How Do Your Emotions Affect Your Behaviors?

Negative Ways Emotions Affect Behavior

Negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy and depression, can affect our behavior negatively. However, positive emotions can also negatively affect our behavior, such as allowing ourselves to be abused by someone because we love them, or indulging in unhealthy activities because they make us happy. When a particular emotion is stirred and becomes intense, our point of view becomes distorted. We focus on the emotion, and the stimuli that triggered it. It becomes amplified in our minds, and so, at that time, our reaction to it almost seems rational, because it is the only information we deem important enough to process. This subsequently motivates our behavior in a variety of ways. For example, fighting when we are angry, withdrawing from participation and responsibilities when depressed, or enduring a bad relationship when we still love someone.

Positive Ways Emotions Affect Behavior

The affect emotions have on our behavior is not all negative, however. In fact, the reason for emotions is to help us cope with life. For example, when we feel fear, we flee to protect ourselves. When we feel love for our children, we try to take care of them better. When we feel angry, we fight to defend ourselves or what belongs to us. These things are in place to ensure not only our personal survival, but the survival of our species. If there was nothing we felt passionate about in life, we would have had little motivation to act, and perhaps would not have become the dominant, diverse, creative and practical creatures that we are today.

Direct Ways Emotions Affect Behavior

Automatic responses are one way our emotions affect our behavior. Sometimes, our feelings stimulate our brains to process certain information very quickly, or process it in a certain way. If that information is processed while disregarding facts, common sense or other considerations, it could result in a quick or poorly analyzed final action. This is when emotions directly affect our behavior. For example, punching someone for insulting you, ducking and running when you hear a gunshot, or rushing into the arms of an attractive, sweet-talking stranger. These actions are often impulsive rather than premeditated. These usually result in behavior that is counter-productive, if not destructive.

Indirect Ways Emotions Affect Behavior

Even though, when emotionally aroused in some way, many of us will briefly think of the same automatic responses, few people will act on them. Most of the time, our behavior is indirectly affected by our emotions. Rather than an instinctual action, the cognitive processing that takes place results in a decision-making process, adaption and assimilation of information and, eventually, a learning experience. For example, when someone insults us, we might think about hitting the person, but many of us will choose not to do so, though we may engage in a conscious response that our brain allows, such as insulting the person back. We will cognitively process the encounter and the emotional stimulation, decide that we do not like the person, and seek to avoid that person in the future. Further, this may motivate us to stop going to a particular place where that person might be found. It becomes a domino effect from a single emotional response.

Emotional Empathy Affecting Behavior

Even further, emotions provide us with the ability to empathize with others. Because of this, we can predict emotional responses, which also affects our behavior, which is why people will usually try to evoke a positive response rather than a negative one. For this reason, few of us go around insulting others at random, cutting lines in the grocery store or stealing each other's goods, because we wish to avoid evoking and dealing with a negative response in others. On the other hand, trying to be a nice person by complimenting others, being polite and following rules, is a behavior that is motivated by desiring a positive emotional response from other people.

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• What Is an Emotion?
• How Emotion Shapes Behavior
• The Influence of Emotions on Risky Behavior