Affect - what is it, what is this state? This term came from psychiatric and criminal practice into everyday life. How does it differ from ordinary emotions, when does it become a dangerous pathology?
Emotions are different
An emotion is a mental and physiological process that reflects a personal unconscious assessment of a situation or phenomenon. Positive changes cause joy, while unpleasant changes cause irritation, sadness, fear or anger. The latter is what affect is made of. What is this condition? This is an intense state that lasts a relatively short time, but has vivid psychosomatic manifestations - changes in breathing and pulse, spasms of peripheral blood vessels, increased sweating, and impaired movement.
What types does affect include?
We have found out what affect is. Now let's look at its classification. The main types of affect are divided depending on their impact into asthenic (horror, melancholy - everything that paralyzes activity) and sthenic (delight, anger - mobilization and motivation to action). If the situations that caused this condition are repeated frequently, then the tension accumulates. view. The most dangerous is pathological, which is caused by a violation of the adequate functioning of the human psychophysiological system. which lasts from thirty minutes to an hour, during which a person behaves “on autopilot” and is not aware of his actions. After the cessation of the condition, the individual usually does not remember his actions and feels exhaustion and prostration. That is why, if a person committed a murder in a state of passion, this is a mitigating circumstance, since the accused did not control his actions and was not aware of them.
Legal aspects
It is necessary to make some clarifications in the question legal justification these kinds of altered states. In legal practice, only pathological proven affect is a mitigating circumstance. If a person has committed a pathological crime, he will receive a maximum of three years in prison. All other types are taken into account only mediocrely.
History of the study
"Affect" - what does this word mean? It comes from Latin. Affectus means "passion", "excitement". Even the Greeks knew this state. Plato called it as an innate mental principle. If a person showed a tendency to passion, then he should take up military affairs. The Christian view viewed these states as manifestations of influence dark forces, obsession. It was only during the times of Descartes and Spinoza that the role of the relationship between emotions, mind and body began to be understood. Emotional affect came to the attention of scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Researchers such as Mauss and Durkheim discovered that society influences the individual through affect. Psychological affect was also of interest to Freud, who concluded that the suppression of such states leads to serious mental disorders and diseases and pathologies. They can then be expressed in physical symptoms such as pain, paralysis, and so on.
Action example
Let's look at an example of how affect works. All people have anxious moods that are replaced by fear. This feeling is already more specific, and it usually has a known reason. When fear reaches its climax, horror occurs. And this is a psycho-emotional state that is characterized by unusual strength and violent expression in external actions, physiological internal processes, often uncontrollable. If a person is irritated, then this feeling can develop into anger, and then into rage. It is violent feelings, unconscious and uncontrollable, that are called affects in psychological and criminal practice.
Characteristics from the point of view of the central nervous system
In a state of passion, the central nervous system experiences violent irritation due to strong emotional experiences. The concept of affect is characterized by the maximum strength of inhibitory and excitatory processes in the cerebral cortex, increased activity of subcortical centers. Excitation in the centers of the brain that are associated with emotions is accompanied by inhibition of areas of the cortex that are responsible for analyzing what is happening and reporting on their actions. Subcortical centers, freed from the control of the cerebral cortex during the action of affect, are responsible for the outward vivid manifestation of this state. Affect has its own unique characteristics. The course of this emotional experience is limited in time, since this process is excessively intense. That is why it becomes obsolete quite quickly. There are three main stages.
Stage one: initial
In some cases, the state of passion occurs unexpectedly, like some kind of flash or explosion, and then instantly reaches maximum intensity. In other cases, the intensity of the experience increases gradually. Excitation and inhibition in different centers of the cerebral cortex and subcortical centers are increasingly activated. Thanks to this, a person increasingly loses his self-control.
Stage two: central
During this stage, sudden changes and disturbances in the adequate functioning of the body are observed. Excitation in the subcortical centers reaches higher power, inhibition covers all the most important centers of the cortex and inhibits their functions. Thanks to this, many people fall apart nervous processes, which are associated with education and morality. Speech and thinking are impaired, attention decreases, and control over actions is lost. Disorder appears fine motor skills. The functions of the endocrine glands, autonomous nervous system. Breathing and blood circulation are impaired. At this stage, affect has not one culminating peak, but several: the period of active flow changes with a period of attenuation, and then the cycle is repeated several times.
