After our brief overview of the whole range of
emotions, we are now going to take a closer look at each
of the seven major emotions: happiness, sadness, fear,
anger, disgust, surprise and contempt. Other
secondary emotions (guilt, shame, relief, embarrassment,
pride, hope, satisfaction, worry, disappointment,
annoyance, scorn etc) are either combinations of these
main emotions or variations thereof, in terms of
intensity, trigger or response. Therefore, we’ll be
focusing on the universal emotions and only fleetingly
mention the secondary ones.
How are we going to analyze these seven
emotions? By going again through all the defining traits
of each of the emotions we have highlighted in the
previous chapter, and pointing out the characteristics
distinguishing them from others. So here is what we’re
going to learn:
1. what that specific emotion is and how it helps us
in our daily life
2. triggers and responses for each emotion
3. the facial expression for that particular emotion
(how we look like when we are seized by that
sensation)
4. managing its outburst
Happiness
Happiness is doubtlessly the most enjoyable
emotion of all. Some philosophers actually claim that the
sole purpose of our existence is the pursuit of happiness.
What makes us feel happy? Clearly everyone has their
own pleasures and passions that generate a sense of
fulfillment within them. By and large, we could say that
happiness is triggered by the convergence between our
desires and reality. As a natural response, whenever a
desire is satisfied, the so-called “reward mechanism” of
our brains is activated, that is, the hormones responsible
for our state of well-being are released and, as a result,
we will feel happy.
But for the experience of joy, we wouldn’t be
able to set apart the pleasant from the unpleasant and life
would be much duller. Happiness can be of many kinds,
such as excitement, relief, contentment, wonder, ecstasy,
amazement or gratitude. Each of them is triggered
basically by the same universal trigger/theme, which is
the fulfillment of our goal, just that within this main
theme there are some small varieties.
For instance, the goal you need to reach for relief
is the avoidance of a threat. Usually, the relief comes
after the cessation of a sensation of fear of an impending
danger, that is, of which you were aware of beforehand.
Frightening situations coming out of the blue aren’t
normally followed by relief when overcome, since it’s
this expectancy stress that results in relief. If you are
waiting for the results of your exam to be listed on a
bulletin board, you will be seized with relief and
immediately afterwards with excitement, provided you
got the desired mark. You’ve been under a considerable
amount of pressure while on tenterhooks and perfectly
aware of the possibility of failure (the impending
danger), hence the conditions for experiencing relief. On
the other hand, if you were startled by a masked
colleague wanting to play a prank on you, you wouldn’t
feel relief after figuring out there was no real danger to
fear. The surprise element here staves off relief, as your
brain didn’t have any time to evaluate the situation you
were in and, therefore, couldn’t prepare the relief reward
for a prospective favorable outcome.
Relief can also act as a giveaway. If several
suspects
are
being
interrogated
regarding
the
commission of a crime and you accuse the wrong
person, the true culprit will instinctively heave a sigh of
relief. He was aware of the danger of being caught and
now that you got the wrong person, anticipates a narrow
escape. That’s why, in these cases, it would be advisable
to look for any relief reactions among the other suspects,
even though you had already placed the blame on a
particular person. Relief might be expressed through a
slight sigh or just a shadow of a smile.
Wonder is another subunit of happiness. It’s that
feeling that compels you to say ‘Wow! It’s
unbelievable!’. The situation at hand needs to be totally
unexpected, mesmerizing and baffling, in order to make
you feel wonder. We can experience it during magic
shows, when we can hardly believe our eyes what the
performer is doing in front of us. Coincidences might
also work (moving into the same block of flats where a
high school friend lives, from whom you haven’t heard
for years).
You should be careful not to mistake wonder for
awe, since the latter encompasses a touch of fear, which
doesn’t exist in the former.
Ecstasy is a very intense emotion. We feel
ecstasy whenever we achieve something immensely
desired. Passing a difficult exam is very likely to trigger
this emotion, as well as winning a cut-throat
competition, where you really had to outperform
everyone else in order to reach absolute glory. It remains
debatable whether sexual experiences can also lead to
ecstasy or whether it is just sensory - physical pleasure.
