Contents
- It is not true that some emotions are good and others are bad: they all help us
- Psychology
- The psychologists Elena Huguet and Laura Rodríguez, from the team of ‘In Mental Balance’ dismantle the myth that there are good and bad or positive or negative emotions and affirm that they all have an important function
It is not true that some emotions are good and others are bad: they all help us
Psychology
The psychologists Elena Huguet and Laura Rodríguez, from the team of ‘In Mental Balance’ dismantle the myth that there are good and bad or positive or negative emotions and affirm that they all have an important function
PM5:01“It shouldn’t affect me”, “Feeling like this is wasting time”, “Anger is bad, what you have to do is be calm” … Who does not hear these messages from others or their own? Almost all of us have been able to receive these comments at some time due to an emotional reaction. But the fact that some emotional reactions are rejected makes, almost automatically, we consider that some emotions are good and others bad.
Almost always the supposed good emotions They are usually related to those experiences that are subjectively pleasant, commonly called positive ones, and the bad ones are usually related to the unpleasant or negative ones.
But sometimes the categorizations as “good” or “bad” emotions are also given by experiences we have had in the past. For example, if my anger was not accepted in my family and it was punished, it is possible that I have learned the relationship between anger and the miscategorization of emotion.
Emotions are not “good” or “bad” since, as we have explained in our guide to understanding emotions for ABC Wellbeing, they all have an adaptive function for our body. They are messages that allow us to protect ourselves, seek help, improve and, after all, develop throughout life. What we can do is distinguish between adaptive emotion, which is useful and allows us to approach the problem, from the harmful emotion, which is excessive, and hinders performance and adaptation.
But, if I only attend to the emotions that I consider pleasant, will I be better? As the expert in emotional psychopathology Gonzalo Hervás points out, it must be specified that not in all contexts positive emotions provide advantages. An example of this can be found if we realize that positive emotions can sometimes bias us. This is what happened in a study by Forgas e East. In it, the participants, after inducing a positive or negative state of mind, had to assess the guilt or innocence of people who had committed an alleged crime, sometimes true and sometimes false, during recorded interrogations. In this research they discovered that those who had a sad state of mind were more accurate in their verdicts, by detecting lies better, than those who were happy or neutral. That is to say, negative affect produced an advantage in accurately identifying lies and mistakes.
For this reason, the key will be to attend to the message that my emotions are giving me, whether they are more pleasant or less, because it will be essential to know what I need. Listening to what is best for me (seeking help, crying, venting, saying what bothers me or resting …) will be much more useful than burying those emotions because, although they are not pleasant, emotions will make me see what it is important and will be a guide to meeting that need.
The psychologist Elena Huguet combines her activity as a health psychologist at the ‘En Equilibrio Mental’ clinic with research on suicide in the doctoral program of the UCM, teaching at the European University of Madrid as a professor of the Master of General Health Psychologist and as trainer in different training centers such as the Miguel Hernández University, the Autonomous University of Madrid and in the working groups of the Official College of Psychologists, among others.
For her part, the psychologist Laura Rodríguez Mondragón combines her work as a psychotherapist with adolescents, young people, adults and couples with the completion of her Doctoral Thesis on ‘Eating Behavior and Personality Disorders’ at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM). There he completed the Master in General Health Psychology. She has also been a tutor of master’s degree practices at the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Pontifical University of Comillas.