Stage three: final
During this stage, internal and altered states fade away. The vital activity of the whole organism declines greatly: huge waste nervous forces drain him. A person experiences apathy, drowsiness, and fatigue.
Characteristics of emotional experiences
Affect is an unconscious state to a lesser or greater extent, depending on its intensity. This is expressed in reduced control over actions. During the heat of passion, a person is not able to control his actions; he is overwhelmed by emotions that he is almost unaware of. However, absolute lack of accountability is observed only during particularly strong states, when the most important parts of the brain are completely inhibited. This is precisely the condition that appears in criminal practice. In most cases, especially in the initial, growing stage, control is maintained, but in a reduced and partial form. A strong affect takes over the entire personality. Sharp and strong changes are observed in the process of consciousness. The volume of information processed is significantly reduced to a small number of perceptions and ideas. Many facts and phenomena are perceived completely differently, and a change in personal attitudes occurs. The very personality of a person changes, moral and ethical ideas are reset. In these situations they say that the person has changed before our eyes.
Affect(from Lat. affectus - emotional excitement, passion) - strong emotional disturbance, characterized by disorganization of consciousness, a sharp activation of impulsive, involuntary defensive and aggressive reactions.
Diagnostic signs affect:
Subjective suddenness of the onset of affect;
Short-term, explosive nature of emotional release;
Intensity, tension of emotional experiences, manifested in muscle tension, motor arousal, in the form of impulsive, stereotyped actions;
Specific changes in consciousness, its “narrowing”, concentration of thinking on affectively colored experiences, as a result of which the subject realizes only immediate goals and makes decisions that are inadequate to the situation that has arisen, to the detriment of his own interests and plans, without taking into account possible consequences, which he himself later usually regrets;
Mental disorders cognitive processes(fragmentation of perception, partial amnesia of what happened, etc.);
Externally observable signs of a disorder of the autonomic nervous system (discoloration skin faces, affectively colored facial expressions, intermittent speech with impaired articulation, altered timbre of voice, slow tempo of pronouncing words in the decline stage);
Decreased emotional-volitional regulation of behavior and self-control;
Post-affective exhaustion of the nervous system, loss of strength, decreased activity, stupor, apathy, lethargy in the decline stage.
To correctly resolve the question of whether the accused (defendant) was in a state of passion, in addition to establishing the signs noted above, it is necessary to investigate:
The nature of the affectogenic situation;
Individual psychological characteristics of the personality of the accused (defendant);
His psychophysiological state on the eve of the crime;
The nature of the actions of the accused at the time the crime was committed;
Features of the behavior of the perpetrator immediately after the crime, his reaction to the words of others, his attitude towards his illegal actions and the resulting consequences.
Usually, affectogenic situation is unexpected, acutely conflicting in nature, accompanied by real threats, violence, insults against the subject or his relatives. Moreover, the strength of the impact of negative stimuli is determined primarily by the subjective meaning of the events and situations in which a person acts.
TO individual psychological characteristics of the subject’s personality that predispose to affect include: a significant predominance of excitation processes over inhibition processes, emotional instability, increased sensitivity (sensitivity), vulnerability, touchiness, a tendency to get stuck on traumatic facts, high but unstable self-esteem.
The appearance of an affective reaction is also influenced by the age characteristics of the subject, his temporary functional psychophysiological states, which violate the stability of the psyche to the influence of an affectogenic situation (fatigue, insomnia, post-traumatic disorders psyches mentioned above, etc.).
Stages of affect:
1. Preparatory - increasing emotional tension. The development of this stage is determined by the time of existence of conflict relationships: from psychotraumatic actions to an affective explosion. The first signs of emotional disinhibition and neurasthenic symptoms may not appear immediately.
2. Climax, or explosion(the shortest). The transition to the second stage occurs suddenly, depending on the individual psychological characteristics of a particular person.
Manifests itself in the form of sharp, disordered, repetitive, stereotypical actions of an aggressive nature. Associated symptoms:“narrowness” of consciousness with fragmented perception, inconsistency, “fragmented” thinking (decisions made are inappropriate to the situation, the processes of goal formation and motivation are inconsistent and chaotic); volitional regulation of actions and self-control sharply decrease.
