characteristics of the sphere of knowledge. However, intelligence is a complex psychological concept, which primarily emphasizes the integrating function of the mental. One of the criteria for the development of intelligence is the success of a person's adaptation to the surrounding reality. Obviously, knowledge and erudition do not always determine success in life. Much more important is how a person feels in the world around him, how socially competent he is in dealing with people, how he is able to cope with negative emotions and maintain a positive tone in his mood. It is these observations, confirmed by practical research, that led American scientists to introduce an independent psychological concept of "emotional intelligence" (hereinafter referred to as EI) and attempts to develop its measurement and evaluation.

The new concept was proposed by P. Salovey (Yale University, USA) and D. Mayer (University of New Hampshire, USA) in the 90s. The most common definition of emotional intelligence includes:

the ability to accurately perceive emotions, evaluate and express them;

the ability to access and (or) evoke (generate) emotions when they accompany thought processes;

the ability to understand emotions and apply emotional knowledge;

the ability to regulate emotions in order to promote emotional and intellectual growth.

Schematically, all these four components are presented in Table 5.

Each component of EI is revealed with the help of four substructures, and they are arranged as they develop from easy to more complex (on the left - the earliest, on the right - those that develop later; below - basic, and above - the highest). Thus, the authors suggest that people with high emotional intelligence master and master most of them faster.

Perception, evaluation and expression of emotions constitute an essential part of emotional intelligence and are already described in detail in this textbook. At this level, the development of EI is determined by how a person is able to identify emotional manifestations in himself and others, as well as through the perception of works of art (1–2), has the gift of adequate expression of emotions (3), is sensitive to manipulation, i.e., is able to distinguish true emotions from simulated (4).

Emotional accompaniment of cognitive processes describes how emotions affect how people think and evaluate events. In addition to sending information that is significant for a person at the initial level (1), the ability to anticipate certain emotions develops, and the experience of emotional experiences appears. A person can imagine himself in the place of another, empathize and reproduce similar emotions in himself, thereby regulating his behavior in a given situation. According to the authors, this is the so-called "emotional theater of consciousness", and the better it is developed in a person, the easier it is for him to choose alternative life approaches (2). This is followed by the development of the influence of emotions on the overall assessment of the life situation. The general emotional state is largely

Table 5

(after P. Salovey and D. Sluyter, Basic Books, NY, 1997.)

determines the level of tasks that a person sets for himself, and, accordingly, is able to achieve (3). Emotions determine thought processes, for example, the predominance of deductive or inductive thinking was experimentally established depending on emotional states (4). S. L. Rubinshtein also wrote about this: “... thought sometimes begins to be regulated by the desire to correspond with subjective feeling, and not with objective reality ... Emotional thinking, with more or less passionate bias, selects arguments in favor of the desired solution.”

Understanding and analyzing emotions; application of emotional knowledge. First, the child learns to identify emotions, he forms concepts that describe certain emotional experiences (1). Throughout life, a person accumulates emotional knowledge, an understanding of certain emotions increases (2). An emotionally mature person can already understand the existence of complex and contradictory experiences due to different circumstances. It is no longer surprising for him that the same feeling (for example, love) can be accompanied by a whole gamut of very different emotions (jealousy, anger, hatred, tenderness, etc.) (3). At the next level of development of this component of EI, a person already knows and can predict the consequences of certain emotions (for example, that anger can turn into rage or guilt), which is especially important in interpersonal interaction (4).

Reflexive regulation of emotions. The highest stage of EI development is the conscious regulation of emotions. Even I. M. Sechenov wrote that “the point is not fear, but the ability to control fear.” A person should be open and tolerant of any emotions, whether they please him or not (1). From an early age, parents teach children to manage emotions, to be able to restrain their emotional manifestations (for example, irritation, tears, laughter, etc.). Children master control over emotions to one degree or another and learn to regulate them in socially acceptable norms. An emotionally mature person can direct the energy mobilized even with the help of negative emotions into development that is beneficial for him (for example, get angry before starting at a sports competition and use this energy to improve his results) (2). Further development allows you to reflectively monitor emotions not only in yourself, but also in other people (3). The final part of this component of EI is associated with a high level of mastery of emotions, the ability to survive strong traumatic effects, to get out of negative emotional states without exaggerating or underestimating the importance of their impact (4).

Thus, we have considered all four components, with the help of which the concept of emotional intelligence is revealed today, and although there are still many questions in its description and measurement, the proposed concept and its growing popularity among scientists different countries surely bring us closer to understanding the toughest questions interaction of emotional and cognitive spheres of the mental.

§ 14.4. HIGHER FEELINGS

At present, there is no exhaustive generally accepted classification of feelings due to their great diversity and historical variability.

The most common of the existing classifications identifies separate subspecies of feelings in accordance with specific areas of activity and areas of social phenomena in which they manifest themselves.

A special group is made up of higher feelings, which contain all the richness of a person's emotional relationship to social reality. Depending on the subject area to which they relate, the highest feelings are divided into moral, aesthetic, intellectual and practical. Higher senses have a number of characteristic features:

the great degree of generality which they can achieve in their developed forms;

higher feelings are always associated with a more or less clear awareness of social norms relating to one or another side of reality.

Since the attitude of a person as a whole to the world and to life is revealed to a certain extent in higher feelings, they are sometimes called ideological feelings.

Moral, or moral, are the feelings that a person experiences when perceiving the phenomena of reality and comparing these phenomena with the norms, categories of morality developed by society.

The object of moral feelings are social institutions and institutions, the state, human groups and individuals, life events, human relations, the person himself as an object of his feelings, etc.

The question arises: is it possible to consider moral feeling only because it is directed to certain social institutions, human groups, individuals? No, since the emergence of a moral feeling presupposes that a person has mastered moral norms and rules, that they appear in his mind as something to which he is obliged, cannot but obey.

Moral feelings include: a sense of duty, humanity, benevolence, love, friendship, sympathy.

Among the moral feelings sometimes stand out separately moral and political feelings as a manifestation of emotional relations to various public organizations and institutions, collectives, the state as a whole, to the Motherland.

One of key features moral feelings is their effective character. They act as the motivating forces of many heroic deeds and sublime deeds.

aesthetic feelings- this is the emotional attitude of a person to the beautiful or ugly in the surrounding phenomena, objects, in people's lives, in nature and in art.

The basis for the emergence of aesthetic feelings is the ability of a person to perceive the phenomena of the surrounding reality, guided not only by moral standards, but also by the principles of beauty. Man acquired this ability in the process of social development, social practice.

Aesthetic feelings are characterized by great diversity, complexity of the psychological picture, versatility and depth of influence on a person's personality.

The subject of aesthetic feelings can be various phenomena of reality: the social life of a person, nature, art in the broadest sense of the word.

A person experiences especially deep feelings when perceiving the best works of fiction, musical, dramatic, fine and other arts. This is due to the fact that moral, intellectual, and practical feelings are specifically intertwined in these experiences. The huge positive impact that the perception of works of art has on the mental and physiological state of a person was noted by Aristotle, who called this phenomenon “purification” (“catharsis”).

In addition to experiencing the beautiful (or ugly), aesthetic feelings also carry out a kind of reconfiguration of mental and physiological functions human body according to the perceived aesthetic object. As a rule, aesthetic feelings have a sthenic effect on the psyche, activate the functions of the body. This influence of them is manifested in a kind of excitement when perceiving works of art.

Aesthetic feeling cannot be characterized by any one emotion involved in its manifestation. The complexity and originality of aesthetic experiences lies in the specific and unique combination of emotions that are different in their direction, intensity and meaning. N.V. Gogol characterized his humor as laughter visible to the world through tears invisible to the world.

Although aesthetic feelings are specific, different from moral ones, they are directly related to the latter, often influence their upbringing and formation, and play a role in the social life and activities of people similar to that played by moral feelings.

intellectual, or cognitive Feelings are called experiences that arise in the process of human cognitive activity.

“The knowledge of man,” writes G. Kh. Shingarov, “is not a dead, mirror-mechanical reflection of reality, but a passionate search for truth…”

The discovery of new factors and phenomena of reality, their interpretation, reasoning about certain provisions, finding new ways to solve a problem cause a whole range of experiences in a person: surprise, bewilderment, curiosity, curiosity, conjecture, a sense of joy and pride about the discovery made, a feeling doubts about the correctness of the decision, etc. All these feelings, depending on the nature and scale of the problem being solved, on the degree of its difficulty, can appear in a more or less complex form.

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• Introduction
• 1. Concepts of emotions and feelings
• 3. Self-regulation
• Conclusion

Introduction

Everything that a person encounters in everyday life evokes a certain attitude in him. Some objects and phenomena appeal to him sympathy, others, on the contrary, disgust. Some arouse interest and curiosity, others - indifference. Even those individual properties of objects, information about which a person receives through sensations, such as color, taste, smell, are not indifferent to him. Feeling them, he experiences pleasure or displeasure, sometimes clearly expressed, sometimes barely noticeable. This peculiar coloration of sensations, which characterizes his attitude to the individual qualities of the object, is called the sensual tone of sensations.

A more complex attitude towards oneself is caused by life facts taken in their entirety, in all the diversity of their properties and features. Attitudes towards them are expressed in such complex sensory experiences as joy, grief, sympathy, neglect, anger, pride, shame, fear. All these experiences are feelings or emotions.

emotional experience mental process

1. Concepts of emotions and feelings

A person not only cognizes objective and subjective reality, but also relates in a certain way to objects, events, to other people, to his personality. Joy, sadness, indignation, admiration, love, hatred - all these are various forms of a person's subjective attitude to reality: emotions and feelings.

The word "emotion" comes from the Latin word "emovere", which means to excite, excite, shock.

Definition. Emotions and feelings are mental processes that reflect the personal significance of external and internal situations for human life in the form of experiences.

Emotions and feelings are included in all mental processes and states of a person. Any manifestations of personality activity are accompanied by emotional experiences.

In essence, emotions and feelings are identical mental processes, they form a single substructure of the personality - its emotional sphere. But at the same time, emotions and feelings differ from each other in a number of ways.

Emotions are a special class of subjective psychological states that reflect in the form of direct experiences the process and results of practical activities aimed at meeting the actual needs of a person.

Since everything that a person does ultimately serves the purpose of satisfying his various needs, any manifestations of human activity are accompanied by emotional experiences.

The oldest in origin, the simplest and most common forms of emotional experiences among living beings are the pleasure derived from the satisfaction of organic needs, and the displeasure associated with the inability to do this when the corresponding need is exacerbated. Any new situation, information that contributes to the satisfaction of needs (or increases the likelihood of their satisfaction) - causes positive emotions; and information that reduces this probability inevitably causes negative emotions. Therefore, in some cases, we choose such behavior that helps to strengthen - repeat joy, admiration, interest; in others, one that reduces or prevents fear, grief, anger. This is how emotions govern our behavior.

Emotions can be triggered by both real and imagined situations. They, like feelings, are perceived by a person as his own inner experiences, are transmitted to other people, and underlie empathy. Already Darwin considered emotion - as the body's response to the situation.

Distinctive features of emotions:

From the point of view of evolution, emotions are an older form of a person's relationship to the world around him, therefore they are inherent in both animals and humans. Feelings are unique to humans.

Emotions are more associated with the satisfaction of natural needs. Feelings arise when higher social, including spiritual, needs are satisfied.

