Emotional beginnings

Understanding emotions and how to manage them

Deciding what my first article should focus on has taken more time than I anticipated. The sheer breadth of topics at the intersection of psychology and legal practice makes finding a suitable starting point a difficult task. But as so much of my career has involved emotions in some way, it seems fitting that this is where I should begin.

It amazes me to think that I have spent more years of my working life being oblivious to my emotions than I have spent being aware of them, and that at no point in my vocational training did I learn about their impact and how to manage them. This is remarkable because our emotions influence so many facets of our work, including how we navigate difficult situations, how we interact with colleagues and clients, our behaviour, memory, judgement and decision making. Emotions are also very relevant when we talk about our mental health and wellbeing, a topic close to my heart.

I’ll be returning to these different issues at various points in future posts. For the moment, I wanted to focus on what emotions are, how we come to experience them, and how we can regulate them more effectively, something which has helped me enormously.

A short story will help me to tie these strands together. It is not a story I have shared widely; on reflection my hesitation in disclosing it perhaps speaks to the prevailing stigma in our profession around talking about how we feel and the internal storm of negative emotions that we can all too easily experience in our daily lives. In some ways, speaking about our emotions has greatly improved since I started out in my career, but more open dialogue is needed to break down the barriers that remain.

I must have done something wrong

I have sat with this memory often in recent years, reflecting on it with older eyes and with a perspective I didn’t have back then. The peripheral details have all but faded over the years, save for the fact that I was working on a high-profile litigation case with several others in my team. I had joined the firm not long before and as a newly qualified solicitor, being involved in this case was a big deal for me. I wanted to make a good impression, but I was also terrified about making a mistake and anxious about disappointing my team.

It was late morning by the time my supervising partner walked into the office looking like thunder. As he passed my desk, I said good morning. He murmured morning back but was clearly agitated with me, or so I thought. And that was all it took to send me into an emotional orbit.

A wave of negative thoughts swept over me. I must have done something wrong, made a mistake and not realised. I had emailed him a draft to review a few days previously; maybe it was that – was it that bad? Or maybe he thought my ‘good morning’ was a sarcastic comment because it was nearly afternoon, and now he thinks I’m rude, as well as incompetent.

My hands turned clammy; the noise of colleagues around me intensified. I hid in the silence of the toilets until even my thoughts grew tired of the merry-go-round in my head. When I returned to my desk, my supervising partner was gone. A personal emergency at home, a colleague told me later that day.

The complexities of emotion

Before the above event unfolded, my mood was generally positive. Work was busy but I was excited about what I was working on; I felt hopeful and optimistic. However, these positive emotions co-existed, as they often do, with some contradictory ones such as feeling anxious about doing well and fearful of making a mistake.

Immediately after the event, I experienced an intense array of unpleasant emotions. Anxiety, fear, sadness, and shame took over. Aside from clammy hands, my heart rate elevated, my thoughts shifted to searching for all the ways in which I had caused my supervisor to be so upset with me, and my behaviour changed from sitting confidently at my desk to hiding in a toilet.

My emotions had a range of consequences; they affected me physiologically, cognitively, and behaviourally. In fact, the reason we have emotions is not an accident or an inconvenient blip in our evolutionary make up. They serve an important purpose, helping us to navigate and respond to our surroundings. Besides enabling us to respond quickly to danger, emotions help us to interact with others and build meaningful relationships. They can motivate and direct us in positive ways to reach our goals and align our actions with our values.

However, sometimes our emotions can direct us in not so helpful ways because we haven’t made an accurate assessment of our surroundings. Emotions are usually triggered by a specific event or situation, and how we perceive and interpret that situation matters greatly. In hindsight, this played a pivotal role in the emotional episode I experienced that day. Not only do our emotions influence how we think, how we think influences how we feel.

“Emotions usually occur because events have been interpreted in a certain way, and, once emotions occur, people often think in a somewhat altered manner.” (Parrott, 2001, p. 382)

Attention and appraisal

Our emotional response to a situation begins when we are exposed to a stimulus. Something happens in our environment which catches our attention and kickstarts our perceptual processing of what we have observed. In cognitive terms, we call this a bottom-up process because it is driven by external stimuli. In my story, the stimulus was the partner walking into the office looking agitated.

After perceiving this event, I appraised the situation using a top-down cognitive process to make sense of what was going on. We call this a top-down process because it draws on our internal stored knowledge about similar situations. This latter process also activates areas of our brain associated with high-level cognition to produce meaning to what we have perceived (Ochsner et al., 2009).