A large number of injuries inflicted on the victim often creates an outwardly deceptive picture (from the point of view of the objective side of the crime), as if the perpetrator acted with particular cruelty, although in fact he was in a state of passion. Sometimes this leads to the erroneous classification of an act, for example, as a murder committed with particular cruelty, and not in a state of passion (suddenly arising strong emotional excitement) with the imposition of a criminal punishment disproportionate to the guilt of the defendant.
3. Stage of decline in emotional tension with depletion of affective arousal(final). Affective arousal fades, a sharp decline occurs, and physical activity slows down. Due to the significant expenditure of the body’s internal energy resources, active forms of behavior are sharply replaced by passive ones, fatigue, apathy, confusion, and lethargy appear.
Often, the accused who has committed murder or caused bodily harm in a state of passion, then sincerely regrets what happened and strives to help his victim. Moreover, this help is also often chaotic, inadequate to the situation and the nature of the crime.
Types of affect:
1. Cumulated (cumulative) physiological affect - affect that occurs with repeated repetitions of negative influences.
2. Abnormal affect (affect based on simple alcohol intoxication) - affect that develops against the background of alcohol intoxication mild degree when changes in perception and behavior are not so significant that we can talk about complete deformation thought processes, about a significantly distorted semantic perception of reality.
The presence of data on the defendant’s consumption of alcoholic beverages in the period preceding the affective tort does not relieve experts of the obligation to carefully analyze all the circumstances of the case in each specific case in order to conclude about the presence or absence of affect.
3. A type of abnormal affect - affect that develops in psychopathic individuals, in whom deviations from the mental norm do not reach a pronounced pathology, but at the same time do not exclude certain defects in the emotional-volitional, motivational sphere. It should also be taken into account that the type of psychopathization of such persons in each phase of the development of affect gives it a characteristic emotional coloring. So, for example, for psychopathic personalities of the excitable circle, a directly explosive nature of the reaction is most typical, for inhibited ones - a cumulative-explosive one, for hysterical ones - a demonstratively emphasized, outwardly exaggerated affective discharge. A characteristic feature of all of them is that affects in people of the psychopathic circle arise easily and in their strength are far from corresponding to the cause that caused them. Affective irritability in such individuals often reaches such a degree that even an insignificant contradiction can cause a violent outburst of anger in them.
Affect has criminal legal significance not only in the investigation of crimes under Art. Art. 107, 113 of the Criminal Code, but also when assessing the mental state of the perpetrator. Affect can also be of particular importance when assessing the psychologically helpless state of the victim in cases of rape, as well as as a circumstance mitigating punishment in other categories of criminal cases, for example, in a situation of exceeding the limits of necessary defense, for some military crimes, etc.
The diagnosis of affect has its own characteristics, which are determined primarily by the fact that the state experienced by a person cannot be reproduced either in fact or for ethical reasons. The main methods used by psychologists to determine affect are:
Psychological analysis the situation in which the crime was committed, based on the materials of the criminal case;
Studying anamnestic information about the person who committed the unlawful act;
A conversation with the accused, his relatives, who know well the conditions in which he grew up, lived, and was brought up;
Psychological testing of the subject using various psychodiagnostic test techniques;
Retrospective analysis of the subject’s behavior in a criminal situation using the results of his psychological testing, anamnestic information, information about the event based on the materials of the criminal case.
Suffering, being a purely psychological concept, has now acquired quite a relevant legal meaning, understanding the essence and disclosure of the content of which when considering a number of criminal cases and civil disputes becomes an indispensable condition legally correct application rules of law.
Suffering is feelings, the emotional state of a person in the form of negative experiences that arise under the influence of events that traumatize his psyche, deeply affecting his personal structures, mood, well-being, and health.
Suffering in its pure form is extremely rare. Suffering is usually accompanied by: fear, tension (stress), anger, impulsivity, affect, guilt, shame and other negative emotions. The most common connection between suffering and fear, suffering and stress.
A very close relationship exists between suffering and fear, stress, emotions of anger, and affect. Therefore, establishing a strong emotional stress, affect can serve as confirmation, proof that he really experienced suffering.
Characteristic signs suffering:
Sadness, detachment from current events, isolation from people;
The person experiences loneliness and isolation;
Feels like a loser, unhappy, defeated, unable to achieve previous successes;
Dejection, loss of spirit, thoughts appear about one’s professional incompetence, about the loss of the meaning of life;
Overall decreases physical tone, appear functional disorders, sleep, appetite, etc. are disturbed.