Emotions are situational. They reflect the relationship of the subject to the object at the moment. Feelings, unlike emotions, have a relative stability and constancy. They reflect the attitude of a person to the object of his sustainable needs.

Emotion is always a direct experience. Feelings are always mediated by consciousness. They are associated with certain knowledge, understanding of the object, include memory, processes of thinking and will.

Emotions are often unconscious, so it is very difficult to relate them to a specific object. The same emotion can be associated with different objects. Feelings are always subjective. They express a stable attitude towards real or imaginary objects. There can be no feelings at all, they are caused by specific facts, events, people and circumstances to which a person is positively or negatively motivated.

The highest form of development of emotions - are feelings in relation to something, to someone, associated, respectively, with the highest human needs.

Feelings (eng. sentiments) - sustainable long-term emotional relationship of a person to other people, to the phenomena of reality, reflecting the significance of these phenomena in connection with his needs and motives. The highest product of the development of emotional processes in social conditions. Generated by the world of objective phenomena, i.e., having a strictly causally-conditioned nature. Feelings, one way or another, are subjective, since the same phenomena can have different meanings.

In contrast to the actual emotions and affects associated with specific situations, feelings have a clearly expressed objective character, but the subject can be very generalized and speculative.

The hallmarks of feelings are:

1. Clearly expressed intensity. Feelings are stronger emotional experiences than moods. When we say that a person experiences a feeling, and not a mood, by this we indicate, first of all, an intense, clearly expressed, quite definite emotional experience: a person does not just experience pleasure, but experiences joy; he does not just have a mood in which some kind of vague anxiety is expressed - he experiences fear.

2. Limited duration. Feelings don't last as long as moods. Their duration is limited by the time of the direct action of the causes that cause them, or the memories of the circumstances that caused this feeling. For example, spectators in a stadium experience strong feelings while watching a football match they are interested in, but these feelings fade after the match is over. We can re-experience this or that feeling if the thought of the object that caused this feeling in due time arises in our memory.

3. Conscious character. characteristic feature feelings is that the reasons that caused them are always clear to the person who experiences these feelings. It could be a letter we received, a sports record, a job well done, and so on. Feelings are based on complex nervous processes in the higher parts of the cerebral cortex: according to I.P. Pavlova, feelings "are connected with the uppermost department and all of them are tied to the second signaling system." "Unaccountable feeling" is a term that does not correspond to the psychological characteristics of feelings, which always act as conscious experiences. This term can rightly be applied to moods, not feelings.

4. Strictly differentiated connection of emotional experience with specific objects, actions, circumstances that cause it. Feelings do not have a diffuse character characteristic of moods. We experience a sense of pleasure when reading this particular book, and not another; doing our favorite sport, we experience satisfaction that does not apply to other sports, and so on. Feelings are most closely related to activity, for example, a feeling of fear causes a desire to run, and a feeling of anger causes a desire to fight. This "objective" character of feelings has great importance during their upbringing: feelings develop, become deeper and more perfect as a result of close acquaintance with the objects that cause them, systematic exercise in this type of activity, etc.

Feelings are the leading formations of the emotional sphere of the personality, they determine the dynamics and content of emotions.

Manifestations of emotions:

Emotional reactions are associated with nervous and humoral processes, they are also manifested in external movements, called ``expressive movements'". Expressive movements are an important component of emotions, the external form of their existence. Expressions of emotions are universal, similar for all people, sets of expressive signs that reflect certain emotional states.

Expressive forms of emotions include the following:

gestures (hand movements),

facial expressions (movements of facial muscles),

pantomime (movements of the whole body),

emotional components of speech (strength and timbre, voice intonation),

vegetative changes (redness, blanching, sweating).

The face of a person has the greatest ability to express various emotional shades.

Extreme variety of quality features. The following, rather incomplete list of emotional states, since they are expressed in human speech, allows us to judge an extremely large number and variety of emotions:

feeling of hunger, thirst, pleasant taste, pleasure, disgust, feeling of pain, desire, possession, sexual feeling;

a sense of decisiveness, self-confidence, carelessness, security, courage, bravery, bravery, courage, a sense of risk;

a sense of self-satisfaction, vanity, ambition, conceit, arrogance, shamelessness, arrogance, a sense of superiority, pride, vanity, contempt, indulgence;

Plastic. An emotion of the same quality, such as joy or fear, can be experienced by a person in many shades and degrees, depending on the causes that caused it, the objects or activities with which it is associated. A person can experience joy when meeting a friend, in the process of work that interests him, admiring the majestic pictures of nature, watching the cheerful and relaxed games of children, reading a book, etc. - but all these manifestations of joy are very different in quality and degree.

Communication with intraorganic processes. This relationship is twofold:

1) intraorganic processes are the strongest stimulators of many emotions,

2) without exception, all emotions in one form or another and degree find their expression in bodily manifestations. The close connection of emotions with the processes of vital activity of the body was noticed a very long time ago. Even Descartes, speaking about emotions (love, hate, desire, joy and sadness), argued that "they all belong to the body and are given to the soul only insofar as it is connected with the body." Emotions signal all that is good and bad for the body, and directly impels a person to activities aimed at preserving the integrity of his body and maintaining life. At the same time, emotions, being associated with an increase and decrease in blood circulation, also have a great influence on the functioning of the brain: “emotions have a much more noticeable effect on the cerebral circulation (blood) than even very energetic mental work” (Moceo).

Connection with the direct experience of one's own "I". Even the weakest emotions capture the whole person as a whole, are accompanied by thrills of one's own personality in its organic integrity and opposition. external environment. Since in his relationship with the environment a person passively experiences changes caused in him by external influences, his emotions acquire the character of emotional states; when emotions are associated with active manifestations of the personality and are expressed in activities aimed at changing the environment, they act as relations to external reality. And emotional, relationships and emotional states are always experienced by a person as his direct experiences, which, for all their effectiveness and huge role in a person’s life, often remain unconscious, forming the deep foundations of his personality, his inclinations, interests, temperament and character.

Emotion functions:

In modern psychology, there are several main functions of emotions: signal, evaluative, adaptive, regulatory, communicative, stabilizing, motivating.

Signal (information) function of emotions. The emergence of emotions and feelings informs about how the process of meeting the needs of the subject is going.

Evaluation function of emotions. Emotion acts as a generalized assessment of the situation in which the subject is located. Emotions and feelings help him navigate the surrounding reality, evaluate objects and phenomena in terms of their desirability or undesirability, usefulness or harmfulness.

The adaptive function of emotions. Thanks to the emotion that has arisen in time, the subject has the ability to quickly respond to external or internal influences and it is advisable to adapt to the prevailing conditions.

The regulatory function of emotions arises on the basis of the information-signal function. Reflecting and evaluating reality, emotions and feelings direct the behavior of the subject in a certain direction, contribute to the manifestation of certain reactions.

The communicative function of emotions indicates that without emotional manifestations it is difficult to imagine any interaction between people. Expressing emotions through feelings, a person shows his attitude to reality and to other people in expressive movements (gestures, facial expressions, pantomime, voice intonation). By demonstrating his experiences, one person affects the emotional sphere of another person, causing him to respond with emotions and feelings.

Stabilizing (protective) function of emotions. Emotions are a regulator of behavior that keeps life processes within the optimal limits of meeting needs and prevents the destructive nature of any factors for the life of a given subject.

The motivating function of emotions. Emotions (fear, surprise, anxiety, etc.), informing us about the nature of the influences of the external environment, encourage us to take certain actions.

The same emotion can "serve" different feelings, for example, you can rejoice at the success of a loved one and rejoice at the failure of a person you hate.

The same feeling can be realized in different emotions, for example, the feeling of love gives rise to a range of emotions: joy, anger, sadness, sympathy, jealousy, etc. In one and the same feeling, emotions of different signs (positive and negative) often merge, unite, pass into each other. This explains such a property of feelings as duality - ambivalence.

Feelings appear later than actual emotions; they are formed as the individual consciousness develops under the influence of the educational influences of the family, school, and art.

EMOTIONS are reactions! FEELINGS are relationships!

EMOTIONS:

Arrived in the process of evolution before

Inherent in animals and man

Tied to situations and events

Situational and short-term

Highlight events that have a meaning "here and now"

The same emotion manifests itself in different feelings

FEELINGS:

Arose in the process of evolution later

Mainly inherent in humans and higher animals

Attached to objects

Sustainable and long lasting

Allocate phenomena that have a stable, long-term motivational significance

The same feeling manifests itself in different emotions.

There are also HIGHER FEELINGS associated with the experience of truth, goodness and beauty:

1) MORAL FEELINGS associated with the distinction between good and evil;

2) ETHICAL FEELINGS - associated with the distinction between the beautiful and the ugly;

3) INTELLECTUAL FEELINGS - arise as a result of cognitive activity. It is surprise, curiosity, a sense of the new.

CHARACTERISTICS OF SENSES:

In classical psychology, there are only five "pure" real feelings - these are:

1. Anger (annoyance, discontent, indignation, disappointment, irritation, anger, rage)

2. Fear (confusion, anxiety, fright, anxiety, fear, panic, horror)

3. Sadness (sadness, longing, grief, regret, abandonment, despondency, suffering, grief, torment, despair)

4. Joy (contentment, peace, fun, pleasure, delight)

5. Love (desire, attraction, sympathy, tenderness, attraction, adoration, pleasure, bliss, passion, euphoria, nirvana, happiness)

Feelings such as: envy, jealousy, resentment, hatred, guilt (repentance), shame (shyness, embarrassment, shyness) are considered social feelings, more complex - spliced, where, in addition to feelings, there is a mental component (idea). For example, jealousy - can be described as feeling angry at the idea that someone else is giving what they should be giving to me; envy - as a feeling of anger (sadness) because of the idea that someone gets something bigger and better, while I could get it; resentment - like a feeling of anger soldered with pain because of the idea that the other behaved towards me in an inappropriate way, etc. These fusions refer to the "middle world" - interpretation, and talking about feelings, but not the expression and living of the feelings themselves, the essence of which lies in a tense mental activity in moments when it is enough just to realize your emotional state and learn how to manage it.

There are fusions of feelings where one feeling is realized in contrast to another, for example, a feeling of guilt is often fused with resentment, anger, shame, fear or grief, and only guilt or anger is realized, while the fear or disgust that is present at the same time is not noticed. Therefore, it is important to amplify (strengthen) the emotional situation and only then go to the feelings.

2. Types of emotional experiences

TYPES OF EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCES Three main levels can be distinguished in the diverse manifestations of the emotional sphere of a person. The first is the level of organic affective-emotional sensitivity. This includes elementary so-called physical feelings - pleasures, displeasures, associated mainly with organic needs. Feelings of this kind can be of a more or less specialized local character, acting as an emotional coloring or tone of a separate sensation process. They can also acquire a more general, spilled character; expressing the general, more or less diffuse, organic feeling of the individual, these emotional states are of an unobjectified nature. An example is the feeling of pointless longing, the same pointless anxiety or joy. Each such feeling reflects the objective state of an individual who is in a certain relationship with the outside world. And "objectless" anxiety can be caused by some object; but although his presence caused a feeling of anxiety, this feeling may not be directed at him, and the connection of the feeling with the object that objectively caused it may not be recognized.

The diverse manifestations of a person's emotional life are divided into emotional tone, affects, emotions proper, feelings, moods, and stress.

