<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0abTKb_0w4KrphY00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0abTKb_0w4KrphY00" width="1528" height="800" >Key points<ul><li>The psychology of emotions has a long history, but there remain many unanswered questions.</li><li>A new approach lines your emotions up along the continuums of self-esteem and desire for warm relationships.</li><li>By charting your own emotions, you may be better prepared to use them to benefit your fulfillment.</li></ul>The psychology of emotions has a long and storied history. Beginning with what all introductory psychology students learn, there are classic debates between the “I think before I feel” camps and “I feel before I think.” Then there is the even more heated dispute regarding how many emotions there are and how to organize them into some sort of rational set of categories.From your own personal point of view, these questions may have abstract theoretical interest, but perhaps you doubt they can help you necessarily cope with the turmoil that your own emotions can create. You may wonder why you can’t be as happy as you’d like to be, or why nothing ever seems very funny to you. Fear may preoccupy you in situations where you feel uncertain or in danger.To be sure, emotions have a unique status within the range of human experiences. They come and they go, maybe seemingly without any provocation. They can create every quality from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. You may be able to control what you think about or even what you think you want, but those emotions can take you completely unaware.Perhaps you’re watching a film or television show full of drama. You’re doing just fine as you follow the story’s ins and outs but then, inexplicably, a character’s speech touches you, and you break down into tears. Why did this happen?<h2>From a Theory of Personality to a Theory of Emotions</h2>According to psychologist Mark Horner and colleagues (2024), the types of emotions that often overwhelm you involve some type of interpersonal situation. Your emotions, the authors argue, can arise in a number of situations, but those involving other people have special significance.In their words, “Interpersonal emotion states provide moment-to-moment feedback during social interactions” meaning that they cue you in to what’s happening with other people. However, you also have “interpersonal emotional dispositions” that form “more enduring features” of your personality (p. 1).The way you’re feeling when you’re with other people, then, provides you with cues about what’s happening interpersonally (e.g. whether people feel warmly toward you). However, you also have a more stable set of predisposing tendencies such as, perhaps, feeling anxious that you won’t be liked.The model guiding the Horner et al. approach to understanding interpersonal emotions derives from what’s known as the “Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC)," which draws a circle or “circumplex” from the two fundamental dimensions of self-esteem (“agentic”) and security (“communal”). Interpersonal emotions, they go on to suggest, “are affective manifestations of mental representations of relationships between self and others.”Spelling this out further, the agentic dimensions of emotions run from those that are positive of feeling capable or attractive to those that are negative of feeling helpless or unappealing. The communal dimension ranges from the positive end of feeling that others are caring and welcoming toward you to the opposite end of feeling that others are uncaring or rejecting. It may help as you think about this model to imagine a circle divided into 8 pieces with a vertical axis ranging from +A to -A and a horizontal one from +C to -C. While reading these descriptions, you may have been reminded of another approach that stresses views of the self in relation to others as determining emotions. In adult attachment theory, people who are insecurely attached fear rejection and/or try to avoid closeness with others. This would put them at the negative ends of both IPC affect dimensions. By putting IPC together with attachment theory, Horner and his coauthors believe that they can combine the best of both interpersonal worlds in capturing emotions as states and traits.<h2>Quantifying Interpersonal Emotions</h2>Across two studies (one a college student and the second an online sample of adults), the Horner et al. research team developed and then refined a 170-item scale called the Interpersonal Emotion Inventory (IEI). Breaking the IEI into its subscales along the circumplex, the following items give you an idea of how each point in the circumplex is measured.Items on this scale all began with the prompt “When I interact with or think about myself in relation to others, I feel…” As you read each item, use a 0 (never) to 4 (almost always) rating scale.A=Agentic C=Communal+A: Confident-Impressive: "...self-confident"+A -C: Superior-Callous: "...superior."-C: Rejecting-Suspicious "...rejecting of others"-A -C: Rejected-Ashamed "...unwanted"-A: Insecure-Anxious "...self-doubt"-A +C: Needy-Empathic "...like I want to console and comfort others"+C: Welcoming-Trusting: "...grateful for others' love and support"+A +C: Included-Proud: ".... proud"Analyses that test a circumplex model require a sophisticated set of statistics to validate its structure, which the Horner et al. authors were able to do. Additionally, the authors established relationships between the IEI and theoretically related instruments, including a measure of attachment style. Validating the connection between these ways of viewing emotions in relationships, those with +A and +C scores were more likely to be high on attachment security and the -A and -C to be high on attachment insecurity.However, there were other intriguing combinations as well. People with +A-C tendencies prioritize status over love. Therefore, “if others deny them status (-A), then they may readily shift toward -C (angry, resentful) feelings. People with the -A +C combination, in contrast, prioritize love and if they feel deprived of this, they will readily shift to feeling anxious and worthless (-A).What makes the IPC so particularly useful, then, is its reframing of emotions into a truly interpersonal framework. When you think about emotions, it may seem fairly obvious that relationships with others are important contributors, but prior researchers have not made this connection either so explicitly or so well-articulated.<h2>Charting Your Own Interpersonal Emotions</h2>Returning to the example of your breaking down into tears at an unexpected moment in a fictional portrayal of relationships, the IPC can provide important insights. What, in the narrative, stimulated your point of sensitivity in the agency-communion dimensions? Translating that scenario into actual relationships with others, how many times has something a person you cared about said sent your emotions in an unpredictable direction?The IPC is a fairly sophisticated approach to understanding emotions, and proper assessment would require more than responding to the sample items shown here. However, even these simple responses may have given you insight into the ways you construe your relationships with others that, in turn, affect your day-to-day mood. To sum up, a theory of emotions that pulls directly from relationships with others can provide an important source of new ideas to help you figure out why you feel the way you do. Once you can identify these feelings along the two key dimensions of agency and communion, you may be better prepared to help use your feelings as a guide toward fulfillment as you gain an understanding of their source.ReferencesHorner, M. S., Locke, K. D., &amp; Hulsey, T. L. (2024). Assessing affective dimensions of the interpersonal circumplex: Development and validation of the interpersonal emotion inventory. Journal of Personality Assessment. doi: 10.1080/00223891.2024.2400266</div></body>

Mountain View, CA

NewsBreak

A New Way to Unlock the Mystery of Your Emotions

The psychology of emotions has a long history, but there remain many unanswered questions. A new approach lines your emotions up along the continuums of self-esteem and desire for warm relationships. By charting your own emotions, you may be better prepared to use them to benefit your fulfillment. The psychology...

A New Way to Unlock the Mystery of Your Emotions

Comments / 0