Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize feelings and judge which feelings are appropriate for a given situation.
You can feel sad and happy at the same time.
When you feel a knot in your stomach after finding out you got a low grade you experience a physiological reaction. We experience motion when external stimuli cause physiological changes. This is the organismic view of emotions.
Perceptual view of emotions is also also called appraisal theory and asserts that subjective perceptions shape what external phenomena mean to us. These events have no meaning and they only gain meaning if we attribute significance to them.
Perceptual view of emotions: External Event (failing an exam) -> Perception of event (you think you’re not smart or the exam was very hard) -> Interpreted emotion (shame or anger) -> Response
This problem is corrected in the cognitive labeling view of emotions, which is similar to above but explains how we move from experience to interpretation. According to the CLVE the mechanism that allows this is language or symbols. In other words, what we feel may be shaped by how we label our physiological responses. So if you see a low grade and you get a knot in your stomach you label the knot as evidence of anxiety. So what you felt didn’t result from the low grade but it would be shaped by how you labeled your physiological response to the event.
The Cognitive Labeling view of emotions: External Event -> Physiological Response -> Label for Response -> Emotion
A bad grade on a test is not a judgment that I’m stupid. It’s a challenge for me to do better. Therefore, you should see grades as challenges that you could meet.
Social Influences on Emotions
Interactive view of emotions proposes that social rules and understandings shape what people feel and how they do or don’t express their feelings. Three key concepts of this are framing rules, feeling rules, and emotion work.