In mid-June of 2014, the famed psychologist and emotions
expert Paul Ekman sent a survey to 248 researchers active in his
discipline. He achieved a moderately
high response rate of 60%. The idea was
to see what the fast-growing field actually agreed upon in interpreting the
scientific evidence on the nature of emotion.
He recently published an article about the results: What
Scientists Who Study Emotion Agree About
The survey showed that at least one notion is solid:
Universal emotions exist. Eighty-eight percent of the scientists who responded
agreed that, no matter who you are, or where you were raised, you are bound to
share certain feelings with the rest of mankind. They were asked which emotion labels (out of a list of 18) should
be considered to have been empirically established. The five emotions that scientists rated as
the most universal were anger
(91%), fear (90%), disgust (86%), sadness (80%), and happiness (76%). Finally, there was high agreement about
whether “specific moods may be related to specific emotions(s) such as anger to
irritability” (88%), whether “specific personality traits are related in some
way to specific emotions, such as fear to shyness” (82%), and whether specific
emotional disorders are related in some way to specific emotions, such as
disgust to anorexia (75%).
Goleman, who refers to Ekman in his seminal
book, Emotional Intelligence, has
listed a hierarchy of emotional intensities. He defines an emotion as a feeling and its distinctive thoughts, psychological
and biological states, and propensity to act such as when we become angry. He then goes on to define a mood, which, while more muted, lasts
longer than an emotion, and he compares the emotion anger with a grumpy
mood. Beyond moods he then defines temperament, as the readiness to evoke a
given emotion or mood, such as someone with a choleric temperament. Finally he notes there are the outright disorders of emotion which can lead to
insanity, such as someone with paranoid schizophrenia.
Level of Emotional Intensity
|
Population Penetration & Frequency
|
Emotion
|
All of the people all of the time
|
Mood
|
Most of the people some of the time
|
Temperament
|
30% of people most of the time
|
Disorder
|
1% of people all of the time
|
Temperament
is the genetic basis of your personality and the most widely accepted model of
personality by organisational psychologists is the five factor model (FFM), which
have been defined as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion,
agreeableness, and neuroticism.
My
question is simple: How do the five basic emotions link up to the Five
Factors? I can see link between
happiness and extraversion but that is about it.
Personally,
and those who have read my blogs and books would know, I move in
the opposite direction starting with mental disorders and then on to
temperament, then mood, then finally to emotions. It is easy to imagine for example how someone
strong in one of the five factors (e.g. conscientiousness)
could get angry or be disgusted by someone very weak in same factor.
No comments:
Post a Comment