Module five, the emotional self. The emotional aspect of the self has long been misunderstood. The ancient cultures from which many of our own contemporary values have derived, we're faced with a difficult task. But the advent of agriculture for the first time in human history, people did not have to wander and had food surpluses that went beyond the immediate moment. As a result, you suddenly had large groups of people living near each other. In order to limit the destructive impulses that tended to come out when large groups gathered, people began to champion concepts of reason and rationality.

In doing so, they suggested that emotions themselves might be undesirable, or that acknowledging emotions is a sign of weakness. Nothing could be further from the truth or validity of emotions. You might have heard it said that all emotions are valid. But what exactly does this mean? Does this mean that anytime you feel an emotion you are perfectly justified in feeling an emotion? For example, if your child spills a glass of milk does the validity of emotions mean you are correct than being angry with your child.

Perhaps the notion of correct versus incorrect is the wrong approach. the validity of emotions means that in any situation if you feel anger regardless of the cause, it is valid to acknowledge to yourself that you do indeed feel anger. the validity of emotions means that denying an emotional state is a dangerous action that can have big consequences, often resulting in an emotional breakdown in the future if not addressed. utility of emotions before human beings established cities and civilizations life was in the words of Thomas Hobbes mean nasty, brutish, and short. At any moment a person could find his or herself in mortal danger. In this type of environment, the ability to feel fear serve their purpose that was often the difference between life and death.

If you felt fear, your sympathetic nervous system could stimulate your adrenal glands, and you would feel the impulse to run away or fight. With adrenaline coursing through your system. You could approach the situation as if it was the life and death situation it actually was more often than not. Of course, nowadays we might feel as if a situation is a matter of life or death, when upon further reflection we realize it isn't. Nevertheless, when we feel emotions they provide us with important information about both our environment and more importantly, our assessment of that environment. emotional arousal in order to make the best use of our emotions, it becomes important to be able to identify how we feel at any given moment, psychologists have developed the theory of emotional granularity to help us with just that.

According to this theory, emotions can be identified by two different primary characteristics, the level to which they excite us known as arousal, and the degree to which we experience them as pleasant or unpleasant known as Valence. emotions that are characterized as having high arousal would be emotions such as joy, anger, enthusiasm and anxiety. Low arousal emotions would include depression, but also calm. If your thoughts tend to race along with your pulse, you are probably feeling any emotion or group emotions that are characterized by high levels of arousal emotional Valence. Emotional valence refers to whether the emotion is experienced as a pleasant condition or an unpleasant condition. emotions that are unpleasant tend to indicate that something needs to change either in ourselves or in our environment.

Emotions that are on the pleasant side of the valence scale indicates that whatever is happening works for us. When you're having a good time you are experiencing emotions on the pleasurable side of the valence continuum.