Psychology for Dummies (23 page)

When someone is smiling, is she happy? What about someone who glares at you, puffs out his chest, and turns red in the face? Can you guess what emotion he’s experiencing? Of course you can. All emotions have an expressive and communicative component that consists of verbal signals, facial expressions, eye contact, and other body movements and non-verbal expressions.

Some people believe that the expressive components of emotions are innate or inborn. The same goes for our ability to discern what someone is feeling by observing these expressions. Some emotional expressions seem to be universal, such as smiling when happy and frowning when sad.

The culture we live in also has a lot to do with how and when we express emotions, including what emotions are appropriate to feel and express. Certain situations place constraints on these aspects of emotions as well. We don’t typically cheer and laugh at funerals, and we don’t usually scream angrily at people when they give us a compliment or a gift.

Our speech gives expression to how we feel in several ways:

If you want to appear calm when you’re angry, make an effort to speak slowly, use soft tones, and keep the volume down. If you’re looking to intimidate someone, speak fast, in harsh tones, and very loudly. This will send the signal that you’re angry.

Human beings experience a lot of different emotions: fear, sadness, elation, and disgust to name just a few. Take a second and think about your life: What emotions do you experience most often? As a therapist, I’ve seen the whole range, but love and anger are two feelings that come up time and time again — maybe more than any others. People want to talk about wanting love, not getting love, giving love, and so on. They also want to express their anger in a safe place where they know they won’t be retaliated against.

Injecting a little fun

Consider the following experiment presented in Wallace and Goldstein. Research subjects are given a shot of epinephrine that activates their sympathetic nervous system. It engages their fight or flight response! Some subjects were told what the injection would do, and others were either told something misleading or told nothing about the injection. Then the subjects were placed into one of two groups: an anger-situation group or a euphoria-situation group. The anger group had to fill out an insulting questionnaire designed to make them angry. The euphoria group was put in a room with a researcher who was laughing, smiling, and having a good ol’ time!

Both groups received the same drug, so their bodies produced the same physiological reaction and the same type of arousal. But did they experience this arousal as the same emotion? What do you think? The subjects in the anger group said they felt angry, and subjects in the euphoria group said they were happy. Keep in mind that both groups had the same physiological arousal so their experienced emotion was all based on the information provided to them by environmental cures applied to the generic experience of autonomic nervous system arousal. Just as the two-factor theory would predict, subjects apparently labeled their physiological arousal by evaluating the situation, or the context.

Love makes the world go ’round. Or is it money? Whether love makes the world go around or not doesn’t diminish the power that it seems to hold over a lot of us. Most of us want love, even if we don’t want to admit it at times. It feels good to be loved and to love someone else. I think most people would have a hard time arguing that there’s too much darn love in the world.

For those of you who think love is magical, I hope I don’t burst your bubble with a psychological analysis of it. Hatfield and Rapson identify two specific types of love:

Robert Sternberg created his theory of love that outlines six forms of love. Each form is distinguished by varying degrees of
passion,
a strong desire for another person and the expectation that sex with him or her will be rewarding;
commitment,
the conviction that a person will stick around, no matter what happens; and
intimacy,
the ability to share our deepest and most secret feelings and thoughts with another person.

Sternberg’s six forms of love based on varying levels of passion, commitment, and intimacy are:

Are the foundations of love formed in childhood? Some psychologists feel that our love relationships as adults are extensions of our childhood attachments. Children who have healthy attachments have more mature adult relationships with higher levels of intimacy and trust, and they’re comfortable with higher levels of interdependency. Children who experience anxious or ambivalent attachments to their primary caregivers may “fall in love” too easily, seeking extreme closeness right off the bat and reacting intensely to any suggestion of abandonment. Glenn Close’s character in
Fatal Attraction
must have had a hard time with attachments when she was a child. Children who avoid social interaction tend to be uncomfortable with closeness and have a hard time with being dependent upon others in their adult relationships.

Hatfield and Rappon proposed that each of us possess love templates in the form of mental schemas or scripts. Templates are formed early in life and are revised and solidified over the years as we experience various relationships with people. These templates shape the ways we think about relationships and determine what our expectations are when we enter into relationships. It seems that a lot of people on those TV dating shows have some pretty interesting love schemas because some of their expectations are, let’s just say, interesting.

There are six basic love schemas that apply to romantic relationships. Each schema is differentiated by a person’s comfort level with closeness and independence and how eager he or she is to be in a romantic relationship.