Emotional tone is the simplest form of experience, emotional coloring, a shade of a psychological process. The smell of a rose, the taste of an orange, good music, a bouquet in a vase, a pleasant companion, the smile of a random person - set a positive emotional tone. It may be different: overcrowded transport, crowded and stuffy, stepped on the foot, cursed - and a negative emotional mood arises. It turns out that the little things are important for mental well-being. Do not neglect small joys and give them to others, at least in the form of a smile, a compliment, a flower. Create emotional comfort.

The most powerful emotional reaction is affect - a strong, stormy and relatively short-term emotional experience that completely captures the human psyche and predetermines a single reaction to the situation as a whole (sometimes this reaction, and the stimuli that act, are not sufficiently realized - and this is one of the reasons for the practical uncontrollability of this state) .

The development of affect obeys the following law: the stronger the initial motivational stimulus of behavior is, and the more effort had to be expended to implement it, and the smaller the result, the stronger the affect! Unlike emotions and feelings, affects proceed violently, quickly, and are accompanied by pronounced organic changes and motor reactions.

Emotions proper, unlike affects, are longer states. They are a reaction not only to events that have taken place, but also to probable or remembered ones. If affects arise towards the end of the action and reflect the total final assessment of the situation, then emotions are shifted to the beginning of the action and anticipate the result. They are of a leading nature, reflecting events in the form of a generalized subjective assessment by a person of a certain situation related to the satisfaction of human needs. We call the change in the general emotional background - mood.

Mood is an emotional state that colors all human behavior. Emotional states that have arisen in the process of activity can increase or decrease a person's vital activity. The first are called - sthenic, the second - asthenic.

Passion is an alloy of emotions, motives and feelings concentrated around a certain type of activity or object (person). Or in another way: The feeling of exceptional strength of perseverance, duration, expressed in the direction of thoughts and forces towards a single goal, is called passion.

One of the most common types of affects today is stress. It is a state of excessively strong and prolonged psychological stress that occurs in a person when his nervous system receives an emotional overload. Stress disorganizes human activity, disrupts the normal course of his behavior.

Translated from English, stress is pressure, tension, pressure, and distress is grief, unhappiness, malaise, need. According to G. Selye, stress is a non-specific (that is, the same for various influences) response of the body to any requirement presented to it, which helps it adapt to the difficulty that has arisen, to cope with it. Any surprise that disrupts the usual course of life can be a cause of stress. At the same time, as G. Selye notes, it does not matter whether the situation we are faced with is pleasant or not pleasant. What matters is the intensity of the need for adjustment or adaptation.

Stress-related activities can be pleasant or unpleasant. Any event, fact or message can cause stress, i.e. become a stressor. The specific results of the two events - grief and joy - are completely different, even opposite, but their stressful effect - a non-specific requirement for a new situation - may be the same. Whether this or that situation will cause stress or not depends not only on the situation itself, but also on the person, her experience, expectations, self-confidence, etc. Of particular importance is the assessment of the threat, the expectation of dangerous consequences that the situation contains.

This means that the very occurrence, and the experience of stress, depends not only on objective, but on subjective factors, on the characteristics of the person himself: his assessment of the situation, comparing his strengths and abilities with what is required of him, etc. etc.

The concept of frustration is close to the concept of stress. The term itself is translated from Lat. Means - deceit, vain expectation. Frustration is experienced as tension, anxiety, despair, anger, which cover a person when, on the way to achieving a goal, he encounters unexpected obstacles and obstacles that interfere with the satisfaction of a need.

Frustration thus creates, along with the original motivation, a new, protective motivation aimed at overcoming the obstacle that has arisen. The old and new motivation is realized in emotional reactions.

Frustration entails emotional disturbances only when there is an obstacle to strong motivation. If a child who has begun to drink is taken away from the nipple, he reacts with anger, but at the end of suckling there are no emotional manifestations.

3. Self-regulation

SELF-REGULATION (from lat. to put in order, to adjust) - an expedient, relatively appropriate to changing conditions, establishing a balance between the environment and the body. Man is largely a self-regulating system. He is endowed with physiological and psychological mechanisms for adapting to changing conditions of life and activity, self-management, mobilization of forces and experience, changing the direction and content of his activity. Involuntary adaptation to the environment (a reaction to an increase or decrease in temperature, a change in the frequency of breathing, etc.) is a passing level of relations between a person and reality. Another, more complex level is the self-regulation of behavior through attitudes, skills, habits, and experience that are unconscious in a given situation. The third, higher level is a conscious change in one's state, maintenance and intensification of activity, regulation of one's actions in accordance with the goal and the situation.

Self-regulation, the property of biological systems to automatically establish and maintain certain physiological or other biological indicators at a certain, relatively constant level. In self-regulation, the controlling factors do not act on the regulated system from the outside, but arise within it itself. The process of self-regulation can be cyclical. Deviation of any vital factor from a constant level serves as an impetus for the mobilization of devices that restore it. At different levels of organization of living matter - from the molecular to the supraorganismal - the specific mechanisms of self-regulation are very diverse.

An example of self-regulation at the molecular level are those enzymatic reactions in which the end product affects the activity of the enzyme; in such a biochemical system, a certain concentration of the reaction product is automatically maintained. Examples Self-regulation at the cellular level: self-assembly of cellular organelles from biological macromolecules, self-organization of heterogeneous cells with the formation of ordered cell associations: maintenance of a certain value of the transmembrane potential in excitable cells and a regular temporal and spatial sequence of ion flows during excitation of the cell membrane. The processes of self-regulation occupy an important place in the phenomena of cell division and differentiation: for example, in mammals, after the removal of part of the liver, the remaining part, regenerating, automatically compensates for the loss (an example is self-regulation at the organ level). At the organismic level, the nervous, humoral, and hormonal mechanisms by which indicators of the internal environment, such as temperature, blood and osmotic pressure, blood sugar levels, etc., are established and maintained at a certain level are well studied. (see Homeostasis). One of the main mechanisms of self-regulation of functions is nervous regulation. Manifestations and mechanisms are diverse. Self-regulation of supraorganismal systems - populations (species level) and biocenoses (supraspecific level) - regulation of population size, sex ratio in them, aging and death of biological individuals, etc. The phenomena of self-regulation are characterized by general laws that are studied by biological cybernetics. In biological systems, both regulation by perturbation and deviation are found (the 2nd method differs from the 1st by the presence of feedback - from the outputs of the system to its regulators).

The concept of self-regulation is evaluated by various specialists in different ways. This is due to the unequal nature of biological systems in which automatic regulation takes place. These include systems in which the controlled parameters are constant and the result of regulation is stereotyped (for example, stereotypical and therefore "meaningless" behavior of an insect under certain conditions), as well as adaptive systems (self-adjusting, self-organizing, self-learning), which automatically adapt to changing external conditions.

Conclusion

Between people there are significant differences in the depth and stability of feelings. Some people are completely captured by feelings, leaving a deep mark after themselves. In other people, feelings are superficial, flow easily, hardly noticeable, pass quickly and completely without a trace. Manifestations of affects and passions are noticeably different in people. In this regard, one can single out people who are unbalanced, easily losing control over themselves and their behavior, prone to easily succumb to affects and passions, such as unbridled anger, panic, excitement. Other people, on the contrary, are always balanced, completely in control of themselves, consciously controlling their behavior.

One of the most significant differences between people lies in how feelings and emotions are reflected in their activities. So, for some people, feelings are of an effective nature, they encourage action, for others everything is limited to the feeling itself, which does not cause any changes in behavior. In the most striking form, the passivity of feelings is expressed in the sentimentality of a person. Such people, as a rule, are prone to emotional experiences, but the feelings they have do not affect their behavior.

It should be noted that the existing differences in the manifestation of emotions and feelings largely determine the uniqueness of a particular person, i.e. define his personality.

Bibliography

1. Psychology. Textbook for humanit. universities / Edited by Druzhinin V.N. St. Petersburg: Publishing house "Peter", 2003.

2. Radugin A.A. Psychology: Tutorial for higher educational institutions. - M.: Center, 2001.

3. Psychology for university students: textbook. allowance / Under the editorship of E.N. Rogov. - M.: Mar T, 2004

additional literature

1. Goryanina V.A. Psychology of communication // V.A. Goryanina // Textbook. M. 2002.

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Emotions and feelings, their meaning and place in the human psyche, functions and types. Basic emotional processes and their management. Will as a person's conscious overcoming of difficulties on the way to the implementation of an action, its significance for the activity of the individual.

Relevance of the research topic. In modern psychology, emotional phenomena are understood as subjective experiences by a person of his attitude to objects, phenomena, events, and other people. Emotions are one of the manifestations of a person's subjective attitude to the surrounding reality and to himself. Emotions are closely related to needs, because, as a rule, when needs are met, a person experiences positive emotions and, conversely, when it is impossible to get what he wants, negative ones. Joy, sorrow, fear, anger, compassion, bliss, pity, jealousy, indifference, love - there is no end to the words that define different kinds and shades of emotion.

Emotions play a very important role in human life. They are different from other mental processes, but it is difficult to separate them, because. they merge into a single human experience. For example, the perception of works of art in images is always accompanied by certain emotional experiences that express a person's attitude to what he feels. An interesting, successful thought, creative activity is accompanied by emotions. All sorts of memories are also associated with images and carry not only information, but also feelings. The simplest taste sensations, such as sour, sweet, bitter and salty, are also so fused with emotions that they are not even encountered in life without them.

Emotions differ from sensations in that sensations are usually not accompanied by any specific subjective experiences such as pleasure or displeasure, pleasant or unpleasant. They give a person objective information about what is happening in him and outside him. Emotions express the subjective states of a person associated with his needs and motives. They reflect the surrounding world in the form of direct experience (satisfaction, joy, sadness) and they reflect the significance for the individual of the phenomena of the situation that surround him. They "tell" what is important and what is not important. Their most striking feature is their subjectivity. We talk about emotions when we have a special state - the peak of experience (according to Maslow), when a person feels that he is working to the maximum, when he feels pride in himself.

The purpose of this work is to reveal the relationship between emotions and the mental organization of a person.

Hypothesis: emotions play an essential role in the psychological regulation of human behavior.

Research objectives:

– theoretical analysis of the problem of emotions and their functions in human life;

- analyze the mechanism of influence of emotions on human behavior.

The object of research is emotions as a special class of mental phenomena, processes and states that are associated with instincts, needs and motives.

The subject of the study is the emotional manifestation of personality in the life of an individual.

Of course, first of all, the mental organization of a person is understood as his needs, motives, activities, behavior and lifestyle, on which emotions depend, and which, as it were, give rise to them. They play a major role in the formation of emotions. Without emotions, it is impossible to perceive the world around us. They have a special role. Emotions are part of our "inner" and "outer" life, manifested when we are angry, happy, sad.

The American psychologist W. James, the creator of one of the first theories in which subjective emotional experience is correlated with functions, described the huge role of emotions in human life in the following words: “Imagine, if possible, that you suddenly lost all the emotions that fill you with the world around you, and try to imagine this world as it is in itself, without your favorable or unfavorable assessment, without the hopes or fears it inspires. This kind of aloof and lifeless performance will be almost impossible for you. For in it no part of the universe should be more important than any other, and the totality of things and events will have no meaning, character, expression or perspective. Everything valuable, interesting and important that each of us finds in his world is all a pure product of a contemplative personality.

1.1. The concept, essence and functions of emotions

In the process of evolution of the animal world, a special form of manifestation of the reflective function of the brain appeared - emotions (from lat. emoveo- excite, excite). They reflect the personal significance of external and internal stimuli, situations, events for a person, that is, what worries him, and are expressed in the form of experiences.

