“ Learning and Developing Emotions”
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How does a person become the emotionally complex person he is?
What are the origins of his daily frustrations, his morbid fears, his feelings of love?
Is a person born with all his emotions or are they learned?
Or do the emotions develop both through maturation and learning?
Research has shown that the emotions do develop and mature from infancy through adulthood, partly as a function of the growth and development of the central and autonomic nervous systems.
Some emotional responses are inborn, although they may not appear until the child has reached a certain stage of growth.
However, research also shows that many emotional responses are learned through experience. In view of the complex nature of our emotions, it is not surprising that their development should be equally complex.
A newborn baby is a helpless, undeveloped organism that does little more than drink milk, move around a bit, cry when hungry or uncomfortable, and sleep. However, if you startle a baby by sounding a bell or flashing a light, you may cause the baby to cry.
The young infant does react to pain, discomfort, or startling stimuli, but his or her reactions are of a very global, uncontrolled nature. We might say that his or her emotional life simply consists of degrees of comfort and discomfort.
As the baby grows and develops, he or she learns to interact with people and things in his or her environment, and his or her emotional responses begin to increase in number. By the age of five months, a baby may show signs of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions, including distress and even anger. Delight may clearly be present by the third month, while most signs of love and affection may not until the baby is 10 or 11 months old.
In the same way that a child must be able to move his or her arms and legs before he or she can learn to walk, the child must physiologically be capable of producing and experiencing particular emotions before these can be modified through learning.
Classical conditioning
Psychologists have found that there are two basic processes by which learning takes place. One kind of learning is called classical conditioning. This occurs when one event or stimulus is consistently paired with, or followed by, a reward or punishment. It is through classical conditioning that a child learns to associate his or her mother's face and voice with happiness and love, for he or she learns that this person provides food and comfort.
Negative emotions are learned in a similar fashion. If a child is bitten or startled several times by a dog, he or she may learn to associate furry animals with pain or startle and, thus, develop a fear of them.
Operant conditioning
The second kind of learning is called operant conditioning. This occurs when an individual learns to do things that produce rewards in his or her environment and learns not to do things that produce punishments. For example, if a mother always attends to her baby when he cries and cuddles him until he is quiet, she may teach the baby that if he or she cries he or she will get attention from the mother. Thus, the baby will learn to increase crying in order to have the mother more.
Every day, we grow and have new experiences. We constantly learn by reading, watching television, interacting with other people, and so forth. This learning affects our emotions. If a person is nice to use, cares about us, and tries to do positive things for us, we learn Self Esteem through classical conditioning and to associate this person with positive feelings. One the other hand, if a person is mean, we associate him or her with negative emotions.
In other words, how we react emotionally depends not only on maturation and learning but on how we feel at that moment. Our emotional responses to various stimuli will vary, depending on what factors influence us at the time.
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Finding a Safe Haven Leads to Self-Improvement
The merger of emotional and mental aspects of a person can lead to self-improvement.
Emotions dominate your actions and reactions, though you do not want it to happen oftentimes. Society equates emotions with weakness, so people are used to putting feelings aside and focus on the rational aspects.
No matter how strict and logical you may be, you still and will express emotions.
Positive emotions are a lifelong goal for many of you as it relates to emotional, health, and self-improvement.
Ask yourself: What is more important the amount of money you made during your life or the number of times you laughed out of sheer joy?
People tend to put their positive emotions behind their negative feelings. This is one of the biggest problems that people come across during their lives.
There is no clear way on to ignore a negative experience and replace it with a positive one. Life just does not work that way.
For example, when you were a child and your goldfish died, you were heartbroken. Your parents probably bought you another goldfish but the sorrow remained.
Things got even more complex when you became an adult. A fight with your spouse the night before affected your entire day. You went to work angry and tired. On the way home from work, you did not notice the sun shining and you were not inclined to stop at a roadside stand to pick up some fresh fruits and vegetables.
All this because of that one negative thought, which has contaminated the way you perceived the reality around you.
In times like this, finding a safe place or haven to relax your mind will do wonders for your emotional and mental improvement. That place is relatively easy to find. It can be an actual place or an imaginary location.
Let us say you have something that is bugging you and it just would not go away. Go bowling. Do not know how? Just give it a shot.
Get caught up in the game. Your mind will drift away from the negative thoughts that dominated your last hours or days and start processing a whole new kind of information.
A safe haven can take many forms. It can be a song, movie, person or pet. The main thing is to allow yourself to get completely involved with this new activity.
You might still get flashes of the problem every now and then. Ignore them and get even more absorbed in what you are doing.
The end of the bowling game, song, or movie abruptly returns to reality. In this case, you will probably want to retreat back to the safe place. Do not do it.
The safe place exists only as a helping hand, not as a solution to your life's problems. It serves only as an escape route.
You will return from your safe zone with an increased energy level. You will feel better about yourself and gain more confidence. You will see that any issue can be resolved.
This is how a small escape from a harsh reality can increase your emotional and mental health. Try to do this often and experience a better you!
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