Anatomy of an Emotional Response

It all starts with perception. Something happens, a stimulus, that creates a reaction in our body. The starter point for all our experiences is our feeling and experience of each moment. The influence of our brain on our emotional experience is profound.

The primitive emotional experience is very direct and our earliest ancestors were mostly concerned with fight/flight/freeze responses. As we developed the frontal lobe and the associated complex responses, we also developed interpretive filters that we now apply on our emotions. Let's look at the flow for a response.

Observable data and experiences - we get new raw event data. Think of this as the way a video recorder would capture the event. All of the data at once, no feeling, just data.

Selection - We select the focus of our attention. Our subconscious mind spends our entire life learning what is important to each of us. It uses this information to select what is important from the entire field of observable data and then feed the selection into the brain. Incidentally, there is a very small (one neuron) connection into the amygdula that still provides the opportunity to evaluate whether it is a significant threat. This is an important area to understand, in that we have two regions of our brain simoultaneously evaluating the same information. The amygdula takes a very low resolution pass with the idea of "better safe than sorry" while the frontal lobe takes its time, brings in more information, and evaluates responses. This is one reason people can feel so conflicted in a particular moment, as they may be experiencing a fear that does not seem to go with the moment.

Meaning - We then take this information and add cultural and personal meaning. So, given the same data, different people will interpret it different ways.

Assumptions - We make assumptions based on the meanings we applied. This adds another level of complexity. Even after we have applied meaning, we still fill in missing bits of data to satisfy our own level of curiosity as to what any particular event means.

Beliefs - We then adopt beliefs about the world around us.

Conclusions - We draw conclusions based on those beliefs.

Actions - We take action based on this.

Emotional Intelligence Institute of Santa Barbara
eq@myemotionaliq.com
105 E. De La Guerra #2
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
(805) 277-4993