The two emotions shouldn’t be confused with each
other, since the latter implies physical arousal,
unnecessary for the former. Perhaps you can reach a
blend of both of them, provided that your love for you
partner exceeds the boundaries of body contact.
It should again be stressed, that the sooner you
acquire a trigger of a particular emotion, the stronger it
will be throughout your life. In my childhood, I would
always be delighted by the enticing scent of my mom’s
home-baked bread. Since then, whenever I come across
such a smell, I feel happy. Needless to say that it is not
the mere odor that triggers happiness, but all the
memories that are attached to it: my mother, the kitchen
where she taught me how to cook, the love with which
she took the bread out of the oven and then sliced it
later.
You can easily spot a happy person, usually just
by casting a glance at his/her face: smiling or laughing,
the corners of the lips pulled up and wrinkles around the
eyes. Usually, you can tell when somebody is faking a
smile, by observing whether these wrinkles emerge.
A French neurologist, Duchenne de Boulogne,
was the first to conduct a serious study on smiles, over a
century ago. He wanted to find out which muscles are
activated when we smile. For this purpose, he used as
subject a man who couldn’t feel pain in his facial tissues,
so that his facial muscles could be electrically
stimulated, without him being harmed. According to
Duchenne’s findings, when the subject was artificially
stimulated, his smile didn’t look genuine. Conversely,
when he was told a joke, his smile seemed to have
gained more credibility. From the pictures taken of both
situations, Duchenne concluded that it was the muscles
around the eyes that gave away the true nature of a
smile:
"The emotion of frank joy is expressed on the
face by the combined contraction of the
zygomaticus major muscle
and the orbicularis oculi. The first obeys the will
but the second is
only put in play by the sweet emotions of the soul;
the . . . fake joy, the
deceitful laugh, cannotprovoke the contraction of
this latter muscle. . . .
The muscle around the eye does not obey the will;
it is only brought into play by
a true feeling, by an agreeable emotion. Its inertia,
in smiling,
unmasks a false friend."3
Therefore, while the lips can be manipulated to
draw a smile, it is our eyes that reveal the authenticity of
our feelings. Yet, Ekman discovered a problem with this
theory. He agreed with Duchenne up to a point, in that
the muscles surrounding our eyes are beyond our
control, but only partly. When somebody is grinning, he
actually activates a part of his orbicualris oculi, so that
wrinkles do appear in the corners of the eyes (they are
also called “crow’s feet”). This can be misleading. The
other segment of these muscles, located between our
eyebrows and our lids, remains, however, motionless in
a grin. In a genuine big smile, our brows would slightly
droop, as a sign of contraction of this segment, too.
Therefore, when somebody exhibits just a soft smile,
without too much extension over the face, it is sufficient
to watch whether wrinkles form around the eyes. This is
not the case with a wider smile, when you need to
scrutinize the movement of the brows.
When it comes to managing your joyful outburst,
what you need to grasp is whether your reactions can in
any sense harm somebody else. If you remember our
discussion about the possibility of emotions being seen
as either positive or negative, you know that the
happiness, of one can also have a negative impact on
others. If you’re rejoicing in someone’s misfortune and
you show it, you are very likely to incur the hatred of
that
particular
person.
Therefore,
under
some
circumstances, happiness also has to be kept away from
erupting. You could achieve this by following the
emotional management steps presented previously:
firstly, identify those situations that make you feel this
“evil happiness”; secondly, enter the reflective state (try
putting yourself into that person’s shoes, sympathize
with him/her) and your desire to embarrass the
unfortunate one will decrease; thirdly, if you fail and
give vent to your thoughts, try making a subsequent run-
down on your behavior (with the benefits of hindsight
and the pangs of conscience, you might act more
considerately next time).
