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What Is Managing Emotions?
This chapter explains the keystone of emotional intelligence: the ability to manage emotions. This ability does not mean that you never feel emotions or act emotionally but that your emotions are integrated into your decisions and into your behavior in a way that enhances your life and the lives of those around you. People with a strong ability to manage emotions can be passionate, but they also have good emotional self-control, tend to be even-tempered, think clearly when they are experiencing strong feelings, make decisions based on their hearts and their heads, and generally reflect on their emotions often. At the same time, individuals who are not especially skilled in emotional management often are seen by others as having a bad temper, losing control, and taking their feelings out on others. They sometimes seem blinded by their feelings, doing stupid things by acting on gut impulse rather than thinking things through. Paradoxically, they don’t try very hard to reflect on these feelings.There is another type of manager who lacks the ability to manage-emotions. This is the cold, logical, analytical manager who is driven only by the facts, at least the facts as he defines them. This emotionally unintelligent manager tries, in vain, to make so-called objective and unemotional decisions, and in doing so, fails to see the forest for the trees. The emotionally intelligent manager leverages the data of emotions and the wisdom in feelings while recognizing that moods arise for unknown reasons. Whereas acting with our emotions is usually the smart choice, acting out with our moods isn’t usually a good idea. Emotions signal that something important is going on or is about to happen. But they also bring feelings and thoughts that we may not want to experience. How we deal with emotional events makes a big difference in how successful we are in achieving our objectives, even in how we remember and process information. Consider an experiment by Jane Richards and James Gross at Stanford University in which these researchers showed an upsetting film to people. Some were told to suppress the expression of their emotions, and some were not given any special instructions. After the film, everyone was given a memory test about details in the film. Those who tried to suppress their emotions remembered less about the movie than did the people who were not given any special instructions.[1] In another experiment, people viewed upsetting slides. Some people were asked to suppress their emotional reaction, and others were asked to try to make the experience a positive one. Both groups looked at the slides the same amount of time; those asked to hide their feelings did not look away. The people who tried to see the experience as a positive one reported less negative emotions than the others. The most fascinating finding was that those people who were asked to suppress their reaction remembered less verbal information about the slides (such as what people said) than the others did but that there were no differences in their nonverbal memory (such as describing what was in a particular scene). This may mean that we talk to ourselves when we try to suppress our emotional expressions. We monitor how we feel, think about how we might look, match the two, and then make any necessary corrections to our expression.[2]
What this research tells us is that if we always try to suppress our emotions, we may not remember as much information about an upsetting or emotional event. If we suppress our feelings, memory for painful or emotional encounters suffers. In fact, it is hypothesized that men may remember less about social interactions than women because men, in general, tend to suppress their emotions more than women do.
Welcoming Emotion
Emotions are not always welcome. There are many instances when we try to suppress emotional reactions. This kind of suppression can make sense at times, because we lack the resources to process the feeling, and we need to ignore the emotions and the information contained in them. If this suppression becomes habitual, however, we lose the information value of our emotions. At other times, we have to allow ourselves to feel a feeling, even to welcome the emotion that might be unexpected or uncomfortable. It takes a good deal of energy not to feel, and this energy—mental energy—gets siphoned away from problem solving, decision making, and being aware. Imagine trying to mourn the death of a loved one by trying hard not to feel sad. It just doesn’t work. Remaining open to feelings can be problematic for positive as well as negative emotions. Some people are uncomfortable with happiness, or at least with the extreme form of happiness—joy. They may be afraid that they will lose control and in a burst of enthusiasm expose themselves to ridicule. In some cultures, for example in Asian countries like Japan, experiencing too much joy, especially if it is due to one’s accomplishments, is seen as a bit selfish and embarrassing. Sometimes people from these cultures cover up a joyful facial expression with their hands or try not to look too happy. Similarly, in many parts of the world it is considered bad luck to arouse the envy of other people by being too happy about one’s good fortune. One doesn’t want to tempt the “evil eye.” In such cultures, the regulation of positive feelings may be especially important, and people may develop all kinds of strategies in order to be effective in doing so. Americans, if they are outside the office, do not seem especially troubled about experiencing “too much” joy, however.[3]
Not Being Used by Emotions
Emotion management includes the ability to control overwhelming emotion when the feelings threaten to hurt us, or others, physically, mentally, or emotionally. We also learn not to express certain emotions when doing so would be inappropriate. Many times, it is a more intelligent decision to smile, even though we are sad, or to let pass a slight or an insult. Emotions act as a signaling system, yet if we always act on those signals, we can react impulsively and not blend emotion and thought. Perhaps the emotion and its source need to be confirmed, or we need to ensure that our perceptions of the emotion-causing event were correct. The familiar strategy of just waiting a moment—counting to ten—can often make a big difference in whether the response we make is effective. But there will be times when “he who hesitates is lost.” If we stop and reflect on the unreasonableness of our fear and see that it is unnecessary to flee, we may end up being trapped on a sinking ship or cornered by a threatening adversary. Similarly, if we don’t trust the happiness we feel and let an opportunity pass us by, we may come to regret not acting on our passion. As we mentioned earlier, in the workplace the emotion most often not acted on is joy.[4] For many years, psychologists debated whether venting one’s feelings—for example, expressing anger cathartically such as by yelling and screaming—helps one manage such feelings. The verdict is now in: catharsis does not seem to help.[5] The more one vents, the worse one tends to feel (at least until exhaustion takes over). Given these findings, we argue that emotional management is neither suppressing one’s feelings nor venting them. Effective emotion management is not a question of whether we should strive to control our feelings but how we can intelligently engage and disengage from them.