The depth of suffering depends not only on what happened, but also, no less, on our attitude to it, on the individual psychological characteristics of the victim, on his attitudes, and social expectations.
The suffering a person experiences has a negative impact on his professional activity, cognitive activity, which usually does not go unnoticed by his immediate environment.
The law mentions two varieties of this class of emotions:
- moral and mental suffering- are directly related to personal, deep structures that are attacked, which causes such a strong emotional response in a person in the form of negative experiences called suffering;
Physical suffering.
The profession of a lawyer places increased demands on his psyche, intellect, and emotional and volitional qualities. Whatever field of law enforcement he works in, his working day is often filled with a variety of problematic situations, various kinds of conflicts that require prompt decision-making of a legal nature, which in itself, to a much greater extent than in other professions, contributes to increased fatigue, excessive irritation, stress.
A huge number of publications are currently devoted to relaxation methods, a lot of special, including translated, literature on psychotraining has been published, in which, if desired, you can always find a large number of different useful tips, various types of physical relaxation exercises. However, despite all these methodological developments and recommendations, first of all you should remember about simple and accessible ways to overcome negative mental states in the professional activity of a lawyer:
1. Correct mode labor, reasonable alternation of it with active rest. Sometimes it’s worth even slightly changing your lifestyle, giving up some bad habits to sharply raise the threshold of resistance to neuropsychic overload.
2. Taking into account your individual psychological characteristics, you should know how to behave most wisely in stressful situations, how you can relieve yourself of the state of excessive anxiety, emotional tension, fatigue, while increasing the efficiency of your work, improving your well-being and mood.
3. Timely prevent the growing state of emotional tension. Typically, the most common harbingers of an upcoming deterioration in mental state are increasingly frequent feelings of fatigue and irritation. The acuity of perception decreases, memory, attention, and the efficiency of mental activity deteriorate.
If conditions permit, you can take a short, unscheduled break for 20-30 minutes while working and ventilate the room.
Lay your head back on the chair. Try not to think about anything disturbing. Take advantage of the selectivity of your thinking, using the mechanism of displacing from your consciousness everything that worries you at the moment. Reassure yourself that “you still can’t redo all the things”, think about something pleasant, bringing up in your mind the most significant values in life, compare them with how much you have that others don’t have.
We often hear about passion when it comes to any illegal action: “murder in the heat of passion.” However, this concept is not limited to criminal matters. Affect can both destroy and save a person.
Reaction to stress
Science perceives affect as a complex phenomenon - a combination of mental, physiological, cognitive and emotional processes. This is a short-term peak state, or, in other words, the body’s reaction during which psychophysiological resources are thrown into the fight against stress that has arisen under the influence of the external environment.
Affect is usually a response to an event that has occurred, but it is already based on a state of internal conflict. Affect is provoked by a critical, most often unexpected, situation from which a person is unable to find an adequate way out.
Experts distinguish between ordinary and cumulative affect. In the first case, affect is caused by the direct impact of a stressor on a person; in the second, it is the result of the accumulation of relatively weak factors, each of which individually is not capable of causing a state of affect.
In addition to excitation of the body, affect can provoke inhibition and even blocking of its functions. In this case, a person is overcome by one emotion, for example, panic horror: in a state of asthenic affect, instead of active actions, a person watches in a daze the events unfolding around him.
How to recognize affect
Affect is sometimes not easy to distinguish from other mental states. For example, affect differs from ordinary feelings, emotions and moods in its intensity and short duration, as well as the obligatory presence of a provoking situation.
There are differences between affect and frustration. The latter is always a long-term motivational-emotional state that arises as a result of the inability to satisfy one or another need.
It is more difficult to identify the differences between affect and trance, since they have much in common. For example, in both states there are violations of the conscious volitional control of behavior. One of the main differences is that trance, unlike affect, is caused not by situational factors, but by painful changes in the psyche.
Experts also distinguish between the concepts of affect and insanity. Although the characteristics of an individual’s behavior in both conditions are very similar, in affect they are not random. Even in situations where a person is not able to control his impulses, he becomes their captive of his own free will.
Physiological changes during affect
Affect is always accompanied by physiological changes in the human body. The first thing that is observed is a powerful surge of adrenaline. Then comes the time of vegetative reactions - the pulse and breathing quicken, the arterial pressure, spasms of peripheral vessels occur, coordination of movements is impaired.
