Emotional Regulation | Changing Emotions by Acting Opposite to the Current Emotion

TBI Advocate's Note:  What follows is an excerpt from a splendid website entitled "How Psychology Tests Brain Injury." 

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Having studied psychology, the Dutch author Feri Kovács has specialized in neuropsychology and rehabilitation.  This field studies the relationship between brain and behavior — more specifically, brain injury and its consequences and how to cope with it.

By FERI KOVÁCS
Clinical neuropsychologist in Holland         

NETHERLANDS |  Emotions are not only essential in life, they give the flavor to your life as well. Without them, life would be dull but also your information processing would be making much more mistakes.

Feri Kovács

Feelings closely work together with your cognitive (information processing) system to handle yourself, your world and others. Brain injury can change all this.

The most common complaint of family members is that their partner is changed, in his or her emotional reactions.

Meaning: less emotionally stable.

If someone was quite in balance, after the brain injury there can be sudden outbursts of aggression or anxiety.


               

Brain injury affects your emotions and increases stress

Mood changes tend to come more frequently and much more intense than they used to be. Control over such outbursts seems to be reduced. It is as if someone has more stress than before and can not handle it effectively anymore.

Four basic emotions and control

Science dictates that there are six basic emotions:

1. anger, 
2. fear, 
3. sadness, 
4. joy, 
5. disgust and 
6. surprise. 

Actually, one scientist Ekman made this divisions after studying facial expressions all over the world. I and especially some philosophers disagree with this list and I believe that there are only 4 basic emotions.  The rest is just a derivative of these four.

The four fundamental basic ones are:

1. anger, 
2. fear, 
3. sadness and
4. last but not least joy. 

As you can see, nature has provided us and most higher animals with 75% negative feelings. Joy is clearly in the minority.  I always can speculate quite simply why this is so.  I always tell my patients how they can imagine that in the jungle a group of lions can survive if joy would be the most important emotion.

Ever seen only happy lions around? Just laughing? When seeing a deer or a gazelle, they would just laugh? Can you imagine how long such lions would survive out there?

Evolution is also the reason that fear is the most predominant emotion in most higher animals, and also in man.  Sadness is a special case and it only exists in higher animals, not in reptiles. Ever seen a crocodile grieving or sad (as far as we can tell)?

Although feelings are very useful and even necessary for survival, we as human beings have one fundamental task: to control them and not getting overwhelmed by them.

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© Copyright  F. Kovács. All rights reserved. No reproduction of any kind without express permission.