Table of Contents
What are the effects of negative and positive emotions?
Emotions can also have conflicting consequences; a positive emotion can lead to a negative consequence, and a negative emotion can lead to a positive consequence. For example, although happiness is considered as a positive and desirable emotion, research has revealed a darker side of happiness. an unpleasant, often disruptive, emotional reaction designed to express a negative affect. Negative emotion is not conducive to progress toward obtaining one’s goals. Examples are anger, envy, sadness, and fear. Compare positive emotion. Negative affectivity is negative emotions and expression, which includes sadness, disgust, lethargy, fear, and distress. Research shows that emotions can have an effect on your memory. People who are in a positive mood are more likely to remember information presented to them, whereas people who are in a negative mood (i.e. sad or angry) are less likely to remember the information that is presented to them (Levine & Burgess, 1997). Unproductive negative emotions can lead to low motivation or disengagement, which can negatively impact a student’s learning experience and present challenging environments and dynamics for educators to navigate during class. However, negative emotions such as confusion can also be a powerful learning tool. Negative attitudes and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness can create chronic stress, which upsets the body’s hormone balance, depletes the brain chemicals required for happiness, and damages the immune system. Chronic stress can actually decrease our lifespan.
What are the effects of emotions?
You may find that you can’t concentrate, are irritable and easily distracted, sleep badly and get tired easy. Fear and anxiety can also cause physical effects on the body including: overbreathing (hyperventilating) shaking. This can put you at increased risk for a variety of physical and mental health problems, including anxiety, depression, digestive issues, headaches, muscle tension and pain, heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, stroke, sleep problems, weight gain, and memory and concentration impairment. Stress can cause an imbalance of neural circuitry subserving cognition, decision making, anxiety and mood that can increase or decrease expression of those behaviors and behavioral states. This imbalance, in turn, affects systemic physiology via neuroendocrine, autonomic, immune and metabolic mediators. Stress has a psychological impact that can manifest as irritability or aggression, a feeling of loss of control, insomnia, fatigue or exhaustion, sadness or tears, concentration or memory problems, or more. Continued stress can lead to other problems, such as depression, anxiety or burnout. Long-term stress increases the risk of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, substance use problems, sleep problems, pain and bodily complaints such as muscle tension.
What causes negative emotions?
Negative emotions can come from a triggering event, such as an overwhelming workload. Your thoughts surrounding an event also play a role. The way that you interpret what happened can alter how you experience the event and whether or not it causes stress. Definition. Negative affect is a broad concept that can be summarized as feelings of emotional distress (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988); more specifically, it is a construct that is defined by the common variance between anxiety, sadness, fear, anger, guilt and shame, irritability, and other unpleasant emotions. Pessimism affects more than just your emotional health. In fact, doctors have found that people with high levels of negativity are more likely to suffer from degenerative brain diseases, cardiovascular problems, digestive issues, and recover from sickness much slower than those with a positive mindset. Anger is the negative emotion that has been shown to have the biggest impact on our health and wellbeing, particularly where this is poorly managed.
What are the 5 negative emotions?
Anger, fear, resentment, frustration, and anxiety are negative emotional states that many people experience regularly but try to avoid. And this is understandable—they are designed to make us uncomfortable. A state of high negative affect is characterised by feelings of psychological distress, such as nervousness and irritability, with low negative affect associated with feelings of calmness and serenity. Terror: Fear, Apprehension. Rage: Anger, Annoyance. Loathing: Disgust, Boredom. Grief: Sadness, Pensiveness. The Six Basic Emotions A widely accepted theory of basic emotions and their expressions, developed Paul Ekman, suggests we have six basic emotions. They include sadness, happiness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Sadness is the longest lasting of all emotions taking on average 120 hours to pass. Hatred is the second most enduring emotion followed by joy which lasts an average of 35 hours. Guilt lingers longer than the hot burn of shame; and fear tends to pass fairly quickly compared to anxiety which generally lasts much longer.
Do negative emotions affect your brain?
When a continuous stream of negative emotions hijacks our frontal lobes, our brain’s architecture changes, leaving us in a heightened stress-response state where fear, anger, anxiety, frustration, and sadness take over our thinking, logical brains. Emotional information is stored through “packages” in our organs, tissues, skin, and muscles. These “packages” allow the emotional information to stay in our body parts until we can “release” it. Negative emotions in particular have a long-lasting effect on the body. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. A: Negative thinking makes you feel blue about the world, about yourself, about the future. It contributes to low self-worth. It makes you feel you’re not effective in the world. Psychologists link negative thinking to depression, anxiety, chronic worry and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The more our feelings build up, without allowing them to be expressed, the more overwhelming they feel. This can also cause us to turn to more unhealthy ways of coping with our emotions such as using substances or turning to food to manage emotions. A fundamental difference between feelings and emotions is that feelings are experienced consciously, while emotions manifest either consciously or subconsciously. Some people may spend years, or even a lifetime, not understanding the depths of their emotions.
Why are negative emotions more powerful?
That’s because of something called the negativity bias. The negativity bias is a natural human tendency to pay more attention to negative emotions than to positive ones. It makes sense when you think about it: Negative emotions call our attention to problems — problems we might need to deal with quickly. It’s natural to feel more pessimistic when things aren’t going so well in our lives. Regular or even constant negative thinking can also be a sign of anxiety, depression, stress or low self-esteem. This sounds a bit strange, but negativity can also be contagious. Negative affectivity (NA), or negative affect, is a personality variable that involves the experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept. Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of negative emotions, including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. Stress that is characterized as negative is referred to as distress. Examples of common negative stressors are relationship problems, unemployment and injury. When something distresses you, it can lead to feelings of hopelessness about the situation. A small 2014 study suggested that emotions can influence how we think, make decisions, and solve problems, especially with thinking tasks. In a 2021 research review , researchers explained how emotions are a way humans evolved to address problems in a constantly changing world. Scientists have discovered negative emotions have an addictive quality that trigger the reward centers in the brain. In other words, you feel like you’re rewarding yourself when you succumb to negative emotions. Worry activates areas of the brain that trick you into feeling soothed.
How do emotions affect our daily lives?
A small 2014 study suggested that emotions can influence how we think, make decisions, and solve problems, especially with thinking tasks. In a 2021 research review , researchers explained how emotions are a way humans evolved to address problems in a constantly changing world. Emotions start affecting personality from childhood. For example, if a child experiences positive emotions and gets parental attachment, she will likely develop an adjusted personality. Further, components of personality also develop out of an individual’s frequent emotional reactions and experiences. Research shows that emotions can have an effect on your memory. People who are in a positive mood are more likely to remember information presented to them, whereas people who are in a negative mood (i.e. sad or angry) are less likely to remember the information that is presented to them (Levine & Burgess, 1997). Emotions come first, then feelings come after as the emotion chemicals go to work in our bodies. Then moods develop from a combination of feelings. Emotions are chemicals released in response to our interpretation of a specific trigger. Affect is the collective term for describing feeling states like emotions and moods. Affective states may vary in several ways, including their duration, intensity, specificity, pleasantness, and level of arousal, and they have an important role to play in regulating cognition, behavior, and social interactions.