People who have experienced a state of passion experience physical exhaustion and exacerbation of chronic diseases.
Physiological affect
Affect is usually divided into physiological and pathological. Physiological affect is an intense emotion that completely takes over a person’s consciousness, as a result of which control over one’s own actions is reduced. In this case, deep clouding of consciousness does not occur, and the person usually maintains self-control.
Pathological affect
Pathological affect is a rapidly occurring psychophysiological reaction characterized by the suddenness of its occurrence, in which the intensity of the experience is much higher than with physiological affect, and the nature of the emotions is concentrated around such states as rage, anger, fear, despair. With pathological affect, the normal course of the most important things is usually disrupted. mental processes– perception and thinking, a critical assessment of reality disappears and volitional control over actions sharply decreases.
German psychiatrist Richard Krafft-Ebing drew attention to the deep disorder of consciousness during pathological affect with the resulting fragmentation and confusion of memories of what happened. And the domestic psychiatrist Vladimir Serbsky attributed pathological affect to states of insanity and unconsciousness.
According to doctors, the state of pathological affect usually lasts a matter of seconds, during which a sharp mobilization of the body’s resources occurs - at this moment the person is able to demonstrate abnormal strength and reaction.
Phases of pathological affect
Despite its severity and short duration, psychiatrists distinguish three phases of pathological affect.
The preparatory phase is marked by an increase in emotional tension, a change in the perception of reality and a violation of the ability to adequately assess the situation. At this moment, consciousness is limited to the traumatic experience - everything else does not exist for it.
The explosion phase is directly aggressive actions, which, as described by Russian psychiatrist Sergei Korsakov, have “the nature of complex arbitrary acts committed with the cruelty of an automatic machine or machine.” In this phase, facial reactions are observed that demonstrate a sharp change in emotions - from anger and rage to despair and bewilderment.
The final phase is usually accompanied by a sudden depletion of physical and mental strength. After it, an irresistible desire to sleep or a state of prostration may arise, characterized by lethargy and complete indifference to what is happening.
Affect and criminal law
The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation distinguishes between crimes committed with mitigating and aggravating circumstances. Taking this into account, murder committed in a state of passion (Article 107 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and causing grievous or moderate harm to health in a state of passion (Article 113 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) are classified as mitigating circumstances.
According to the Criminal Code, affect acquires criminal legal significance only in the case when “the state of sudden strong emotional excitement (affect) is caused by violence, mockery, grave insult on the part of the victim or other illegal or immoral actions (inaction) of the victim, as well as prolonged psychotraumatic a situation that arose in connection with the systematic illegal or immoral behavior of the victim.”
Lawyers emphasize that the situation provoking the emergence of affect must exist in reality, and not in the imagination of the subject. However, the same situation can be perceived differently by a person who has committed a crime in a state of passion - this depends on the characteristics of his personality, psycho-emotional state and other factors.
The severity and depth of an affective outburst is not always proportional to the strength of the provoking circumstance, which explains the paradoxical nature of some affective reactions. In such cases, only a comprehensive psychological and psychiatric examination can assess the mental functioning of a person in a state of passion.
The affective state is widely covered not only in purely scientific literature, but is also often mentioned in popular culture: books, films, music - and in everyday communication. As a rule, this phenomenon comes up most often when we are dealing with the investigation of a crime committed under the influence of strong emotions.
But is affect understood in the same way in psychology and criminal law? And what does it feel like precise definition affect, what are its types and signs?
Concept
The meaning of the word “affect” really first of all refers us to the violent manifestation of feelings: from Latin affectus is translated as “mental excitement”, “passion”. In a broad sense, affect is considered as a state of strong mental arousal, during which a person loses the ability to control his actions.
How does science, primarily psychology and jurisprudence, clarify this definition? One can remain in a state of passion for only a short time; it is accompanied by pronounced physical and mental manifestations and provides a person with relaxation in action - says psychological sources. The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation classifies the following actions (or inactions) of the victim as causes of passion.
- Violence (both physical and psychological).
- Mockery or insult (meaning rude ridicule, humiliation of a person’s honor and dignity).
- Other crimes of various nature (the list is quite wide: from coercion to engage in sexual intercourse to refusal to perform work duties).
- Immoral actions of the victim or personal hostility towards him.
