What Are the 6 Stages of Emotion?

Emotions are grouped in many ways. There are the five stages of grief. There is Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There are Erik Erikson's stages of development. Some emotions are considered positive and some negative. All emotions are valuable and have a purpose in the evolution of the person feeling them. They may have become misdirected by life experience, but they are well-intended. Looking at the parts of a single emotion, viewing it as a process, is another way to understand emotions.

Exposure to Stimulus

• The stimulus that provokes an emotion is usually external but may come from inside a person. External stimuli could include music, a crowd, a special view in nature, something that someone says to you, a violent event, an animal, or food, among millions of possibilities. Internal stimuli might be feeling sick, feeling energetic, a new pain, a thought or memory that pops into your head apparently without an external reason or just a mood.

Register Stimulus for Meaning

• This simple-sounding step includes applying all of our experience and knowledge about the stimulus, perhaps including its context, in what seems like a split second, and forming a conclusion about how to react. In a fleeting moment, the human mind gives the stimulus cognitive appraisal and applies related theories. This response may be based on the months of experience that make up the lifetime of a 2-year-old, or it may be based on a lifetime of 70 years of collecting information.

Impose Personal Filter

• Obviously many people could see or hear the same stimulus and have as many different reactions. We apply the filters of our personal makeup and experience. An introvert may see a crowd and head the other way. An extrovert may relish joining the crowd and mingling with all those people. A child may look at a plane overhead in wonder. A world-weary adult may wonder how often the planes will fly over his new house or feel dread at the prospect of his next business trip.

Experience Feeling State

• This state is closest to being the emotion itself but alone it is like a deer in the headlights--frozen in the moment and not connected to past or future. Within a moment, a person will have the beginning of an attraction or an avoidance reaction. In varying degrees, every stimulus produces fear or love. Our totality of life experience begins to produce a feeling we may not understand or we may have the awareness to know what's happening.

Experience Physical Reaction

• Often physical reactions happen in the core of the body. Fear often produces a startling feeling or a "knot" in the stomach. It's as if the sky darkened. You have a fight or flight response. Positive and negative reactions have some aspects in common, like a faster heart rate or rate of breathing, breaking into a sweat, hands becoming cold or mouth going dry. A positive feeling of anticipation usually produces a smile; misgiving produces a frown. The degree of reaction may be anywhere from almost no reaction to overwhelming anger or tears of happiness.

React

• The person reacting to the stimulus can himself become a stimulus. His actions, including facial expressions, walking away or walking toward, what he says, or other body language usually give immediate cues. Much of the reaction may happen following the encounter with the stimulus or "downstream." He may go buy flowers, he may start whistling, he may set his teeth and start composing a memo, he may get something to eat, he may determine never to treat his wife or child like what he just saw and to go home early.