 Emotion has a tremendous impact on communication in general, but more specifically, it's very much related to our ability to listen effectively, both in terms of understanding our own emotion and how that impacts our listening skills, but also just our ability to interpret and identify emotion in others and understand how that might impact the message that they are trying to send as well. Both as a sender and a receiver, emotion has a tremendous impact on our listening skills. So let's take a few minutes to understand emotion and how it might impact listening specifically. To define emotion very quickly here, emotion is the body's multi-dimensional response to any event that either enhances or inhibits your goals. So keeping in mind that emotion is multi-dimensional, that it's not just any one thing, that it's both physical and it's psychological and it's all kinds of things. It's multi-dimensional, but it's a response to a specific event and it either enhances or inhibits our goals. So when we determine whether an emotion is what kind of valence it has, is it going to be what we would call positive or negative? It really depends on whether or not it's helping us achieve our goal or inhibiting us from achieving a goal. So emotion is a little more complicated than we may initially expect. It's not just the fuzzies that come on us when something specific happens. There's a little more to it than that, but let's dig a little deeper then into emotion. So first of all, as I mentioned before, emotions are multi-dimensional. They affect us in more than one way. So they are multi-dimensional. First of all, there are physiological changes that come along with emotion. Oftentimes strong emotions will come with, you know, the increased body temperature will see more sweating or hands will get clammy. Our heart rate will increase. Those types of things, our stomach may tighten up a little bit. Those are physiological changes, changes that happen within our body when we experience a strong emotion. We also have nonverbal reactions when we experience a strong emotion, whether it's fright or surprise or joy or whatever it is, we're going to respond in a nonverbal way. So that's another dimension of emotion is how it impacts us in our nonverbal communication. But we also have cognitive interpretations that are related to emotion. In other words, how we think about those emotions and how we interpret them in our own mind and how we assign value to those and assign meaning to those things. Those cognitive interpretations are an important dimension of emotion as well. And then finally, our verbal expression. We express ourselves verbally when we experience an emotion. And so how do we do that? Are we doing it in an as effective way as possible? That's what we mean when we say emotions are multi-dimensional. They affect us physically. They affect us psychologically. They affect us in an unverbal sense. They affect us in a verbal sense. So there's a lot of dimension to emotion and a lot of things that happen and can happen as a result of those emotions. I briefly mentioned before as well that emotions will vary in what we call valence. Valence is basically the appropriateness. So we identify valence in two different categories. First of all, intensity. Intensity. How intense is that emotion? Meaning, are we experiencing that emotion to the right level of intensity and not letting it get either too out of proportion or not giving it enough intensity? Either way, we want to be in the appropriate range of intensity and then duration as well. So duration meaning, is that emotion affecting us in the appropriate length of time or for the appropriate length of time for the appropriate span of time? Or are we letting it linger? Are we letting it go too quickly? Are we letting it linger too long? Either one of those would not be great. So really when we talk about valence, we're talking about appropriateness. So we look at this in terms of the level of intensity and duration and is it still in that appropriate range? When we stay angry for too long or we get way too angry over something small, that means our emotion is taking on a negative valence. Meaning it is not in the appropriate proportion for either of those factors, intensity or duration. Meaning it is keeping us from achieving a goal. It is inhibiting us from achieving a goal. So we would then assign that what we call negative valence. But if we are experiencing it in the appropriate range of intensity and duration, then we would say that's having a positive valence. If it's helping us achieve a goal in that sense. So emotions are going to vary though in valence. And every emotion can have either a positive or negative valence. It just depends on the situation. It depends on the context. So we need to keep that in mind as well. But that's how we look at emotion and kind of weigh and measure emotion is through valence. So there are a variety of things that influence emotion and factors that come into play. First of all, things like our personality. Are you just a generally happy person? Are you generally kind of sour person? Are you right in the middle? You just, you know, our personality impacts our emotion. A great deal on how we experience and how we express those emotions. Our culture will as well. You know, in Westernized cultures, we tend to be more expressive with our emotion. We value that personal freedom of expression. Whereas in more collectivistic cultures and other cultures, they tend to be more reserved in their expression of emotion. And because they don't want to, it's a collectivistic culture. They don't want to upset the fruit basket, so to speak. So they tend to hold things in a little more and don't feel the need to express every emotion in the moment that they have it. As we do in some, you know, individualistic kind of culture. So our culture certainly will play a role in how we experience and how we express these emotions as well. Our gender and member gender is really a sociologically defined. It's a social construct