How Do Emotions Affect Your Everyday Life?

Emotions have the power to drive our actions on a day-to-day basis, and they influence our physiology, or our bodies, more than we think. Understanding how our emotions affect us and our relationships can help us achieve better emotional well-being.

In the book Discovering Psychology, Don and Sandra Hockenbury conceptualize emotion as a complex psychological state involving three distinct components: a personal subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral response. In other words, emotion is closely tied to a personal experience, a bodily reaction, and a corresponding manifestation in our behavior.

In 1972, the psychologist Paul Ekman suggested that there are six basic emotions that are universal across all human cultures: fear, disgust, anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness. In 1999, Ekman expanded his list to include other basic emotions, such as embarrassment, excitement, contempt, shame, pride, satisfaction, and amusement.

Let’s now consider those three components of emotions that I mentioned earlier.

First, there is subjective experience. Although behavioral scientists believe that there are basic emotions experienced by people around the world, regardless of culture and origin, they also believe that experiencing an emotion can be very subjective.

For example, anger. This is an emotion that can be experienced by different people in varying ways and intensities—from mild annoyance to explosive rage. We can also agree that we don’t always experience pure forms of each emotion. Mixed emotions about different events or situations in our lives are common.

For example, when starting a new job, you may feel excited and nervous at the same time. Another example: when you get married, it can produce anything from joy to anxiety. And these emotions can occur simultaneously, or you can feel them one after the other.

The second component of emotion is the physiological response. Our body always responds, somewhere, to what we feel. You may have experienced trembling when going to a job interview, right? Or you may have felt your skin getting warm and red when you had to present a project at college. Or your heart may have raced with tachycardia when you felt fear.

Dr. Daiana Fosha, a psychologist with a doctorate from Adelphi University in New York, states in one of her books that for every emotion there is a visceral component—that is, some part of the body that responds, that speaks, that manifests itself. Many of the bodily responses you experience during an emotion, such as sweaty palms or a racing heartbeat, are regulated by the sympathetic nervous system, which is a branch of the autonomic nervous system. This, in turn, controls involuntary bodily responses, such as blood flow and digestion.

The third component of emotion is the behavioral response, that is, how you express the emotion. We usually express emotions with body language. For example, if you are nervous, you may tap your foot on the floor without even realizing it. In moments of great anxiety, some people clench their hands tightly and don’t notice.

Have you heard of emotional intelligence? It is different from rational intelligence. Those who develop emotional intelligence, among other things, learn to perceive their own emotions and the emotions of others. This helps a lot in relationships. It is important because, in order to have a good relationship, we need to be sensitive and perceptive to what we feel and what others feel.

An angry or authoritarian person generally does not care about what others feel. Therefore, it is more difficult for them to have friendships, since people feel attacked and end up distancing themselves.

What is the difference between affection, emotion, and feeling?

Affection is something more generic, encompassing everything we feel. We are born with the ability to feel, not just to think. Affectivity has to do with our capacity to feel emotions and feelings. When we say that a person has affection, we are saying that they have the capacity to love, to be loved, to be aggressive, to be calm, to be annoying, or to be pleasant.

Emotion is the affective expression directed toward a person or object. Many emotions from the past can remain alive in our minds, and they can be pleasant or unpleasant—joy or anguish, security or fear, love or hate. People perceive our emotions: they are automatic and usually arise from the unconscious. They are not usually long-lasting. That is why mature love is not an emotion: it involves emotion and feeling, but it is more than that. When you love someone, you do not feel exactly the same emotion or feeling all the time.

And what about feelings? Feelings seem to be something private — that is, you feel something, but people may not know what it is unless you talk about it. Feelings are internal, more private, can be more lasting and less intense than emotions, and do not need to be linked to something immediate.

When it comes to emotions and feelings, let’s not forget that mental health has a lot to do with having emotions without letting them have us. Think about it!