Each of us knows what emotions are, but it is impossible to give this state an exact scientific definition. According to V.V. Raevsky, to date, there is no single generally accepted scientific theory of emotions, as well as accurate data on in which centers and how these emotions arise and what their nervous substrate is.

For many years, scientists have contrasted emotions and processes associated with the cognition of the surrounding reality, considering emotions to be a phenomenon that we inherited from distant animal ancestors. To date, it is generally accepted that the structure of emotions includes not only a subjective component, i.e. a reflection of a person’s state, but also a cognitive component - a reflection of objects and phenomena that have a certain significance for the needs, goals and motives of a person experiencing emotions. This implies the dual conditionality of emotions - on the one hand, by the needs of a person, which determine his attitude to the object of emotions, and on the other hand, by his ability to reflect and understand certain properties of this object.

Emotions, or emotional experiences, usually mean a wide variety of human reactions - from violent outbursts of passion to subtle shades of mood. In psychology, emotions are called processes that reflect personal significance and assessment of external and internal situations for human life in the form of experiences.

In psychology emotions are defined as a person's experience at the moment of his attitude to something (to the current or future situation, to other people, to himself, etc.).

The concept of "emotion" is also used in a broad sense, when it means a holistic emotional reaction of a person, including not only the mental component - experience, but also specific physiological changes in the body that accompany this experience. Animals also have emotions, but in humans they acquire a special depth, have many shades and combinations.

Emotions play a decisive role in the learning process, in reinforcing newly formed conditioned reflexes. Reflexes that are not reinforced by stimuli undergo active inhibition, and sometimes disappear. Consequently, emotions, namely, subjective reactions to the impact of internal and external stimuli, are associated with the expansion of the range of adaptive capabilities of the organism. Emotions are active states of specialized brain structures that prompt to strengthen (repeat) or weaken (prevent) these states.

The most essential feature of emotions is their subjectivity. If such mental processes as perception and thinking allow a person to more or less objectively reflect the world around him and not dependent on him, then emotions serve to reflect the subjective attitude of a person to himself and to the world around him. It is emotions that reflect the personal significance of knowledge through inspiration, obsession, partiality and interest.

It is important to emphasize that emotions are not only recognized and comprehended, but also experienced. Unlike thinking, which reflects the properties and relationships of external objects, experience is a direct reflection by a person of his own states. A person always takes a certain position in relation to an event, he does not make a purely rational assessment, his position is always biased, including emotional experience. Reflecting probabilistic events, emotion determines anticipation, which is a significant link in any learning. For example, the emotion of fear makes a child avoid the fire with which he was once burned. Emotion can also anticipate favorable events.

When a person feels danger, he is in a state of anxiety - a reaction to an uncertain situation that carries a threat.

When a person is emotionally excited, his condition is accompanied by certain physiological reactions: blood pressure, sugar content in it, pulse and respiration rate, muscle tension. V. James and G. N. Lange assumed that it was these changes that exhausted the essence of emotions. However, later it was experimentally shown that emotions always remain, even if all their physiological manifestations are excluded, i.e. there was always a subjective experience. This means that the necessary biological components do not exhaust emotions. Then it remains unclear why physiological changes are needed? Subsequently, it was found that these reactions are essential not for experiencing emotions, but for activating all the forces of the body for increased muscular activity (when fighting or fleeing), usually following a strong emotional reaction. Based on this, they came to the conclusion that emotions carry out the energy organization of a person. Such a representation allows us to understand the biological value of innate emotions. In one of his lectures, I.P. Pavlov explained the reason for the close relationship between emotions and muscle movements as follows: “If we turn to our distant ancestors, we will see that everything was based on muscles ... One cannot imagine any beast, lying for hours and getting angry without any muscular manifestations of his anger. In our ancestors, every feeling passed into the work of the muscles. For example, when a lion gets angry, it takes the form of a fight, the fear of a hare turns into a run, and so on. And in our ancestors, everything poured out just as directly into any activity of the skeletal muscles: either they ran away from danger in fear, then they themselves attacked the enemy in anger, then they defended the life of their child.

Developing the theoretical foundations for the study of emotions as one of the forms of reflection, P. V. Simonov, first of all, identified the following problems. If emotion is a form of reflection of reality, then it is important to understand what exactly it reflects, how it differs from other types of reflective activity of the brain.

P.V.Simonov proposed a concept according to which emotions are an apparatus that turns on when there is a mismatch between a vital need and the possibility of satisfying it, i.e. with a lack or significant excess of relevant information necessary to achieve the goal. At the same time, the degree of emotional stress is determined by the need and the lack of information necessary to satisfy this need. However, in special cases, in unclear situations, when a person does not have accurate information in order to organize his actions to satisfy an existing need, a different response tactic is needed, including an incentive to act in response to signals with a low probability of their reinforcement.

The emotional tone brings together a reflection of the most common and frequently occurring signs of beneficial and harmful environmental factors that persist for a long time. Emotional tone allows a person to quickly respond to new signals, reducing them to a common biological denominator: useful-harmful.

Emotions are included in many psychologically complex states of a person, acting as their organic part. Such complex states, including thinking, attitude and emotions, are humor, irony, satire and sarcasm, which can also be interpreted as types of creativity if they take on an artistic form.

Emotions are often regarded as the sensory expression of instinctive activity. However, they are manifested not only in subjective experiences, the nature of which can only be learned from a person and, based on them, analogies can be built for higher animals, but also in objectively observed external manifestations, characteristic actions, facial expressions, vegetative reactions. These external manifestations are quite expressive. For example, seeing that a person is frowning, clenching his teeth and clenching his fists, you can understand without questioning that he is experiencing anger.

In general, the definition of emotion is abstract and descriptive or requires further clarification. Let's look at some of these definitions. Soviet psychologists Lebedinsky and Myasishchev define emotion as an experience.

Emotions are one of the most important aspects of mental processes that characterize a person's experience of reality. Emotions express an integral expression of the altered tone of neuropsychic activity, which is reflected in all aspects of the human psyche and body.

Emotions affect both the psyche and physiology. The famous physiologist Anokhin considered the connection of emotions with the needs of the body. Anokhin wrote: “... from a physiological point of view, we are faced with the task of revealing the mechanism of those specific processes that ultimately lead to the emergence of both a negative (need) and a positive (satisfaction of needs) emotional state. Emotions are positive and negative. It follows from the definition that negative emotions arise when a person experiences a need, and positive emotions arise when a person is satisfied.

Platonov K.K. wrote that emotion is a special psyche, previously formed in phylogeny (the path that the psyche has gone through), and formed in its ontogenesis, the form of which reflection is characteristic not only of man, but also of animals, manifested both in subjective experiences and in physiological reactions, it is a reflection not of the phenomena themselves, but of their objective relationship with the needs of the organism. Emotions are divided into asthenic, weakening the vital activity of the organism, and sthenic, increasing it, and most (fear, anger) can manifest themselves in both forms. In an adult, emotions usually appear as components of feelings.

In the course of evolution, emotions arose as a means of allowing living beings to determine the biological significance of the states of the body and external influences. simplest form emotions - emotional tone - direct experiences that accompany vital influences (taste, temperature) and encourage them to be preserved or eliminated.

Emotions by origin are a form of species experience: focusing on them, the individual performs the necessary actions (to avoid danger, procreation), the expediency of which is hidden from him. Emotions human product socio-historical development. They refer to the processes of internal regulation of behavior.

It is likely that the simplest emotions (fear, rage) are of natural origin, because. they are quite closely related to life processes. This connection can be seen even from the usual example, when any living being dies, no external, emotional manifestations are found in it. Suppose even a physically ill person becomes indifferent to the phenomena that occur around him. He loses the ability to be emotionally distracted by external influences.

All higher animals and humans have structures in the brain that are closely related to emotional life. This is the limbic system, which includes clusters of nerve cells located under the cerebral cortex, in close proximity to its center, which controls the main organic processes: blood circulation, digestion, endocrine glands. Hence the close connection of emotions both with the consciousness of a person and with the states of his body.

Among the emotions of humans and animals, despite all their diversity, 2 categories can be distinguished:

positive emotions associated with the satisfaction of the needs of the individual or community;


They require a combination of two factors:

unmet need


increase in the probability of its satisfaction.

negative emotions associated with danger, harmfulness and even a threat to life.


For their occurrence, a semantic mismatch between the predicted situation and the afferentation received from the external environment is sufficient. It is precisely such a mismatch that is observed when the animal does not find food in the feeder, receives bread instead of the expected meat, or even an electric shock. Thus, positive emotions require a more complex central apparatus.


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 is the range of all kinds of emotional states that it is able to experience. Our subjective experiences are not a direct reflection of our own organic processes. The peculiarities of the emotional states we experience are probably associated not so much with the organic changes that accompany them, but with the sensations that arise during this.


A person judges the emotional state of another by special expressive movements, facial expressions, voice changes, etc. Evidence has been obtained for the innate nature of some manifestations of emotions. In every society, there are norms for expressing emotions that correspond to ideas of decency, modesty, good breeding. An excess of facial, gestural or speech expressiveness may be evidence of a lack of education and, as it were, put a person outside his circle. Parenting teaches how to show emotions and when to suppress them. It develops in a person such behavior, which is understood by others as courage, restraint, modesty, coldness, equanimity.


Emotions are the result of the activity of the nervous system.


The development of emotions in ontogenesis is expressed by:

in the differentiation of the qualities of emotions;


in the complication of objects that cause an emotional response;


in developing the ability to regulate emotions and their outward expression.


From this it should be concluded that in babies emotions go on an unconscious level. With age, a person can manage them both externally and internally. And in children, emotions splash out. An adult can control the expression of his emotions, but a child cannot. The older a person gets, the better he learns to manage emotions.


To understand the role of emotions in the mental organization of a person, it is necessary to consider its main functions and its connection with other mental processes. The question of functions is key and permeates the entire psychology of emotions. Emotions perform the functions of such processing of primary information about the world, as a result of which we are able to form our own opinion about it: emotions play a role in determining the value of objects and phenomena.


Let's analyze the main functions of human emotions:


Expressive. Thanks to emotions, people understand each other better, we can, without using speech, judge each other's states and better prepare ourselves for joint activities and communication. For example, people are able to accurately perceive and evaluate the expressions of a human face, to determine such emotional states as joy, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise. Along with the general preparation of the body for action, individual emotional states are accompanied by specific changes in pantomime, facial expressions, and sound reactions. Whatever the original origin and purpose of these reactions, in evolution they developed and became fixed as a means of notifying the emotional state of the individual in intraspecific and interspecific communication. With the increasing role of communication in higher animals, expressive movements become a finely differentiated language, with the help of which individuals exchange information both about their state and about what is happening in the environment (signals of danger, food, etc.). This function of emotions did not lose its significance even after a more perfect form of information exchange was formed in the historical development of man - articulate speech. Self-improved due to the fact that coarse innate forms of expression were supplemented by more subtle conventional norms acquired in ontogenesis, emotional expression remained one of the main factors providing the so-called non-verbal communication. That is, emotions serve to express the internal state and transfer this state to others.


