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Why Is Managing Emotions Important?
Successfully managing emotions means that our conduct is guided by both our thoughts and our feelings. This ability allows us to integrate cognition and affect to generate effective solutions. The idea that there is passion on the one hand and reason on the other represents a false dichotomy that may encourage us in the mistaken belief that somehow our feelings are neither rational nor informative. Without the ability to integrate thinking and feeling, we may analyze problems in painstaking detail and pride ourselves on being a calm and unemotional person. But we miss important sources of information that are signaled by our feelings. Or we may be awash in emotion, becoming overwhelmed with feeling and flailing around looking for a way out. The ability to integrate balances heart and mind. It helps us recognize that emotions contain powerful and important information and that decision making cannot succeed in the absence of emotion. As Damasio demonstrated through the study of patients with various kinds of brain damage, when the brain centers involved in emotion are not functional, it is nearly impossible to make good, “rational” decisions.[9] The ability to regulate your own mood and that of others may be part of what makes good managers great leaders.But what happens when we fail to regulate our emotions? An example may be found in the failure of so many of our New Year’s resolutions. It seems that the deck is stacked against us in this battle, especially when we get emotionally upset. Immediate emotional regulation (making ourselves feel better in the short term) is much more important to us than is impulse control (achieving our longterm goals). Even if we are extremely committed to achieving some important but long-term goal by controlling our impulses, we will likely give up on our resolutions when we are upset as a way to stop feeling upset. Our bid to control impulses fails because we find that feeling good, or not feeling bad, is much more important to us than achieving some distant, far-off goal such as going back to school for an advanced degree, not yelling at customer service, or revising next year’s budget. In a set of classic experiments, Columbia University psychologist-Walter Mischel found that children who were asked to remember a sad event in their lives were later less able to resist the temptation to play with a forbidden toy than were other children.[10] Their sorrow made it hard to delay immediate gratification. In another experiment by Roy Baumeister and colleagues, some people were given a pill and told that it made their mood unchangeable, whereas others were not given the pill. Each group then experienced a stressor in the laboratory. The group with the moodfreezing pill was less likely to give in to their impulses.[11] This means that you turn to the refrigerator or a cigarette only if you believe it’s going to help you feel better. Of course, the mood-freezing pill might have also changed the subject’s physiology and body chemistry. The problem with this hypothesis is that there is no such thing as a mood-freezing pill—the pill was just a placebo and had no noticeable physiological effects. The effects were all in people’s minds. When we feel that our moods are fairly set and stable, we continue attending to the difficult or boring task at hand, rather than taking a snack break or hanging out at the water cooler chatting with colleagues. When we experience emotional distress, however, we are more likely to give in to our impulses. In the short run, this works fine; eating or drinking makes us feel better. In the long run, though, giving in to these impulses is not adaptive, and we end up feeling worse than we did before. Our negative mood returns, and it is now accompanied by feelings of guilt.
You can see a classic, real-world experiment, unfortunately, almost anytime at your neighborhood pub. Most people believe that drinking alcohol enhances their mood and lowers anxiety. If you are feeling upset, angry, or depressed, having a drink to calm yourself or to get out of that funk may work, but only for a short time. After another drink or two, however, you will likely feel even worse than when you started. Alcohol may elevate your mood, but after a few drinks it does just the opposite, and you end up feeling worse. Pharmacologically, alcohol is a depressant. Similarly, when people try to lose weight and are feeling a bit depressed, that piece of chocolate cake in the refrigerator looks awfully good. Eating makes us feel good, and eating chocolate can make us feel really good. That is, until we realize that we blew our diet—again! Food is no substitute for good emotion management skills. Aggression is another area where impulse control loses out to affect regulation. If we experimentally create a bad or negative mood in someone, that person is more likely to become aggressive as a means of trying to feel better. You are even more likely to lose your cool in such a situation if you believe that blowing your top and venting your anger will make you feel better. In fact, June Tangney, a psychologist at George Mason University, has shown that feeling shame is one of the great instigators of subsequent rage.[12] Reflect on that before you publically embarrass a coworker! Our desire to get out of a bad mood can also influence longterm investment strategies. Diane Tice and her colleagues had students participate in an investment simulation game in which a long-term strategy would result in higher winnings than a shortterm strategy to maximize profits. Tice found that people in a sad mood were more likely to cash in earlier than were people in a positive or neutral mood, presumably because those in a sad mood wanted to feel better, and making money—in the short term—was the way to do it.[13]
Procrastination is another dysfunctional affect-regulation tool. Working on our long-term goals often means engaging in tasks that are not much fun. We also may worry about our ability to succeed. The result is that we procrastinate by engaging in some enjoyable activity. When we are in a bad mood, we procrastinate even more, since doing something fun is one way to make ourselves feel better. A sad marketing manager, given the choice between preparing routine reports or hanging out with his coworkers during lunch, will likely opt for the long lunch. If we are feeling sad and we are at the office, we might spend time sharpening our pencils or grabbing a candy bar out of the vending machine rather than working on the marketing presentation. If we can manage our emotions, that is, blend emotion and thought, we increase the chances that our decisions will be more effective and our lives more adaptive. This is the challenge of emotion management—neither to suppress feelings nor to vent them but to reflect on them, integrate them with our thinking, and use them as a source of information and an inspiration for intelligent decision making. In the next chapter we tell you how we measure these four emotional abilities, and then we help you enhance your skills. [9]Damasio, A. R. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994. [10]Mischel, W., and Ebbesen, E. B. “Attention in Delay of Gratification.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970, 16, 329–337; Mischel, W., Ebbesen, E. B., and Zeiss, A. R. “Cognitive and Attentional Mechanisms in Delay of Gratification.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1972, 21, 204–218. [11]Baumeister, R. F. “Ego Depletion, the Executive Function, and Self-Control: An Energy Model of the Self in Personality.” In B. W. Roberts and R. Hogan (eds.), Personality Psychology in the Workplace. Decade Of Behavior. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001; Tice, D. M., Bratslavsky, E., and Baumeister, R. F. “Emotional Distress Regulation Takes Precedence Over Impulse Control: If You Feel Bad, Do It!” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2001, 80, 53–67. [12]Reviewed in Tangney, J. P., and Salovey, P. “Problematic Social Emotions: Shame, Guilt, Jealousy, and Envy.” In R. M. Kowalski and M. R. Leary (eds.), The Social Psychology of Emotional and Behavioral Problems: Interfaces of Social and Clinical Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1999; Tangney, J. P., and Dearing, R. L. Shame and Guilt. New York: Guilford Press, 2002; for earlier work, see Lewis, H. B. Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. New York: International Universities Press, 1971; for a charming book on embarrassment, see Miller, R. E. Embarrassment: Poise and Peril in Everyday Life. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. [13]Tice, D. M., and Bratslavsky, E. “Giving in to Feel Good: The Place of Emotion Regulation in the Context of General Self-Control.” Psychological Inquiry, 2000, 11, 149–159.