In response to any given situation, cognitive processes therefore influence when we experience emotions through a bottom-up process of attention, and what emotions we experience through a top-down process of appraisal. How a person appraises a situation shapes what emotions they experience as a result, which also implies that the same situation can elicit different emotions for different people depending on how they have appraised it (Parrott, 2001).

Because I appraised the situation as one where I was responsible, the emotions I experienced were negative. Had I (or indeed someone else) appraised the situation differently, I might have experienced concern for my supervising partner, which would have prompted me to think if he was okay and behave in a more supportive way towards him. As it turned out, things at home were not okay and that was the reason why he looked agitated and upset; it was nothing to do with me.

Regulating our emotions

Learning about the above processes was a lightbulb moment for me. As a younger lawyer, I struggled a lot with managing my negative emotions in direct response to situations like the one in my story. I still have my moments but knowing that my appraisal of a given situation might not be as accurate as I initially believed has really helped me to regulate my emotional response when I need to.

Emotion regulation is the deliberate attempt to change our immediate emotional reaction to a situation, usually when that reaction is a negative one. In other words, we are actively trying to override our initial, spontaneous emotional response (Gross, 2013).

Most emotion regulation strategies involve either distraction during the attention stage, which involves disengaging our attention from emotional processing and focusing on more neutral information (e.g., ignoring the fact that the partner appeared agitated and returning my attentional focus to my work), or reappraisal early on during the appraisal stage, whereby we reevaluate and reinterpret the situation and change its meaning (e.g., considering other reasons why the partner might be agitated, such as personal difficulties or perhaps he had a particularly bad journey into work).

The reappraisal strategy is the one I use most often. Research also suggests it has the most long-lasting benefits because it reduces the subsequent emotional impact you might experience when facing similar situations in the future (Sheppes et al., 2014). I have certainly found this to be true in my experience, and while my first few attempts at reappraisal were a bit clunky and I had to remind myself to do it, this has got easier for me over time. Rather than a forced process, it definitely feels more natural now to reevaluate situations whenever I start to feel a negative emotional response lurking.

Another layer of complexity

So far, much of what I have talked about involves how our cognitive processes – particularly relating to appraisal – can influence our emotional response to a given situation. However, I wanted to add a few words about how our emotions can also influence how we appraise new situations.

For example, and relevant to the story I shared, if you are anxious at the time, you are more likely to interpret an ambiguous situation (i.e., one that is open to several possible interpretations) in a negative and threatening way – a concept known as interpretive bias (Hirsch et al., 2016). If you are feeling angry, you are more likely to appraise the situation consistent with that emotion, e.g., interpreting the situation as one where the other person is to blame (Keltner et al., 1993).

Paying attention to and reflecting on our current emotional state at the point when we are confronted with a new situation can therefore help us to reappraise it in a more balanced way. If I know I’m already anxious, I know I might be more inclined to interpret the situation as a negative one, when in fact this might not be at all accurate. Our existing emotions appear to colour our appraisal process and this needs to be factored in.

That’s all for now

If I had to choose one gift that my journey through psychology has given me, that has personally helped me to better navigate my work and life more generally, it is understanding emotions, how they arise through a network of cognitive processes, and importantly how we can manage and regulate them by shifting how we think.

Despite being brilliant in so many ways, our minds can and do play tricks on us and one unfortunate consequence of this is the emotional fallout we can experience as a result. How we initially perceive a situation may be accurate the first time we appraise it, but it can also be wildly inaccurate causing us to feel, think and behave in unintended and unfounded ways. Sometimes, a change of perspective is all we need.

References

Gross, J. J. (2013). Emotion regulation: Taking stock and moving forward, Emotion, 13, 359-365.

Hirsch C. R., Meeten F., Krahé C., & Reeder C. (2016). Resolving ambiguity in emotional disorders: The nature and role of interpretation biases. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 12(1), 281–305.

Keltner, D., Ellsworth, P. C., & Edwards, K. (1993). Beyond simple pessimism: effects of sadness and anger on social perception. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64(5), 740-752.

Ochsner, K. N., Ray, R. R., Hughes, B., McRae, K., Cooper, J. C., Weber, J., ... & Gross, J. J. (2009). Bottom-up and top-down processes in emotion generation: common and distinct neural mechanisms. Psychological Science, 20(11), 1322-1331.

Parrott, W. G. (2001). The nature of emotion. In A. Tesser & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology: Intraindividual Processes (1st ed., pp. 375-390). Blackwell Publishing Limited.

Sheppes, G., Scheibe, S., Suri, G., Radu, P., Blechert, J., & Gross, J. J. (2014). Emotion regulation choice: a conceptual framework and supporting evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(1), 163-181.