Reflective-evaluative. A rigorous analysis of views on the nature of emotions, carried out by N. Groth in the historical part of his work, as well as the provisions of modern concepts, allow us to conclude that emotions are quite unanimously recognized as performing the function of evaluation. It should be noted that the ability of emotions to make an assessment is in good agreement with their characteristics: their occurrence in significant situations, objectivity, dependence on needs, etc. The main conclusion following from the combined analysis of all these characteristics is that emotions are not an indirect product of motivational the significance of reflected objects, they directly evaluate and express this significance, they signal it to the subject. In other words, emotions are the language, the system of signals, through which the subject learns about the needful significance of what is happening. That is, animals always evaluate the significance of the situation for the needs of the body.


Dodonov wrote the following about the evaluative function: emotion is an activity that evaluates information that enters the brain about external and inner world, which sensations and perceptions encode in the form of his subjective images. Thus, emotions evaluate the significance of impacts based on sensory-perceptual information. Emotion is a reflection by the human and animal brain of some actual need (its quality and magnitude) and the probability (possibility) of its satisfaction, which the brain evaluates on the basis of genetic and previously acquired individual experience. The price is in general sense This concept is always a function of two factors: demand (need) and supply (the ability to satisfy this need). This function determines the diverse regulatory functions of emotions. Emotions occupy a special place in a person's reflection of reality and the regulation of his behavior and represent a mechanism by which external stimuli are converted into motives for the body's activity, i.e. are a reflection of reality. The reflective nature of emotions lies in the self-regulation of body functions that are adequate to the nature of external and intraorganismal influences and create optimal conditions for the normal flow of reflex activity of the body.


Encouragement. The complete removal of emotions from the function of motivation to a large extent renders meaningless the function of evaluation they produce. Is it possible to follow from the assessment of what is happening, from a biological point of view, anything more expedient than an immediate impulse to appropriate, master the useful and get rid of the harmful? Therefore, there is a fundamental difference between denying the emotional nature of motivating experiences and refusing to recognize any participation of emotions in the development of these experiences. The latter means the recognition in nature of a significant and hardly explainable mental imperfection. Thus, emotions make us strive for something and, in this regard, organize our behavior.


Trace formation (A.N. Leontiev). This function has several names: reinforcing - braking (P.K. Anokhin), reinforcements (P.V. Simonov). It points to the ability of emotions to leave traces in the experience of the individual, fixing in him those influences and successful - unsuccessful actions that aroused them. The trace-forming function is especially pronounced in cases of extreme emotional states. But the footprint itself wouldn't make sense if it wasn't possible to use it in the future. That is, the trace is fixed in memory.


Anticipatory / heuristic. The anticipatory function emphasizes a significant role in the actualization of fixed experience, since the actualization of traces is ahead of the development of events and the emotions that arise in this case signal a possible pleasant or unpleasant outcome. Since the anticipation of events significantly reduces the search for the right way out of the situation, a heuristic function is isolated. It is important to emphasize here that, stating a certain manifestation of emotions, they acutely set the task of finding out exactly how emotions do it, clarifying the psychological mechanism underlying these manifestations. That is, we know the answer before we can say it.


Synthesizing. We perceive not a set of spots or sounds, but a landscape and a melody, not a set of introceptive impressions, but our own body, because the emotional tone of sensations perceived simultaneously or immediately after one another merges according to certain laws. Thus, emotional experiences act as a synthesizing basis of the image, providing the possibility of a holistic and structured reflection of the mosaic variety of actually acting stimuli. That is, emotions help not only fix, but also organize and synthesize all other processes. Emotions begin in sensations. They permeate the entire mental life of a person. They are able to synthesize and integrate information in memory, various mental processes and some activities.


7) organizing / disorganizing. Emotions first of all organize some activity, diverting strength and attention to it, which, naturally, can interfere with the normal flow of another activity being carried out at the same moment. By itself, emotion does not carry a disorganizing function, it all depends on the conditions in which it manifests itself. Even such a crude biological reaction as affect, which usually disorganizes a person's activity, can be useful under certain conditions, for example, when he has to escape from a serious danger, relying solely on physical strength and endurance. This means that disruption of activity is not a direct, but a side manifestation of emotions, in other words, that there is as much truth in the statement about the disorganizing function of emotions as, for example, in the statement that a festive demonstration serves as a delay for vehicles.


8) Direction of attention. At its core, a person is very curious. He is interested to see how another person expresses his emotions, how people solve conflict situations. Thus, emotions can rive our attention to an object or situation.


Stabilizing. This function and its deep connection with the processes of predicting the situation on the basis of memory traces are emphasized by the theoretical positions of P.K. Anokhin. He believed that emotional experiences were fixed in evolution as a mechanism that keeps life processes within optimal limits and prevents the destructive nature of a lack or excess of vital factors. Positive emotions appear when ideas about the future useful result, retrieved from memory, coincide with the result of a completed behavioral act. Mismatch leads to negative emotional states. Positive emotions that arise when a goal is achieved are remembered and, under the appropriate circumstances, can be retrieved from memory to obtain the same useful result.


Compensatory (replacing). Being an active state of a system of specialized brain structures, emotions affect other cerebral systems that regulate behavior, the processes of perceiving external signals and extracting engrams of these signals from memory, and the autonomic functions of the body. It is in the latter case that the compensatory significance of emotions is especially revealed.


The role of emotions is to urgently replace, compensate for the lack of knowledge at the moment. An example of a compensatory function is imitative behavior, which is so characteristic of an emotionally excited population. Since the expediency of adaptive reactions is always relative, an imitative reaction (mass panic) can turn into a real disaster. It manifests itself in the transition to responding to a wide range of supposedly significant signals. The compensatory value of negative emotions lies in their substitutive role. As for positive emotions, their compensatory function is realized through the influence on the need that initiates behavior. This function is manifested in the ability to serve as an additional means of communication between members of the community.


Switching. From a physiological point of view, an emotion is an active state of a system of specialized brain structures that prompts a change in behavior in the direction of minimizing or maximizing this state. Since a positive emotion indicates the approach of satisfaction of a need, and a negative emotion indicates a distance from it, the subject seeks to maximize (strengthen, prolong, repeat) the first state and minimize (weaken, interrupt, prevent) the second. This function of emotions is found both in the sphere of innate forms of behavior and in the implementation of conditioned reflex activity. An assessment of the probability of satisfying a need can occur in a person not only on a conscious, but also on an unconscious level. A striking example of unconscious forecasting is intuition. This function is clearly revealed in the process of competition of motives, when the dominant need is singled out, which becomes a vector of purposeful behavior. The amygdala plays a crucial role in this function.


Reinforcing. It is found not only at the individual level, but also at the population level, where this function is realized through the brain mechanism of "emotional resonance", i.e. empathy. The formation, existence, extinction and features of any conditioned reflex depend on the fact of reinforcement. By reinforcement, “Pavlov meant the action of a biologically significant stimulus, which gives a signal value to another biologically insignificant stimulus combined with it.” Sometimes the immediate reinforcer is not the satisfaction of some need, but the receipt of desirable (pleasant, emotionally positive) or the elimination of unwanted (unpleasant) stimuli. The totality of currently available evidence suggests that the hypothalamus is a key structure for the implementation of this function.


The function of "emergency" resolution of the situation. It occurs in an emergency, critical situation, when the level of adrenaline in the blood rises. For example, the feeling of fear.


The function of activation and mobilization of the body. Emotions, which ensure the successful completion of a task, bring the body into an excited state. Sometimes weak anxiety plays the role of a mobilizing factor, manifested by concern for the outcome of the case, it enhances the sense of responsibility.


The interaction of all functions is necessary, because the absence of any affects the development of personality. Together, they are interconnected and reflect emotions.


1.2. Emotions and the components that make up personality


Considering the specific features of our feelings, it should be noted, first of all, that they are of a personal nature. This means that they reflect the significance of objects and phenomena for a given person in a particular situation. In this regard, feelings can be considered as the most important characteristic of personality. As F. Kruger wrote, “what pleases a person, what interests him, plunges him into despondency, worries, what seems funny to him, most of all characterizes his essence, his character, individuality”.


Feelings not only reflect a person's attitude to objects, but also carry information about them. In this sense, we can talk about the cognitive component of emotions. Even for the first time meeting this or that object, this or that person, we experience some feelings for him. And if this feeling is, for example, distrust or fear, then we try to avoid contact with them. Of course, this information is subjective and depends on the experience of the individual.


Emotions, no matter how different they may seem, are inseparable from personality. “What pleases a person, what interests him, plunges him into despondency, worries, what seems ridiculous to him, most of all characterizes his essence, his character, individuality” (F. Kruger).


Emotions and need. Emotions reflect the state, process and result of satisfying a need. By emotions, one can definitely judge what a person is worried about at a given moment in time, i.e. about what needs and interests are relevant to him.


First of all, emotions serve this or that need in a peculiar way, prompting them to take the necessary actions to satisfy it. A need is a program of biological or spiritual, social life activity fixed in us, which, in case of difficulty in its implementation, is signaled by a certain emotional state - the experience of neediness.


S.L. Rubinstein believed that three spheres can be distinguished in the emotional manifestations of a personality: its organic life, its material interests, and its spiritual, moral needs. He designated them respectively as organic (affective-emotional) sensitivity, objective feelings and generalized ideological feelings.


To affective-emotional sensitivity include, in his opinion, elementary pleasures and displeasures, mainly associated with the satisfaction of organic needs. Object feelings are associated with the possession of certain objects and activities. certain types activities. These feelings, according to their objects, are divided into material, intellectual and aesthetic. They manifest themselves in admiration for some objects, people and activities and in disgust for others. Worldview feelings are associated with morality and human relations to the world, people, social events, moral categories and values.


A person's emotions are related to his needs. They reflect the state, process and result of meeting the need.


People as individuals emotionally differ from each other in many ways: emotional excitability, duration and stability of their emotional experiences, dominance of positive (sthenic) or negative (asthenic) emotions. But most of all, the emotional sphere of developed personalities differs in the strength and depth of feelings, as well as in their content and subject relatedness.


The connection between emotions and needs is indisputable, however, it is hardly legitimate to consider emotion as a function of need alone. Unsatisfied need is necessary for positive emotions no less than for negative ones. Need is a specific force of living organisms that ensures their connection with the external environment for self-preservation and self-development, the source of activity of living systems in the world around. Hence, emotion is a reflection by the human and animal brain of some actual need (its quality and magnitude) and the probability of its satisfaction at the moment. Emotions make it possible to find out what and to what extent seems to be the most important for the body, it requires priority satisfaction.


Motivation and emotions. Motivation is a conscious or unconscious mental factor that encourages an individual to perform certain actions and determines their direction and goals.


The main biological significance of emotional experience lies in the fact that, in essence, only emotional experience allows a person to quickly evaluate his internal state, their emerging need and quickly build an adequate form of response: whether it be a primitive attraction or a conscious social activity. Along with this, emotions are also the main means of assessing the satisfaction of needs. As a rule, the emotions accompanying any motivational excitation are referred to as emotions. negative character. They are subjectively unpleasant. The negative emotion that accompanies motivation has important biological significance. It mobilizes the efforts of a person to satisfy the need that has arisen. These unpleasant emotional experiences are intensified in all those cases when a person's behavior in the external environment does not lead to the satisfaction of the need that has arisen, i.e. to find appropriate reinforcements.


At the same time, the satisfaction of needs, on the contrary, is always associated with positive emotional experiences. A positive emotion is fixed in memory and subsequently arises as a kind of “image” of the future whenever an appropriate motivation arises. So, emotions not only occupied important key positions in evolution between the need and its satisfaction, but were directly included in the apparatus of the acceptor of the results of the action of the corresponding motivation. Motivation is a physiological mechanism for activating the traces of those external objects stored in memory that are able to satisfy the body's need, and those actions that can lead to its satisfaction.