- Long-term psychotraumatic situation (it must be caused by constant actions of the victim that are contrary to the norms of law or morality).
That is, affect can be caused by both a one-time event and repeated situations that long term caused serious inconvenience to the person.
What is primary affect, does it have anything to do with our topic? No, because this is no longer psychology, but another scientific field: that’s what they call characteristic changes organ at the site of introduction of a pathogenic microorganism during an infectious disease.
Kinds
One type of affective reaction can be separated from another according to various parameters, including, for example, precisely the duration of the situation that led to it. Thus, a distinction is made between classical and cumulative (cumulative) types of affect.
Another example is cumulative affect. Here, internal tension can accumulate for days, months and years and spill out even under the influence of what appears at first glance to be a trifle, which becomes the very drop that overflows the cup of patience.
Depending on the presence or absence of mental illness in a person, physiological and pathological affect are distinguished. The first is typical for mentally healthy people, the second is a consequence psychological disorder and acts as one of the manifestations of the disease.
With pathological affect, a person completely loses control over what he does or says, while with physiological affect, he is partially (albeit to a very small extent) aware of what is happening. That is why people who commit a crime in a state of just such a physiological affect are brought to criminal liability, although the punishment is mitigated. Pathological affect is a sufficient basis for declaring a criminal insane. Such a person will not face prison, but compulsory treatment.
Finally, a psychological phenomenon may arise on the border of physiological and pathological affect: experiences that are too strong for the first type, but too weak for the second. This situation is possible, for example, after serious injuries or diseases affecting the brain.
In addition to other types, one can note affect caused by the action of psychoactive substances, such as alcohol, drugs, and some medications.
Leakage
Like any psychological process, affect occurs in several stages or phases. The following stages of affect are generally accepted:
- Preparatory.
- Affective explosion.
- Final.
But no matter how long the preparatory stage lasts, only during this period is a person still able to cope with emotions, stop and prevent the irreparable. If this fails, the process enters the explosion stage.
At the second stage, as is clear from its name, the actual emotional explosion occurs, affective processes reach their peak intensity. As a rule, the signs of affect found in the literature were recorded precisely during this period.
The final, third stage is characterized by pronounced physical and emotional fatigue, devastation, apathy, desire to sleep. There are known cases when criminals fell asleep right at the scene of a crime after committing a murder or another action in a state of passion. Often what happened is completely or partially forgotten.
Signs
Firstly, the affect comes suddenly. Secondly, the affective reaction always manifests itself violently. Finally, this process (meaning the second stage) is always short-term. It is difficult to say exactly how long the state of passion lasts, but it is always no longer than a few minutes, and often even seconds.
The person experiencing the affect may experience the following symptoms:
- Redness or paleness of the skin.
- Dry mouth.
- The activity of movements, their chaotic nature, trembling of the limbs.
- Impaired speech, hearing, vision (ringing in the ears, ripples in the eyes); decreased tactile sensitivity (no pain in case of serious injuries).
- Cardiopalmus.
- The appearance of physical strength previously unusual for humans.
- The so-called narrowing of consciousness, manifested in an incomplete, fragmented perception of reality and one’s own actions. Reality is limited only by the situation that traumatizes a person; he cannot adequately predict the consequences of his actions and the actions of others. Possible illusory perception, loss of orientation in time and space.
How to fight
So, we figured out what a state of passion is, talked about its types, stages and signs. In conclusion, here are ways to help avoid affective state or prevent it. First of all, you need to train restraint and willpower. With constant auto-training, it is possible (although this is a rather difficult task) to do general psychological condition more balanced personality.
Meditation, yoga, exercise, relaxation will also help. essential oils(mint, lemon balm, bergamot, lavender, jasmine, geranium), massage, color therapy (for example, the calming properties of green color are well known). Well, in the end, there is always the option of contacting a competent specialist who will help stabilize your mental state.
You can try to cope with the affect, even if this state has already occurred (that same preparatory stage). Thus, psychologists advise trying to slow down your own reactions (for example, counting or slowly taking deep breaths), change the environment, or try to switch attention from the object that causes inconvenience to something else. Author: Evgenia Bessonova
The most general emotional state that colors all human behavior for a long time is called mood. It is very diverse and can be joyful or sad, cheerful or depressed, cheerful or depressed, calm or irritated, etc. Mood is an emotional reaction not to the direct consequences of certain events, but to their significance for a person’s life in the context of his general life plans, interests and expectations.