Letting Emotions Motivate and Inspire
We shouldn’t forget the lesson that an emotion teaches us. Just as an emotion directs our attention to an event, it can motivate and inspire us. As an emotion lingers but weakens over time, we can draw on it for insight and energy. As our rage cools to anger, the feeling can be harnessed to take a stand against injustice. Or we can use the feeling to communicate the injustice to others who are not in an angry state at the time.
Emotions are not passive. They have an action component or tendency. They motivate our behavior. In fact, some emotion theorists, such as Nico Frijda at the University of Amsterdam, believe that the tendency for emotions to impel us into action (running away when afraid or accepting help from others when sad) is the primary reason we have evolved an emotion system.[6]
Finding Out What’s Going On
The first step in managing emotions is to be aware of them and accept them. Emotional awareness is the building block of successful emotion regulation, but we need more than simply to be aware of our own and others’ feelings. We require a bit of sophisticated processing of the emotions we experience. How am I feeling? is an important first question to ask oneself, but to that we would add:
Am I clear about my feelings?
How strong is this feeling?
How much influence does this feeling seem to have on my thoughts right now?
Is this an emotion that I often experience?
Is it unusual for me to feel this way?
These are the automatic questions that people who are sophisticated and skillful in processing their emotions ask themselves. They associate a current feeling with a larger picture of identity and reality. They relate emotions to a sophisticated sense of oneself. The questions also help to filter out the “noise” of a mood from the signal of an emotion.
Integrating Feelings
Feeling bad can be good, and feeling good can be bad. It all depends on the situation, the people involved, and our goal. Sometimes it makes sense to keep a bad mood intact, whereas at other times it makes more sense to snap out of it and feel happy or neutral. As Aristotle said, “Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy.”[7] We need to make intelligent choices about our emotions. To do so means that we need to integrate emotions and thought into all that we do. This requires us to be balanced and fair with our emotions—to neither push them down below the surface of awareness nor to elevate them so that they are exaggerated in importance. To do either means that we are being too rational or too emotional. Emotional balance is the goal: passion with reason.[8] This is not to imply that we should never experience, or act, on strong emotion. In fact, many times this is the intelligent choice. Feeling joyful, we can sing, dance, and celebrate a wonderful event. That joy can be expressed to its fullest, such as at the birth of a child or the winning of a major contract. In the face of a violent physical assault, our anger rises and intensifies, motivating us to defend ourselves against the assault. Often we should defend ourselves against an unfair verbal attack; not to do so can spell disaster. [1]Richards, J. M., and Gross, J. J. “Emotion Regulation and Memory: The Cognitive Costs of Keeping One’s Cool.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, 79, 410–424. [2]For more information, see Gross, J. J., and John, O. P. “Wise Emotion Regulation.” In L. F. Barrett and P. Salovey (eds.), The Wisdom in Feeling: Psychological Processes in Emotional Intelligence. New York: Guilford Press, 2002. [3]Schoeck, H. Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1966. [4]Kelly, J. R., and Barsade, S. G. “Mood and Emotions in Small Groups and Work Teams.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2001, 86, 99–130. [5]Bushman, B. J. “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger and Aggressive Responding.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2002, 28, 724–731. [6]Frijda, N. H. The Emotions. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1986; see also, Frijda, N. H., Kuipers, P., and ter Schure, E. “Relations Among Emotion, Appraisal, and Emotional Action Readiness.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1989, 57, 212–228. [7]Aristotle. The Poetics. G. F. Else (trans.) Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1970. (Aristotle, circa 355 B.C.) [8]For a relevant discussion, see de Sousa, R. The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.