The simplest types of emotional experiences are unlikely to have a pronounced motivating power for a person. They either do not directly affect behavior, do not make it purposeful, or completely disorganize it (affects and stresses). Emotions such as feelings, moods, passions motivate behavior, not only activating it, but guiding and supporting it. Emotion, expressed in a feeling, desire, attraction or passion, undoubtedly contains an impulse to activity.


The very system and dynamics of typical emotions characterizes a person as a person. Of particular importance for such a characteristic is the description of feelings typical of a person. Feelings simultaneously contain and express the attitude and motivation of a person, and both are usually merged in a deep human feeling. Higher feelings carry a moral principle.


One of those feelings is conscience. It is associated with the moral stability of a person, his acceptance of moral obligations to other people and strict adherence to them. A conscientious person is always consistent and stable in his behavior, always correlates his actions and decisions with spiritual goals and values, deeply experiencing cases of deviation from them not only in his own behavior, but also in the actions of other people.


Human emotions are manifested in all types of human activity and especially in artistic creation. Emotions are included in many psychologically complex states of a person, acting as their organic part.


Humor - this is an emotional manifestation of such an attitude towards something or someone, which carries a combination of funny and kind. It is a laugh at what you love, a way of showing sympathy, attracting attention, creating Have a good mood. irony it is a combination of laughter and disrespect, most often dismissive. Such an attitude cannot yet be called unkind or evil. Satire is a denunciation that specifically contains a condemnation of the object. In satire, he is presented in an unattractive way. Evil, evil is most manifested in sarcasm which is a direct mockery, a mockery of the object.


Tragedy- this is an emotional state that occurs when the forces of good and evil clash and the victory of evil over good. Lot interesting observations, colorfully and truthfully revealing the role of emotions in human personal relationships, was made by the famous philosopher B. Spinoza. One can argue with some of his generalizations, rejecting their generality, but there is no doubt that they reflect the real intimate life of people well. Here is what Spinoza once wrote:


“For the most part, the nature of people is such that they feel compassion for those who feel bad, and for those who feel good, they envy and ... treat them with all the more hatred, the more they love something that they imagine in the possession of another ... ".


“If someone imagines that the object he loves is with someone in the same or even closer relationship of friendship that he alone owned, then he is seized by hatred for the object he loves and envy of this other ...”


“This hatred for the beloved object will be the greater, the greater was the pleasure that the jealous person usually received from the mutual love of the object he loved, and also the stronger was the affect that he had for what, according to his imagination, enters into connection with the beloved object. ... "


“If someone begins to hate the object he loves, so that love is completely destroyed, then ... he will have a greater hatred for him than if he had never loved him, and the more, the more his former love was ...”


“If someone imagines that the one he loves has hatred for him, he will at the same time hate and love him ...”


“If someone imagines that someone loves him, and at the same time does not think that he himself gave any reason for this ... then he, for his part, will love him ...”


“Hatred increases as a result of mutual hatred and, conversely, can be destroyed by love ...”


“Hatred, completely conquered by love, passes into love, and this love will be stronger as a result than if hatred had not preceded it at all ...” .


The last special human feeling that characterizes him as a person is love. A person who truly loves, least of all, thinks about some mental or physical characteristics of a loved one. He thinks mainly about what this person is for him in his individual uniqueness. This person for a lover cannot be replaced by anyone, no matter how perfect this “duplicate” may be in itself.


True love is the spiritual connection of one person with another similar being. It is not limited to physical sexuality and psychological sensuality. For someone who truly loves, psycho-organic connections remain only a form of expression of the spiritual principle, a form of expression of precisely love with human dignity inherent in man.


Do emotions and feelings develop during a person's life? There are two different points of view on this issue. One argues that emotions cannot develop because they are related to the functioning of the organism and to its characteristics that are innate. Another point of view expresses the opposite opinion - that the emotional sphere of a person, like many other psychological phenomena inherent in him, develops.


In fact, these positions are quite compatible with each other and there are no insoluble contradictions between them. In order to be convinced of this, it is enough to connect each of the presented points of view with different classes of emotional phenomena. Elementary emotions, acting as subjective manifestations of organic states, really change little. It is no coincidence that emotionality is considered to be one of the innate and vitally stable personal characteristics person.


But already with respect to affects, and even more so feelings, such an assertion is not true. All the qualities associated with them indicate that these emotions are developing. A person is able to restrain the natural manifestations of affects and is quite trainable in this regard.


The improvement of higher emotions and feelings means the personal development of their owner. This development can go in several directions. Firstly, in the direction associated with the inclusion of new objects, objects, events, people into the sphere of human emotional experiences. Secondly, along the line of increasing the level of conscious, volitional control and control of one's feelings by a person. Thirdly, in the direction of gradual inclusion in the moral regulation of higher values ​​and norms: conscience, decency, duty, responsibility, etc.


2. CONNECTION OF THE EMOTIONAL SPHERE WITH HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND ITS PSYCHOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES


2.1. The role of emotion in human behavior


According to the classification of emotional phenomena A.N. Leontiev distinguishes three types of emotional processes: affects, emotions proper and feelings. affects- these are strong and relatively short-term emotional experiences, accompanied by pronounced motor and visceral manifestations. In a person, affects are caused not only by factors affecting his physical existence, but also by social factors, for example, the opinion of the leader, his negative assessment, the sanctions adopted. A distinctive feature of affects is that they arise in response to a situation that has actually occurred. . Actually emotions unlike affects, they represent a longer current state, sometimes only weakly manifested in external behavior. They express an evaluative personal attitude to an emerging or possible situation, therefore, unlike affects, they are able to anticipate situations and events that have not actually occurred yet. Actually emotions arise on the basis of ideas about experienced or imagined situations. The third type of emotional processes are the so-called object feelings. They arise as a specific generalization of emotions and are associated with a representation or idea of ​​some object, concrete or abstract (for example, a feeling of love for a person, for the Motherland, a feeling of hatred for an enemy, etc.) Objective feelings express stable emotional relationships. According to P.V. Simonov (1981), feelings are emotions that arise on the basis of social and spiritual needs in the origin of emotions. Simonov considers anxiety as a reaction to a low probability of avoiding an undesirable impact. A special place among emotional phenomena is occupied by the so-called general sensations. So, P. Milner believes that, although it is customary to distinguish emotions (anger, fear, joy, etc.) from the so-called general sensations (hunger, thirst, etc.), nevertheless, many in common and their division is rather conditional. One of the reasons why they are distinguished is the different degree of connection between subjective experiences and the excitation of certain receptors (temperature, pain). On this basis, such states are usually referred to as sensations. The state of fear, anger is difficult to associate with the excitation of any receptor surfaces, therefore they are referred to as emotions. Another reason why emotions are contrasted with general sensations is because they occur irregularly. Emotions often arise spontaneously and depend on random external factors, while hunger, thirst, sexual desire follow at certain intervals. Currently, the attention of researchers is attracted by another category of emotional phenomena - mood. Moods do not have a specific target like emotions do, and neither do any specific reactions. Therefore, it is less specific than emotion. In addition, subjective experiences associated with mood are less intense compared to emotions. According to the definition of A. Isen, mood is a flow or flow of ideas, thoughts and images retrieved from memory. They are united by a common tone: positive or negative. Numerous experimental data suggest that mood is the result of both emotional and imaginary events or information retrieved from emotional memory. Clinical researches indicate the key role of hormonal and biochemical factors in the genesis of mood. When a mood reaches a certain threshold, it becomes conscious and can be explained, including its causes. This can serve as an impetus for the transformation of mood into emotion. Mood affects a person's behavior. The same phenomenon can simultaneously cause both emotion and mood, which can coexist, influencing each other. If any emotional reaction develops rapidly in time, then the mood created by it can last for hours, days and weeks. Human actions are not impartial. Therefore, emotion, as a subjective experience, is present in every activity, every reflex (Sokolov E.N., Danilova N.N., 1975). In the structure of behavior, as in a functional system, emotions play a key role. Allocate leading and situational emotions (Vilyunas V.K., 1986). They are associated with different phases of behavior. Leading emotions signal to a person about the dissatisfaction of his needs and encourage him to search for the target object, stimulating certain behavior. The emotional memory of successful actions in the past aimed at satisfying a similar need also has a motivating force. Situational emotions that arise as a result of assessments of individual stages or behavior as a whole prompt the subject to either act in the same direction or change behavior, its tactics, and ways to achieve the goal.


Researchers, answering the question of what role emotions play in the life of living beings, identify several regulatory functions of emotions: reflective (evaluative), motivating, reinforcing, switching, communicative. The reflective function of emotions is expressed in a generalized assessment of events. An example is the behavior of a person who has received a limb injury. Focusing on pain, he immediately finds a position that reduces pain. Emotion, as a special internal state and subjective experience, performs the function of assessing the circumstances of the situation based on the need that has arisen and an intuitive idea of ​​the possibilities of satisfying it. Emotional evaluation is performed at a sensitive level. Example: we never estimate the true nutritional need for proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, salts, etc. The emergence of a feeling of hunger is already enough. The evaluative, or reflective, function of an emotion is directly related to its motivating function. S.L. Rubinstein noted that emotion already in itself contains attraction, desire, aspiration directed towards or away from an object. Emotion performs a search zone where a solution to the problem, satisfaction of the need will be found. Emotional experience contains the image of the object, the satisfaction of needs and its biased attitude towards it, which prompts a person to act. When faced with the situation again, these emotions allow you to anticipate, anticipate events and encourage you to act in a certain direction. There is also a reinforcing function of emotions. It is known that emotions are directly involved in the processes of learning and memory. Significant events that cause emotional reactions are quickly and permanently imprinted in memory. The switching function of emotions is that they often induce a person to change his behavior. This function is most clearly revealed in extreme situations, when there is a struggle between the instinct of self-preservation, natural for a person, and the social need to follow a certain ethical norm (the struggle between fear and a sense of duty, fear and shame). The outcome depends on the strength of motives, on the personal attitudes of the subject. An important function of emotions is the communicative function. Facial expressions, gestures, postures, expressive sighs, changes in intonation are the “language of human feelings” and allow a person to convey his experiences to other people, inform them about his attitude to phenomena, objects, etc.


Human behavior is largely dependent on his emotions, and different emotions affect behavior in different ways. There are so-called sthenic emotions that increase the activity of all processes in the body, and asthenic emotions that slow them down. Sthenic, as a rule, are positive emotions: satisfaction (pleasure), joy, happiness, and asthenic - negative: displeasure, grief, sadness.


The mood creates a certain tone of the body, i.e. his general attitude to action. The productivity and quality of labor of a person in a good, optimistic mood is always higher than that of a person in a pessimistic mood. With a kindly smiling person, those around them enter into communication with a greater desire than with a person who has an unkind face.


Affects play a different role in people's lives. They are able to instantly mobilize the energy and resources of the body to solve a sudden problem or overcome an unexpected obstacle. This is the basic vital role of affects. In an appropriate emotional state, a person sometimes does things that he is usually not capable of. Affects often play a negative role, making a person's behavior uncontrollable and even dangerous for others.


The vital role of feelings is even more significant. They characterize a person as a person, are quite stable and have an independent motivating force. Feelings determine the attitude of a person to the world around him, they also become moral regulators of actions and relationships between people. Feelings of a person can be unchanged, for example, feelings of envy, hatred.