Affect
S. L. Rubinstein noted the peculiarities of mood in that it is not objective, but personal, and that the most powerful emotional reaction is affect.
Affect(from Latin affectuctus - “mental excitement”) - a strong and relatively short-term emotional state associated with a sharp change in what is important for the subject life circumstances and accompanied by pronounced motor manifestations and changes in the functions of internal organs.
Affect completely takes over the human psyche. This entails a narrowing and sometimes even a shutdown of consciousness, changes in thinking and, as a consequence, inappropriate behavior. For example, with severe anger, many people lose the ability to constructively resolve conflicts. Their anger turns into aggression. The person screams, blushes, waves his arms, and may hit the enemy.
Affect occurs sharply, suddenly in the form of a flash, an impulse. Managing and coping with this condition is very difficult. Any feeling can be experienced in an affective form.
Affects have a negative impact on human activity, sharply reducing the level of its organization. In passion, a person seems to lose his head, his actions are unreasonable, committed without taking into account the situation. If objects that are not related to the cause of the affect fall into the sphere of a person’s actions, he can throw away the thing he comes across in a rage, push a chair, or slap the floor. Losing power over himself, a person gives himself entirely to experience.
It would be wrong to think that affect is completely uncontrollable. Despite the apparent suddenness, affect has certain stages of development. And if at the final stages, when a person completely loses control over himself, it is almost impossible to stop, then at the beginning any normal person can do this. Of course, this requires enormous willpower. The most important thing here is to delay the onset of affect, “extinguish” the affective outburst, restrain yourself, and not lose power over your behavior.
Stress
- Main article: Stress
Another broad area of human conditions is united by the concept of stress.
Under stress(from the English stress - “pressure”, “tension”) understand the emotional state that arises in response to all kinds of extreme influences.
No person manages to live and work without experiencing stress. Everyone experiences severe life losses, failures, trials, conflicts, and stress when performing difficult or responsible work from time to time. Some people cope with stress more easily than others, e.g. are stress-resistant.
An emotional state close to stress is the “ emotional burnout ”. This condition occurs in a person if, in a situation of mental or physical stress, he long time experiences negative emotions. At the same time, he can neither change the situation nor cope with negative emotions. Emotional burnout manifests itself in a decrease in the overall emotional background, indifference, avoidance of responsibility, negativism or cynicism towards other people, loss of interest in professional success, and limitation of one’s capabilities. As a rule, the causes of emotional burnout are monotony and monotony of work, lack of career growth, professional inconsistency, age-related changes and socio-psychological maladjustment. Internal conditions For the occurrence of emotional burnout, there may be accentuations of a certain type of character, high anxiety, aggressiveness, conformity, and an inadequate level of aspirations. Emotional burnout hinders professional and personal growth and, like stress, leads to psychosomatic disorders.
Frustration
Close in its manifestations to stress is the emotional state of frustration.
Frustration(from Latin frustration - “deception”, “frustration”, “destruction of plans”) - a human state caused by objectively insurmountable (or subjectively perceived) difficulties that arise on the way to achieving a goal.
Frustration is accompanied by a whole set of negative emotions that can destroy consciousness and activity. In a state of frustration, a person can show anger, depression, external and internal aggression.
For example, when performing some activity a person fails, which causes him negative emotions - grief, dissatisfaction with himself. If in such a situation the people around you support you and help you correct your mistakes, the emotions you experience will remain just an episode in a person’s life. If failures are repeated and significant people at the same time they reproach, shame, call them incapable or lazy, this person usually develops an emotional state of frustration.
The level of frustration depends on the strength and intensity of the influencing factor, the person’s condition and his or her existing forms of response to life’s difficulties. Especially often, the source of frustration is a negative social assessment that affects significant relationships of the individual. A person’s resistance (tolerance) to frustrating factors depends on the degree of his emotional excitability, type of temperament, and experience of interaction with such factors.
A special form of emotional experience is passion. In terms of the intensity of emotional arousal, passion approaches passion, and in terms of duration and stability it resembles mood. What is the peculiarity of passion? Passion is a strong, persistent, all-encompassing feeling that determines the direction of a person’s thoughts and actions. The causes of passion are varied - they can be determined by conscious beliefs, they can come from bodily desires, or they can have a pathological origin. In any case, passion is related to our needs and other personality traits. Passion is usually selective and objective. For example, a passion for music, for collecting, for knowledge, etc.
