Chapter 11
THE EMOTIONAL SUPRA-PROGRAMS
(cont.)
The deviation of these patterns from the original ones (of the basic
emotions involved) may or may not reach our awareness, and the resulting
sensations and images appear with varying degrees of vividness. These may or
may not be accompanied by voluntary or spontaneous activity of one kind or
another.
Throughout his life, the individual acquires the ability to influence the
components of the basic emotions responsible for initiating activities, which
were originally under the strict control of the integration components. Usually
he also acquires some proficiency in executing them.
This proficiency enables the average person to activate various processes:
intra-organismic, behavioral and communicative, even without a previously
achieved suitable integration. Not only professional actors can simulate
emotions successfully, even young children can do it.
The subjective experiential component is also not immune from the
interventions and variations induced by supra-programs. The social environment
greatly influences the shaping of this component, mainly by means of modeling,
education and socialization.
During, and as a result of these processes, the individual also acquires a
proficiency which may be used to divert the emotional experience. This
proficiency is constantly expressed, deliberately or automatically, and with
various degrees of awareness of the processes that divert the subjective
experience from the innate course.
For instance, people learn to halt laughter or crying, by contracting the
face muscles involved in the expression of these emotions. For thousands of
years, people have been listening to and performing certain melodies to change
their whole emotional climate. All of us are aware that we can change our mood
just by changing the contents of our thoughts.
People posses a whole range of natural measures capable of inducing change
in the emotional climate. Prominent among the behavioral alternatives are those
that are included in the innate repertoire or appear automatically when one is
sufficiently mature. In addition, there is a huge number of measures acquired
from being subject to cultural customs of upbringing, and from divergent
individual solutions found to common developmental problems, which were
encountered on the way to adulthood.
The four main branches of this group of measures are:
- Natural behavior that satisfies different desires and needs like eating
when hungry and drinking when thirsty.
- Behavior corresponding to the basic emotion most active at the given
moment, like weeping when suffering and staring when interested.
- Regarding the specific feelings, emotional experiences of a certain moment,
moods and other felt sensations of the body, as announcing the prevailing
conditions at the time of their occurrence and as recommending a specific
reaction. For instance, the treatment of the feelings of fear in dangerous
circumstances as a recommendation to leave rapidly.
- Treating the feelings and sensations of the emotional process as a
"call to arms" directed to brain and mind systems, or at least as an
invitation to pay them attention.
The essence of this book and the manual in chapter 5, form a technique for
the management of the emotional system and climate, which is based on improving
and enhancing this fourth natural behavior pattern. (It seems that this is the
best method of enhancing the activity of the internal maintenance processes of
the updating, mending, and building of supra-programs of daily use, and
especially the more emotional ones.)
top | next |
table of contents |
definitions |
|