Passion and stress play a mostly negative role in life. A strong passion suppresses other feelings, needs and interests of a person, makes him one-sidedly limited in his aspirations, and stress generally has a destructive effect on psychology and behavior, on the state of health.


It is also necessary to analyze the relationship between emotions and human activity. If everything that happens, inasmuch as it has this or that relation on his part, can evoke certain emotions in him, then the effective connection between the emotions of a person and his own activity is especially close. An emotion with an inner necessity arises from a relationship - positive or negative. negative results action to the need, which is his motive, the initial impulse.


This relationship is mutual: on the one hand, the course and outcome of human activity usually evoke certain feelings in a person, on the other hand, a person’s feelings, his emotional states affect his activity. Emotions not only cause activity, but are themselves conditioned by it. The nature of emotions, their basic properties and the structure of emotional processes depend on it.


Influence of emotions on activity in its main features, it obeys the well-known Jerkes-Dodson rule, which postulates the optimal level of stress for each specific type of work. A decrease in emotional tone as a result of a small need or completeness of the subject's awareness leads to drowsiness, loss of vigilance, missing significant signals, and slow reactions. On the other hand, an excessively high level of emotional stress disorganizes activity, complicates it with a tendency to premature reactions, reactions to extraneous, insignificant signals (false alarms), to primitive actions such as blind search by trial and error.


Human emotions are important in optimizing all the activities of the body. Negative emotions are a signal of a violation of the constancy of the internal environment of the body and thereby contribute to the harmonious flow of life processes. Positive emotions are a kind of "reward" to the body for the work it expended in the process of achieving a useful result. Thus, positive emotions are the strongest means of fixing conditioned reflex reactions that are useful for the body (P.V. Simonov). Consequently, positive emotions are the strongest stimulus for evolution, a disturber of peace and stabilization, without which social progress itself would be impossible. Indeed, in a person, positive emotions are always caused by success in his activities, for example, a scientific discovery made, an excellent mark in an exam.


Emotions contribute to the concentration of all the body's reserves necessary for the fastest achievement of a beneficial effect. This concentration of all the forces of the body helps us to successfully cope with difficulties. This is especially important in stressful situations resulting from the action of superstrong stimuli on the body, such as life-threatening factors, or great physical and mental stress.


Emotions go through the path of development common to higher mental functions - from external socially determined forms to internal mental processes. On the basis of innate reactions, the child develops a perception of the emotional state of the close people around him, which over time, under the influence of increasingly complex social contacts, turns into higher emotional processes - intellectual and aesthetic, which make up the emotional wealth of the individual. A newborn child is able to experience fear, which is revealed when strong blow or a sudden loss of balance, the displeasure that manifests itself in the restriction of movement, and the pleasure that occurs in response to rocking, stroking. The following needs have an innate ability to evoke emotions:


Self-preservation (fear)


Freedom of movement (anger)


Obtaining a special kind of irritation that causes a state of sheer pleasure.


It is these needs that determine the foundation of a person's emotional life. If in an infant fear is caused only by loud sounds or loss of support, then already at the age of 3-5 years shame is formed, which is built on top of innate fear, being the social form of this emotion - the fear of condemnation. It is no longer defined physical characteristics situations, but their social significance. Anger is caused in early childhood only by restriction of freedom of movement. At the age of 2 - 3, the child develops jealousy and envy - social forms of anger. Pleasure is stimulated primarily by contact interaction - lulling, stroking. In the future, joy develops as an expectation of pleasure in connection with the growing probability of satisfaction of any need. Joy and happiness arise only with social contacts.


Positive emotions develop in the child in the game and in exploratory behavior. Buhler showed that the moment of experiencing pleasure in children's games shifts as the child grows and develops: for a child, pleasure arises at the moment of obtaining the desired result. In this case, the emotion of pleasure plays the final role, encouraging the completion of the activity. The next step is functional pleasure: the playing child enjoys not only the result, but also the process of activity itself. Pleasure is no longer associated with the end of the process, but with its content. In the third stage, older children develop an anticipation of pleasure. Emotion in this case arises at the beginning of play activity, and neither the result of the action nor the performance itself is central to the child's experience.


The development of negative emotions is closely related to frustration - an emotional reaction to an obstacle to achieving a conscious goal. Frustration proceeds differently depending on whether the obstacle is overcome, a substitute goal is found. Habitual ways of resolving such a situation determine the emotions that form in this case. It is undesirable in the upbringing of a child to achieve his demands too often by direct pressure. To achieve the desired behavior in a child, you can use his age-specific feature - instability of attention, distract him and change the wording of the instructions. In this case, a new situation is created for the child, he will fulfill the requirement with pleasure and the negative consequences of frustration will not accumulate in him.


A child who lacks love and affection grows up cold and unresponsive. But in addition to love, for the emergence of emotional sensitivity, responsibility for the other is also necessary, care for younger brothers and sisters, and if there are none, then for pets. It is important not only not to create conditions for the development of negative emotions, it is equally important not to crush positive ones, because they are the basis of morality and human creativity.


A child is more emotional than an adult. The latter knows how to anticipate and can adapt, in addition, he knows how to weaken and hide the manifestation of emotions, because. it depends on volitional control. Defenselessness, lack of experience for foresight, undeveloped will contribute to emotional instability in children.


Human emotions are manifested in all types of human activity and especially in artistic creation. The artist's own emotional sphere is reflected in the choice of subjects, in the manner of writing, in the way of developing selected themes and subjects. All this taken together makes up the individual originality of the artist.


Next, consider the mechanism mutual influence of human emotions and lifestyle. At the level of historical forms of human existence, when an individual acts as a personality and not as an organism, emotional processes are associated not only with organic, but also with spiritual needs, with tendencies and attitudes of the personality and diverse forms of activity. The objective relations that a person enters into in the process of satisfying his needs give rise to various feelings. The forms of cooperation that develop in the process of people's labor activity give rise to diverse social feelings. human feelings express in the form of experience the real relationship of a person as a social being with the world, primarily with other people. Thus, human feelings, without, of course, breaking away from the organism and its psychophysical mechanisms, go far beyond the narrow limits of mere intraorganic states, spreading to the entire boundless expanse of the world, which a person cognizes and changes in his practical and theoretical activity. Each new subject area that is created in social practice and reflected in human consciousness gives rise to new feelings, and in new feelings a new relation of man to the world is established. The attitude to nature, to the existence of objects is mediated by the social relations of people. They also mediate human feelings. Participation in public life forms public feelings. Objective obligations in relation to other people, turning into obligations in relation to oneself, form the moral feelings of a person. The existence of such feelings suggests a whole world of human relationships. A person's feelings are mediated and conditioned by real social relations in which a person is included, by the mores or customs of a given social environment and its ideology. Taking root in a person, ideology also affects his feelings. The process of forming a person's feelings is inseparable from the whole process of the formation of his personality.


The highest feelings of a person are processes determined by ideal - intellectual, ethical, aesthetic - motives. Man's feelings are the most vivid expression of "nature made man," and this is connected with that exciting charm that comes from any genuine feeling.


2.2. The dynamics of human emotions in relation to human behavior


The mechanism of the emergence and change of human feelings can be imagined as follows. At first, shortly after his birth, the child has only the simplest, biological emotions, that is, experiences that are associated with the satisfaction of his organic needs. The main role among these experiences is played by pleasure and displeasure in their various manifestations (for example, pleasant and unpleasant, sweet and bitter).


In the course of acquiring life experience, in the process of encountering various life events, interacting with people and objects, the child receives a lot of various sensations, including sensations of pleasure and displeasure, pleasant and unpleasant. According to the mechanism of conditioned reflex connection, all these sensations become associated with the corresponding events, people and objects to such an extent that the very appearance of these people, objects or the occurrence of the corresponding events begins to evoke feelings and experiences associated with them. These are feelings, by definition.


If a person's life experience develops in such a way that the sensations and experiences associated with certain events, people and objects are constantly or often confirmed, then the corresponding feelings are fixed in the human psyche and become part of his personality. If the appearance of events, people or objects gives rise to new sensations and experiences in a person, then his feelings can change. This is the main mechanism for changing feelings, and it is based on the well-known laws of learning, formation and change of conditioned reflex connections between elements of life experience.


The above description concerns mainly the appearance and change of individual feelings of a person. It is known, however, that along with individual feelings associated with some particular events, people and objects, a person has complex complexes of feelings. These complexes are a system of feelings connected in such a way that the appearance of one feeling causes the appearance of another; the loss of one sense may lead to the loss of another sense. For example, if a person has a feeling of hatred for someone or something, then along with this feeling, irritation, hostility, anger, disgust for the corresponding object may arise; along with the disappearance of love for a person, the feeling of respect for him usually disappears.


As a rule, it is impossible to remove one of the feelings that is in connection with other feelings without affecting the latter. In the same way, it is also very difficult to generate one feeling without generating other feelings associated with it in a person. In other words, the emergence or change of human feelings has a systemic, complex character, and if we know that some new feeling has arisen in a person or an old, well-known feeling has significantly changed, we have the right to expect corresponding changes in other human feelings in relation to to this object.


Speaking about the dynamics of emotional states, we mean, firstly, the parameters by which the dynamic features of emotions can be evaluated, and secondly, how these parameters can change and according to what laws this usually happens.


Emotions in their dynamics can be assessed by the following main parameters (indicators): duration, strength, frequency of occurrence, the speed of transition from one emotional state to another, usually opposite to it.


Duration is the duration of the existence of the experience that is associated with this emotion, as well as the duration of its impact on the psyche and behavior of a person. If we compare different emotions by this parameter, then their sequence from the longest to the shortest is as follows: feeling, passion, mood, biological emotion, stress, affect.


The strength of an emotion is the intensity of the inner experience corresponding to it, as well as the degree of influence on the psyche and behavior of a person. The more clearly a person experiences this or that emotion, the more significantly it affects his psychology and behavior, the stronger the emotion. Conditionally known to us emotions according to their strength can be arranged in the following row: stress, affect, passion, feeling, biological emotion, mood.


The parameter "frequency of occurrence" refers to those emotions that can occur and change periodically. These are, for example, moods and biological emotions. The periodicity of the occurrence of emotions means their frequency or the time after which certain emotions reappear in a person, while reaching sufficient strength. For example, a person is forced to satisfy his basic biological needs at certain intervals of time. When a need becomes strong, a person has a corresponding negative emotion. When the need is fully satisfied, the negative emotion is replaced by a positive one. The frequency of the corresponding emotional experiences is determined by the frequency or frequency of exacerbation and satisfaction of this organic need.


The speed of transition from one emotional state to another characterizes all emotions that can arise and disappear or move into opposite emotional states. For example, pleasure has the opposite emotion - displeasure; emotions such as affects, feelings, or passions may appear, intensify, weaken, and disappear.


As for feelings, they are also capable of passing into opposite feelings. For example, love for a person can be replaced by indifference or even hatred towards him. How quickly this or that emotion appears, disappears or is replaced by the opposite is called the rate of occurrence or change of emotion. Conventionally, according to the speed of occurrence or change, emotions known to us can be arranged as follows: passions, feelings, moods, stresses, affects.


Since most emotions are cyclical, that is, they are able to appear, grow, remain at a stable level for some time, decrease, disappear, and sometimes go into their opposite, one can imagine the typical dynamics of cyclical changes in emotion. At first, the emotion begins to gradually increase, reaching a maximum value after a while. None of the emotions are able to stay at a high, constant level for a long time. After reaching the maximum value, the emotion usually begins to gradually decrease and disappears after a while.


