Roles and functions of emotions
● Repelling emotions (fear, for example): they encourage flight or avoidance of danger.
● Emotions of attraction: they motivate us to act, love or invest positive energy.
● Centring emotions: they shape our identity, our inner world and our ‘home’.
● Protective emotions (defensive anger): they provide a defensive force against a threat.
Primary emotions signal that an aspect of our environment or experience requires our attention, trigger physical preparations for action and fade once the situation has passed.
Towards appropriate emotional management
For the AS person, the first step is to name each emotion and assign it a precise place. Before being able to share their feelings, they often need a process of intimate acceptance, in a context of trust. In the event of emotional overload, they may seek to withdraw or escape; if escape is impossible, an emotional explosion may occur. Learning to recognise these signals and adopt calming strategies is essential to ensure lasting well-being.
Joy, sadness, fear and anger are four fundamental emotions.
Our capacity for reflection allows us to experience and remember these emotions in a thousand ways: we can blend thoughts and feelings, and our language provides a rich vocabulary to describe the whole spectrum of human experiences.
When thoughts and emotions coexist, they can merge into a single experience, which might be compared to a ‘thought-emotion cocktail’. Thinking about a particular emotion can even trigger another, known as a secondary emotion.
Human beings have become true emotional thinkers. Modern media exploit this mental function to arouse and manipulate our emotional responses, playing on us as one plays the keys of a synthesiser.
As we have seen, emotions are a form of energy, light or heavy; our mind directs their expression. They allow us to touch and move others.
The AS person (too sensitive) struggles to withstand these emotional assaults. Sometimes a human being turns into an emotional cannon, against which it is difficult to protect oneself when hypersensitive.