Passion captures all the thoughts of a person, in which all the circumstances related to the object of passion revolve, which imagines and ponders ways to achieve the need. What is not related to the object of passion seems secondary, unimportant. For example, some scientists who passionately work on a discovery do not attach importance to their appearance, often forgetting about sleep and food.
Most important characteristic passion is its connection with the will. Since passion is one of the significant motivations for activity, because it has great power. In reality, assessing the meaning of passion is twofold. Public opinion plays a big role in evaluation. For example, the passion for money and hoarding is condemned by some people as greed, acquisitiveness, while at the same time within the framework of another social group can be considered as economy, prudence.
Psychological self-regulation: affect, stress, emotional burnout, frustration, passion
Inability to regulate one's own emotional states, coping with affects and stress serves as an obstacle to effective professional activity, disrupts interpersonal relationships at work and in the family, interferes with the achievement of goals and intentions, and disrupts human health.
Exist special moves, which help to cope with strong emotion and prevent it from turning into affect. To do this, it is recommended to notice and realize an unwanted emotion in time, analyze its origins, and reset muscle clamp and relax, breathe deeply and rhythmically, attract a pre-prepared “duty image” of a pleasant event in your life, try to look at yourself from the outside. Affect can be prevented, but this requires endurance, self-control, special training, and a culture of interpersonal relationships.
A means of preventing emotional burnout is the optimization of working conditions and psychological correction for early stages emotional disturbances.
The factor of stressful time also matters. Long-term exposure to stress is especially dangerous. It has been noticed, for example, that over 10-15 years of work in extreme conditions the human body wears out as if it had suffered a severe heart attack. And, conversely, short-term severe stress activates a person, as if “shaking” him.
So, you need to remember the following:- You should not strive to avoid stress at all costs and be afraid of it. It’s paradoxical, but true: the more you try to live and work “always measuredly and calmly,” the more stress will destroy you. After all, instead of gradually and patiently accumulating experience in self-management under stress, you will “run away” from it.
You can compare methods effective management stress with the actions of an experienced climber. If a person, gripped by fear, turns his back to an avalanche and runs away from it, it will overtake him and destroy him. It is necessary to face danger in order to know how to protect yourself from it.
- In order to manage your stress, you need to use its beneficial functions and eliminate harmful ones.
- With constructive stress, people's accumulated dissatisfaction with each other is released, an important problem is solved, and mutual understanding between people improves.
- With destructive stress, relationships sharply deteriorate until they completely break down, the problem remains unresolved, and people experience severe feelings of guilt and hopelessness.
The most successful, both in the profession and in personal life, are people who have learned to control themselves and have developed psychotechnics of personal self-regulation. They know their strengths and weak sides, know how to restrain themselves, show patience, and slow down their internal “explosions.”
People with developed personal psychotechnics implement four main actions:- Action one: they do not blame anyone: neither themselves nor others. They do not suffer from “reproaches of conscience” and do not “dump” their stressful energy on others.
- Action two: they strive to master themselves at the first stage of stress development, when self-control is still preserved and the “stressful element” has not completely taken over. They strive to stop themselves in time. One leading specialist at a large commercial bank expressed this idea this way: “It’s important not to hit point B.”
- Act three: they study themselves. People with developed self-regulation know well how a stressful state begins to develop in them. In other words, they become aware in time of a change in their internal sense of self during the first stage of stress development.
- Act four and most important. People with developed self-regulation intuitively find optimal strategy under stress. Those who successfully master stress are those who understand that “dumping” dark stressful energy on others is uncivilized and, in a certain sense, unprofitable. The necessary business connections are lost and personal relationships are destroyed. They also understand that directing destructive stress energy at themselves by blaming themselves for their mistakes is not constructive. Really, what changes from this? The matter is still pending, and the problem is not being solved.
- correctly assess the significance of events;
- in case of defeat, act according to the principle “it didn’t hurt, that’s what I wanted”;
- increase physical activity(many women begin to do laundry or other heavy housework);
- form a new dominant, i.e. get distracted;
- speak out, cry;
- listen to music;
- cause a smile, laughter, humor is necessary in order to
- to perceive as comic what pretends to be serious;
- achieve relaxation.