A particular case of happiness that is better for
you to conceal is the duping delight (a term coined by
Paul Ekman in his reputed book Telling Lies). It refers to
the emotion you feel when you enjoy leading somebody
down the garden path. According to Ekman’s findings,
duping delight usually takes the shape of a micro-
expression (a fleeting sign of emotion which lasts for
only a split second on your face). Learning to spot such
a give-away will make you a better lie detector. But for
more on this subject I strongly recommend the
bibliography at the end of this book.
To give you a clearer picture of how micro-
expressions work and, for now, especially in the case of
duping delight, I will draw on a well-known TV-series,
Lie to Me, starring Tim Roth in the exceptionally well
performed role of Dr. Cal Lightman, an expert in lie
detection and recognition of facial expressions
(seriously, this series is a must-see). Right in the first
episode, Lightman is interviewing a suspect, who had
supposedly placed a bomb somewhere in the city. By
analyzing his face and body language, he skillfully finds
out where the bomb was hidden. One of the deadliest
give-aways was the duping delight he showed, when Cal
told him the police believed he had put the explosive
material in a particular church. After hearing this, the
corner of his lip went up for a fraction of a second. What
Cal learnt from this was that the police were wrong. The
suspect was happy because the investigators had been
misled and were now going to lose time searching for
the bomb in a wrong place. How he had wished to have
been able to hold back his joy… But as Cal says: ‘The
truth is written all over our face.’
One more thing about happiness: it is one of
those four emotions, along with anger, sadness, and fear,
that can drive somebody into a crisis when reaching their
highest peak. When you are elated, intoxicated with joy,
you are seized with a very powerful sensation, which
overtakes all three main components of human nature:
body: your heart starts to pound more intensely
and there’s no way you can stay calm, but
express yourself very conspicuously (hands
waving up in the air, screaming, hopping,
embracing anyone in your proximity, even
weeping)
mind: the reward system releases a massive
amount of adrenalin and dopamine
spirit: you feel an inner fulfillment and
contentment, since you’ve achieved something
extraordinary
In order to experience such a consuming
emotion, the triggering event also has to be a special
one. Think of football fans rising to their feet after their
favorite team has made an unbelievable come-back
against their 2-0 leading opponents, scored the victory
goal in the very last second of the match and won the
cup. That’s what I call elated with joy. The same applies
to the player who scored that last goal, who will
invariably be overwhelmed by uncontrollable happiness.
Sadness
It’s hard to believe that anyone might enjoy
wallowing in sadness. We are all doing our utmost to
circumvent this emotion. However, grief has a
momentous function, meant to signal that we are going
through a hard time. It is this emotion that strengthened
our ancestral community relationships, since recognizing
the suffering of our fellow creatures led to a mutual
effort to calm and soothe the distraught one. Apart from
this, sorrow (I’m using synonyms just to avoid
repetition, although there might be some slight
differences in meaning) also reveals how much we really
cared for what or whom we lost (the loss of something
or someone we cherished is the trigger). It proves that
there had been a strongly established connection
between us and the lost item or person. The deeper the
distress, the stronger the connection was.
This is why, for instance, a widow, while dressed
in mourning at her husband’s funeral, who doesn’t look
too dismayed because of his death is likely to cause
some raised eyebrows. Assuming she didn’t take any
tranquilizers, her apparent lack of grief will seem strange
to you and you will ask yourself why she is not acting
like any other normal wife. This will raise questions in
your mind concerning her marriage: did they have a
love-hate relationship, with a predisposition toward the
hate part? did he treat her so badly that she now feels no
distress over his death (on the contrary, she might in fact
feel that a load has been taken off her back)? did she
ever really love him (she might have married him for
undisclosed reasons)? was she cheating on him (she
could already have a secret lover, ready to be made
public a few days after the funeral)?
This and other similar questions occur to you,
just because you don’t see her displaying the universal
response for sadness: tears, withdrawal, absent-
mindedness, sad face (the corners of the mouth drawn
down, her inner brows drawn up, and wrinkles across the
forehead). Sometimes it is the absence, not the presence
of an emotion, that tells the truth about somebody.