If we are talking about cyclic changes in emotions associated with organic needs, then after the occurrence, reaching the maximum positive or negative state and subsequent disappearance, such emotions usually begin the opposite cycle, that is, they reach the opposite of the previous, respectively, negative or positive state, and then disappear again.


2.2. Emotions and psychological features of human behavior


Human emotions are associated not only with his needs, but also with many of his other psychological characteristics, including cognitive processes and some personality traits. Human emotions, for example, are associated with sensations and perceptions. We usually say “pleasant sensations”, “unpleasant sensations”, meaning that many of our sensations are emotionally colored. Sensations that are accompanied by emotional experiences are usually more vivid than sensations that are not associated with emotions. The same can be said about the images generated by perception.


In addition, people usually perceive most vividly what their attention is currently drawn to. Consequently, the closest connection and dependence also exists between emotions and attention. It can be stated more precisely: only that which gives rise to certain emotions in a person, at least interest (and interest is the simplest emotion), can be in the sphere of his attention. Emotions control a person's attention, and the stronger the emotion, the more attention a person pays to an object that causes an emotional reaction.


There is an undoubted connection between emotions and human memory. One of the laws of memory, which we considered earlier in the corresponding chapter, is formulated in this way: a person remembers only what causes an emotional reaction in him, and the stronger the emotion, the stronger the memory. The same can be said about other memory processes: emotions are also directly involved in their regulation.


For example, in order to remember something, we can first try to reproduce in our memory the emotional reaction associated with the recalled material. This is quite enough for the recalled material to be immediately remembered. The earliest recall of events associated with our childhood is based on the fact that strong childhood experiences are usually associated with them.


There is no special need to prove the dependence on emotions of other human cognitive processes: imagination, thinking and speech. Almost all the images generated by our imagination are more or less vividly emotionally colored. Moreover, at the origins of such types of imagination as daydreams and dreams, as well as at the basis of the images of dreams, there are always quite definite, quite strong emotions and feelings of a person. A person's thinking is stimulated by moderately expressed emotions, although excessively strong emotions, such as affects and stresses, can upset him. Human speech, especially expressive, has a bright emotional coloring, which manifests itself, for example, in the volume and tempo of speech, intonation, pauses, timbre of speech and stress.


Emotions play a crucial role in self-awareness, in the formation and maintenance of a sense of self-identity. The theory of differential emotions considers emotion as the most fundamental way of organizing sensations.


Emotion
interest played a very important role in human evolution, performing a variety of adaptive functions throughout the history of its existence. Interest in the unknown is the basis of research, cognitive activity and is important for the processes of attention, memory and learning. The emotion of interest plays an important role in motivating success. Interest is also necessary for the development of skills, it is he who motivates human activity aimed at improving innate abilities.


The theory of differential emotions distinguishes experience joy from satisfying a physiological need. The experience of joy is characterized by a sense of satisfaction and a sense of self-confidence, in joy a person feels loved and deserving of love. Smiling and laughing are expressions of joy. From an evolutionary point of view, the emotion of joy, together with the emotion of interest, ensures a person's position in society. Bradbury (1969) found that socially active people, whose emotional experience is more diverse, are more likely to experience positive emotions.


Psychological basis sadness there may be a variety of problem situations that we encounter in everyday life, unmet primary needs, other emotions, as well as imagery and memory. The main and universal cause of sadness and grief is the feeling of loss that occurs as a result of the death of a loved one or separation from him. The experience of sadness is usually described as despondency, sadness, feelings of loneliness and isolation. Although the emotion of sadness can have a very detrimental effect on a person, it is characterized by a lower level of tension than other negative emotions. The emotion of sadness performs a number of psychological functions. Experiences unite people, strengthen friendships and family ties; sadness slows down the mental and physical activity person, and thus gives him the opportunity to think about a difficult situation; sadness encourages a person to restore and strengthen ties with people.


Anger, disgust and contempt- independent emotions, but they often interact with each other. Situations that activate anger often activate the emotions of disgust and contempt to some extent. In any combination, these three emotions can become the main component of hostility. In anger, a person feels much more confident than with any other negative emotion. Anger mobilizes the energy needed for self-defense. Self-confidence and a sense of one's own strength stimulate a person to defend their rights. Unlike manifestations of aggression, experiencing and expressing anger can have positive consequences, especially in cases where a person maintains control over himself.


Experience fear felt and perceived by people as a threat to personal safety. Fear encourages people to make efforts to avoid the threat, to eliminate the danger. Fear can be caused by both physical and psychological threats. The experience of fear is accompanied by a feeling of insecurity, insecurity, inability to control the situation. However, fear also has an adaptive function, forcing a person to look for ways to protect himself.


Experience shame accompanied by heightened self-awareness. This interferes with understanding the situation and increases the likelihood of inadequate reactions to it. The ability to shame means that the individual is inclined to take into account the opinions and feelings of the people around him, thus, shame contributes to greater mutual understanding between people and greater responsibility to society. In addition, shame encourages a person to acquire various skills. A person who is unable to resist the experience of shame is almost certainly doomed to sadness and even depression. Adequate response to the experience of shame can be considered a person's readiness for self-improvement.


Guilt plays a key role in the development of personal and social responsibility, in the process of personality formation. The experience of guilt is the result of self-punishment. A person experiences guilt as a result of violation of some accepted ethical moral or religious standards. The experience of guilt is accompanied by a gnawing feeling of being wrong in relation to another person. The development of guilt and the formation of conscience are the most important stages in the psychological maturation of the individual.


Love is a feeling fundamental to human nature. The emotional bond between children and parents, between siblings, and between spouses is an integral part of our evolutionary heritage. Love encompasses social relationships, strong attachment, emotional connection. Love is characterized by interest and joy, and love relationships can evoke a whole range of emotions.


Emotions are part of a person's personality, and this is true of almost all emotions known to us: moods, affects, feelings, passions. Moreover, using only descriptions of emotional experiences characteristic of a person about various events and things, we can well imagine this person as a person. If, for example, we are told that some person has higher feelings and passions, then we will evaluate him as a noble, highly developed personality; if we are told that low passions and feelings are inherent in this person, then an image of a completely different person immediately appears in our eyes, about which we cannot say that he is a highly developed personality. This is undoubtedly correct, especially in the light of the fact that feelings and passions can act as motives for behavior and, therefore, characterize the main interests and needs of the person concerned.


By the emotions shown by a person, one can judge his character, and vice versa: knowing what the character of a given person is, one can quite definitely assume what emotions he most often experiences. Thus, there is a close connection and dependence between emotions and a person's character.


How does a person's emotions relate to their behavior? How emotions affect conscious and unconscious behavior. After what has already been said about emotions, this question is relatively easy to answer. Indeed, human behavior is influenced by his cognitive processes, and his personal characteristics, and his condition. Emotions, representing the main group of human mental states, are also associated with both cognitive processes and personal properties of a person. Therefore, emotions can both directly and indirectly influence human behavior. This, in particular, is evidenced by the functions of emotions that were identified earlier: motivational and regulatory.


Much more important and interesting is the question of how emotions can influence those types of human behavior that are regulated consciously and unconsciously.


It should be recognized that the unconscious regulation of human behavior is mainly associated with emotions. This should be understood in the following way. Firstly, the brain centers of human emotions are located in the subcortex and in the midbrain, that is, in those nervous structures that, according to modern scientists, are not connected with consciousness. Consequently, the nervous, emotional regulation of the body's activity is carried out at a subconscious level.


Secondly, a person, as a rule, is not aware of the moment when this or that emotion appears in him and begins to influence his psyche and behavior. Thirdly, sometimes, and even if a person is aware of his emotions and clearly perceives the fact that they influence his behavior, the person is still not able to get rid of such influence.


This is the case with all emotional experiences, especially such as passions, affects, stresses. Moreover, the well-known expression “a person is in the power of emotions” is quite true and reflects the fact that strong emotions can completely take over a person’s behavior and control it apart from consciousness and will.


A good illustration of this is the cases when, under the influence of affects or passions, people commit acts for which they later feel ashamed. However, at the time when they committed these acts, these people had neither a sense of shame nor self-control of their inadequate behavior. Therefore, it can be argued that at this point in time they acted not quite consciously.


As for conscious behavior, the influence of emotions on behavior is manifested only in cases where a person is aware of his emotional experiences, can control them, as well as the impact of emotional experiences on his own behavior. It happens in connection with mood and feelings. In principle, with the appropriate skill and sufficient training, anyone can learn this. In psychology, there are special methods designed for the practical development of relevant skills and abilities, for example, autogenic training.


CONCLUSION


In conclusion, we draw the following conclusions. Emotions are a special class of subjective psychological states, reflecting in the form of direct experiences of a pleasant process and the results of practical activities aimed at satisfying its actual needs. Since everything that a person does ultimately serves the purpose of satisfying his various needs, any manifestations of human activity are accompanied by emotional experiences.


Emotions, firstly, reflect in their quality the nature of the course of various life processes. Secondly, they control these processes, activating or inhibiting them, depending on the need. Here life processes are understood as those that are connected with the satisfaction of human needs.


The emotional life of a person, his experiences have become the object of research by physiologists and doctors today. Not only because a person, by virtue of his natural curiosity, strives to penetrate into the most reserved corners of his being, not only because the modeling of emotions promises new stage in the development of cybernetic machines. But also because a large number of diseases modern man we enroll in the category of neurogenic. These are hypertension, atherosclerosis, myocardial infarction, many gastrointestinal diseases, skin and other diseases. Negative emotions play a fatal role in the occurrence of these diseases.


Doctors have long noticed the connection between the individual predominance of certain emotions and a predisposition to certain diseases. M.I. Astvatsaturov said that “the heart is affected by fear, the liver by anger, the stomach by apathy” [Quoted from: 6, p. 184].


The significance of emotions and feelings in the process of reflecting reality in a person's life is not limited to the simple fact that under the influence of one or another external social and natural factor, a person experiences one or another feeling. Knowledge of the essence of emotions and their role in human life is possible only when determining the place of this complex phenomenon in the structure of mental functions in a holistic reflection and change of reality.


The special importance of emotions and feelings for all mental activity is determined by the fact that they are, as it were, between cognitive and volitional activity and, linking them, as already emphasized, are most directly related to what is called the activity of human consciousness.


As we found out, the role of emotions is great. They, like the colors of the rainbow, color the world, only color it into emotional states. Without emotions, the world would be boring, monotonous. It seems to me that without emotions, life on earth would also end; would lead to the extinction of mankind. Emotions are part of a person's life. After all, what happiness to love, to rejoice, to have fun. But even such emotions as sadness, hatred, grief and resentment are important for a person. They form in him feelings of compassion, perseverance, as well as the ability to achieve goals and the ability to experience.


Simonov P.V. human GNI. Motivational-emotional aspects. - M: Nauka, 1975.


Simonov P.V. Emotional brain. - M: Nauka, 1981.


Slastenin V.A., Kashirin V.P. Psychology and Pedagogy.–M.: Academy, 2003.


Dictionary of practical psychologist. – Minsk: Harvest, 1998.


Physiology of man and animals // Ed. A.B. Kogan, - M: graduate School, 2000. V.2.


Shingarov G.Kh. Emotions and feelings as a form of reflection of reality. - M: Nauka, 1971.


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