Section Headings [ Two Procedures] [ Empiricism] [ Value of these Ideas]

After describing my model of emotion and then listing some characteristics of a few emotions, I now describe how to identify emotions.

Identifying emotions is very difficult. And what complicates the difficulty even more is that a person experiences two emotions at once, one being from his or her present consciousness (what I usually call the surface consciousness) and one being from the subconscious mind. To these two we can add a third one that is often present as well, that being anxiety.

Note. Although emotions have their origin in the unconscious mind, they are used by both the surface consciousness and the subconscious mind.

My procedure for identifying my surface emotions had to be different from the procedure that I used to identify my subconscious emotions. The reason for this was that my subconscious emotions were hidden from my normal state of awareness. I usually had to become familiar with my surface emotions before I had much chance of pinpointing my subconscious ones.

Surface Emotions

To identify my surface emotions I read biographies and autobiographies. I would compare the reactions and motivations of the persons being described with my own reactions and motivations. Rather than try to identify many emotions at a time, I would pick just one and try to correlate responses that seemed to be relevant. I would try to pinpoint the emotion underlying dominant attitudes and beliefs in politics, religion, sexuality, morality, etc. I would puzzle over which emotion these responses sprang from. Then intuition would lead me eventually to the correct identification of that emotion. Then I would understand the various ways that that emotion could manifest itself. For example, having identified jealousy, I would see the different ways that it showed itself in politics, sexuality, religion, morality, etc.

But each intuition had to be checked and cross-checked in order to remove occasional errors. Then I would correlate the intuition against my own experience. In this procedure, empiricism backed up my intuitions.

When using biographies and autobiographies for the purpose of identifying emotional responses, it is essential to read about outstanding people, irrespective of whether they are good or bad. Such people have their emotional responses accentuated in their own particular speciality – this gives a ‘sharp edge’ to their personality, and reduces the choice of possible emotions that may be influencing them.

Subconscious Emotions

The procedure that I adopted to identify my subconscious emotions was to use a thesaurus or synonym dictionary. The subconscious mind would only let me get a vague approximation to what the present subconscious emotion was (after all, the contents of the subconscious mind are hidden ; easy identification is not to be expected). So I used the thesaurus to look up synonyms of the approximate emotion. An intuition would then enable me to pinpoint the exact emotion. In this procedure, my intuitions backed up my empiricism.

Body symptoms and Mental Attitudes

Having identified an emotion I then looked for body symptoms and mental attitudes that are associated with that emotion. Once such correlations are found it becomes easy to determine my emotional responses when they are intense : I can identify the emotion direct, or indirectly through the symptom or attitude that is currently expressing itself. Low-intensity emotions can only be identified indirectly.

For example : my nose produced regular colds and catarrhs for most of my life, at any time of the year. By repeated observation I found that my left-side nostril produced a runny nose when I felt hate (usually as a mode of pride) ; the right-side nostril when I felt self-pity.

Other examples : resentment increases blood pressure and usually causes a headache on the left side of the brain (when the resentment is very intense, the pain may be felt as a band of pain around the whole head), whilst fear causes a headache on the right side of the brain. Bitterness causes a headache at the rear of the brain, in the area where the skull joins the neck. Pride is one of the causes of neck pain, in the cervical vertebrae furthest from the skull. [¹]

There is no short-cut to identifying emotions.
It is a long and hard process of becoming more and more aware of the influences that are associated with important beliefs, attitudes and behaviours (minor beliefs, etc, do not carry much emotional weight and so will be exceedingly hard to examine). Intuition is needed. And the development of intuition is a slow process, requiring perseverance and single-mindedness.

Footnote

[¹]. More body symptoms and mental attitudes are described in the article Psycho-Somatics, on my website Patterns of  Confusion. See Links page for its web address.

Copyright @2002  Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.