You might now be thinking: OK, but you said
that people still react differently to the same trigger.
Maybe she is suffering in her heart. Just because she
isn’t showing it doesn’t mean she isn’t sad. Or she might
have been expecting his death and prepared in advance
to manage her emotions.
You would be right. Indeed, as stated in the
opening chapter, people do respond differently to the
same emotional experience. Nevertheless, it is almost
impossible not to show at least a small sign of grief on
your face, because, as happens when we smile, there are
muscles we cannot control voluntarily. These muscles
will always be activated when we feel the corresponding
emotion. It’s the same with sadness. Some muscles that
produce a sad expression will inevitably be activated, if
our feelings are genuine. Therefore, we should see at
least a slight lift of the inner brow or the drooping of the
corner of the mouth, in order to believe that the person is
genuinely grieving. As for the ability to manage your
emotions, I doubt very much that you will ever be able
to maintain a poker face when your partner passes away.
The more intense the love, the deeper the grief
afterwards.
Like happiness, sadness also has a red-alert
button,where its intensity energy causes a truly negative
experience. What I’m talking about is depression. Scores
and scores of people suffer from it nowadays, because
they fail to keep elude the effects of excessive grief.
Usually, depression follows a period of very deep
distress, such as the horrible death of a beloved one or a
major failure in your life (divorce, unemployment,
missing a career-advancing opportunity, etc). I cannot
emphasize enough how dangerous it is to immerse
yourself into this all-consuming mood (we don’t really
classify depression as an emotion, but rather as a mood,
given its duration). Remember that the stronger the
feeling, the more secondary thoughts will occupy your
mind and reinforce your prevailing emotion. In this type
of situation, you are in dire need of outside help.
Friends, family or physicians can bring you back on
track before it’s too late (suicide is most often chosen as
the ultimate solution by people suffering from
depression).
In terms of facial expression, sadness has the
following traits: corners of the inner brows go up, lip
corners go down, in a U-shape, the upper eyelids droop
and the lower lip might be pushed up in a pout. When
the sadness is very intense, our lower face may look as if
we are smiling, since our lip corners are pushed up,
shaping out a false smile.
Managing your blues can be a tough challenge.
Whenever a distressing event arrives that affects us
directly, meaning that we have lost something much
cherished or craved for, we tend to get entangled in
those thoughts that can feed our grief. As previously
stated, there is no such thing as an isolated emotion,
which can be sorted out and dealt with individually. All
of them are accompanied by a sum of other emotional
thoughts (memories, foresights, questions, desires) that
are there to uphold the pivotal feeling. So you either take
the whole gang, or you take nothing at all.
Suppose you have just been made redundant.
You’ve got a wife and two children, one of them on the
verge of leaving for university. The very instant you are
given the sack (the trigger for sadness), you might at
first feel something else than unhappiness. You could be
angry with your boss for not having appreciated you for
the great work you have done. Anger might as well
come along with a deeply felt contempt for your boss,
since you consider yourself better qualified and more
competent than your superior thinks of you. You could
be disgusted at this injustice and feel sick about the
whole reprehensible system. Anyway, chances are that
after things have settled a bit, you will begin to feel sad.
What follows is easy to imagine. You get anxious about
the future and start asking yourself how you and your
family are going to keep body and soul together. You’ll
have doubts about yourself: what if you actually were a
poor employee, who deserved to be dismissed? You
recall those harsh moments in your life, when you had to
eke out a living, earning very little money.
Once again, it is the reflective state that can help
us break the deadlock. The usually first step in our
emotional management plan, identifying your triggers,
could be skipped in this case, provided your dismissal
took you aback and you haven’t dealt with a similar
situation before. The second step, entering the reflective
state, is, conversely, of even bigger importance, given
the size of your problem. You need to focus on your
strengths, those abilities that you can use as effectively
in another field of activity. This could actually be your
chance to try something new. Weren’t you a little tired
out with the same commonplace tasks you had to
accomplish daily? With you experience, skills and