Control Your Emotions (1950) Part 1

This bizarre film is hosted by an unnamed "psychologist." While spouting Pavlovian claptrap such as "Fear is triggered by loud noises" and "Your emotions can be your own greatest enemy," he repeatedly interrupts the story of "Jeff," the film's protagonist. Jeff -- who looks like a heroin addict -- has a lot of trouble controlling his emotions, and the psychologist is always ready to pop in with statements such as "If this kind of behavior is repeated often, it might lead to a permanently warped personality."

Control Your Emotions doubles as a lesson in behaviorist psychology and an admonition to postwar American children. "Before man learned how to control fire and put it to work, it was man's greatest enemy. In much the same way, your emotions can be your own greatest enemy." Similar messages percolate throughout the social guidance films of the 1940s and 1950s (see, for example, A Date With Your Family, where the narrator intones, "Pleasant, unemotional conversation helps the digestion").

The links between the effort to manage and regulate outbursts of feeling and the national offensive to smooth out adolescent behavioral excesses often seem obscure. There is no doubt, however, that the architects of Fifties consensus (psychologists, educators, the judiciary, sociologists and advertisers) wished to discourage "unproductive" and negativistic behavior. "Severe emotional stress," says the narrator of this film, "often decreases efficiency."

What seems clearest is that for Americans, recovery from wartime damage was more about drawing away emotionally from war's stresses and strains than digging graves and sweeping up rubble. After twelve years of economic depression and almost four years of world war, parents (and the authorities on child development that stood behind them) wanted a peaceful and disruption-free world for their kids, and they don't seem to have distinguished between internal and external turmoils. All were undesirable.

Responsive both to the demands of the era and the process of individual maturation, Control Your Emotions ultimately promoted social adaptation over self-expression. It assumed that kids' behavior was a vehicle for emotions that were essentially uncomplicated, individual rather than social. In its scheme, teenagers' emotions weren't linked with any cultural or social contradictions, but simply combinations of the three basic emotions: rage, fear and love. So while other Coronet films like Shy Guy hinted at the existence of a youth culture with its own rewards and pressures, Control Your Emotions saw teens more as creatures of their hormones than of their times.

Producer: Coronet Instructional Films

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Social
• guidance
• psychology
• emotions
• 1950's
• family
• life
• anger
• fear
• love

[myhoneyjudah]

Control of emotions can be gained by living in ignorant bliss :)

[CharmedQuarkZ99]

The tragic fact is that Behaviorism has not moved forward much from this old b/w clip. They nearly killed me by making me a psych med Zombie. Thank God I got off the meds two years ago, and the effect still linger. They would still be handing me appointment cards and pills. Psychiatry is in dire need of change. I refuse to accept I have a 'sick' mind; but rather insist I have a creative mind. Thank you for the sub.

[Kjilif]

haha, as soon as the Dr spoke, i thought i was watching Lost all over again. 

[reevedavey]

CharmedQuarkZ99.sorry fella you are a flake but hey live with it; i do.

[reevedavey]

@golsno177.well i hope you feel better for throwing light where all was dark to us nescient,priapic pangamists.now fuck off and bore someone else.

[MrGNR1990]

Use the force.

[CharmedQuarkZ99]

@RockinFifiLaFume check out ' ladybard1968 ' she gave me the courage and info on them those goons cant hide forever

[RockinFifiLaFume]

@CharmedQuarkZ99 Good for you. Two of my best friends committed suicide while on medication prescribed to them for "depression" when these guys weren't even depressed. SAY NO TO BIG PHARMACEUTICALS. These companies are serial killing corporations.

[photophobius]

Jeff hasn't learned to masturbate yet.

[ididcramsmom]

Is it just me, or should this narrator be "Creepin'" with the Lonely Island?!?!?...

[da959]

GEEESS Jeff! Maybe you just didn't have the right key-fob to get that car to crank up! There's no reason to get all bent out of shape about it!! Holy cow man!