in a sense, right? So masculine, feminine. We're not talking about male-female here. We're talking about masculine and feminine. And we've been conditioned as, you know, if you are primarily masculine or predominantly masculine, then you experience emotions. Or you would express emotion differently than if you were predominantly feminine in your gender. So gender will have a significant impact on how we express emotion in particular. Social roles and conventions kind of come back to culture in a sense. But really what's expected of you as a parent or as a doctor or as a teacher or whatever, you know, what are some of the social roles and conventions that apply to how we are expected to experience and express those emotions. Social media certainly has had a major impact on emotion as well. We see what we call the disinhibition effect, meaning people are more likely to express emotion more quickly and in a stronger fashion over social media because they are less inhibited in that context. So we say and do things we wouldn't necessarily normally say or do in real life. We do that over the internet because we're removed. That removal of being, you know, on the other side of a screen from somebody sort of gives us the feeling of permission to express ourselves in a stronger way or experience and express those emotions more strongly. Which, you know, has positive and negative attributes, I guess, to it. And then emotional contagions as well play a role here. The fact that emotion can absolutely be passed from one person to another. If somebody walks in with a really strong emotion and they walk into a room with a really strong emotion, that emotion is going to rub off on everybody else, whether it's a, you know, happiness or anger or whatever. That's going to have a tendency to rub off on those around them when they may not be experiencing such a strong emotion. So emotional contagions, what are we passing along to other people? That will influence our emotion as well. And then finally our emotional intelligence impacts how we experience and how we express emotions to a great degree. So let's spend a moment just talking about emotional intelligence and what that is. So emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand and manage your emotions as well as understand and influence the emotions of others. So emotional intelligence essentially is our ability to first of all recognize, which is not as easy as it sounds, but when we're experiencing an emotion, being able to say, okay, I'm experiencing this emotion. Put our finger on exactly what it is we're feeling rather than just letting that emotion take us over and without really understanding what it is. We need to recognize our emotion and recognize when we're experiencing an emotion, a strong emotion. Understanding what that is and what that means, what that implications that may have for us and those around us. And then being able to manage our emotions. Now that does not mean totally tamp down our emotions and never experience or express an emotion. That's not what this is getting at. What we're getting at here is our ability to effectively express and looking at it in terms of positive valence. Are we allowing that emotion to manage us? Or are we managing that emotion in a way that helps us achieve our goals in that situation? And then doing that for others as well, being able to recognize emotion and others, understand what that means for them, influence it if possible. Influence is not the same as manipulate. We're not trying to manipulate the emotions of others, but we're just saying, you know, are there ways we can help somebody in a bad mood be in a better mood or that we can, you know, for bosses in a mood, what can we do to influence that? It's in a way that affects us positively, hopefully. So the ways that we can influence those things without manipulating people and without minimizing their emotions, we can understand those and influence them as well. So emotional intelligence basically says, how good are we at doing this? People with high emotional intelligence have loads of this ability and people with a lower sense of emotional intelligence don't have the ability to do these as well. Now this is something we can develop within a certain degree. So something we ought to work at. Aristotle once said that anybody can become angry. That is easy, but to become angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way, that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. And really what Aristotle was getting at there is that not everybody has the same degree of emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is what gives us the ability to be angry with the right person to the right degree at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way. We have high degree of emotional intelligence. We have the ability to do those things more effectively. And somebody with lower emotional intelligence, that's just not as good for them and not as one of their strengths. So we ought to develop as listeners, we want to develop high emotional intelligence so that we can really relate to others, understand their emotions, understand how that would impact what they're saying and why they're saying it and what that means for us. So we ought to be able to look at those things really as a communicator. That's the idea and be able to factor that into our listening and have emotion be one of the ways that we listen. We don't just listen with our ears. We listen with our eyes. We listen with every sense that we have in terms of identifying that other person's emotion and how that might impact what they're saying and how we might interpret it. So if you have questions about emotion and how it impacts listening, please feel free to email me. I'd love to hear from you there. In the meantime, I hope that you will have a renewed understanding of the impact that emotion does play in interpreting the communication of others in particular in the way that we might listen to others using our emotional intelligence.