emotional self

• Emotion


  A full-system response that includes how a person feels, thinks, and experiences physiological reactions
• Emotions are not positive or negative, nor good or bad. They are a normal part of being human.
• Emotions do not last forever, they naturally come and go.
• The natural response when experiencing an emotion is to try to get rid of that emotion, but this is not realistic as emotions play an important role in our lives.
• Emotions


  • Help with communication
  • Provide motivation
  • Provide information
• Emotions

  • Help us survive
  • Help us remember people and situations
  • Help us cope with daily life situations
  • Help us communicate with others
  • Help us avoid pain
  • Help us seek pleasure
• Primary emotion


  Our initial reaction to a situation
• Secondary emotion

  Our response to the primary emotion
• Individuals respond to emotional situations differently, as the urge to do something in a particular situation may not be the same for other people.
• We cannot control our immediate feelings towards a situation, but we can control how we respond to the extreme feelings we are experiencing.
• Recognizing our emotions is one of the best responses when experiencing heightened emotion, as it helps us effectively decide what to do.
• Many people do not recognize or pay attention to how they feel, resulting in a lack of knowledge about the important things happening to them.
• About 80-85% of adolescents experience a relatively happy youth, marked by mostly good relationships with peers and parents.
• About 15-20% of adolescents experience a difficult, tumultuous adolescence marked by serious emotional or behaviour problems, which is about the same percentage as both children and adults.
• Reasons why adolescence may be a time of heightened emotional stress

  • The topics over which parents and normal teenagers have conflict are often more upsetting to both sides
  • There is a marked increase during adolescence of risky behaviours, such as unsafe automobile driving, unprotected sex, and alcohol and drug use
• From the onset of puberty, severe episodes of depression, the eating disorder called anorexia nervosa, several kinds of anxiety conditions, and suicide increase ten-fold, mostly in girls.
• Factors of family environment that can influence risk behaviour of adolescents

  • Constellation of the family (completeness, numerousness, sibling constellation)
  • Social status of the family (occupation, employment, finance and material sources)
  • Age and personal characteristics of the family members
  • The quality of the marital relation
  • The relation among the family members
  • Emotional warmth
  • Conflicts
  • Cohesiveness
• Pubertal maturation leads to a more egalitarian relationship between adolescents and their parents, with adolescents having more autonomy and influence in family decision-making.
• Conflict between adolescents and parents, especially mothers, increases around the onset of puberty, and there is now less certainty that parent-child conflict declines in later adolescence.
• Adolescents who demonstrated poor attitudes to living and had a tendency to suicidal ideation, reported significantly more stress related to parents, lack of adult support outside the home, and sexual identity than did control groups.
• For an important decision or critical situation, adolescents prefer parents more often than peers.
• High parental control and strictness often leads to an enlarged peer orientation and looking for an alliance against parents, and bad relations with parents increases the amount of peers but not the quality of those relations.
• By adolescence, peers have become the most important people in the individual's life, and the rejection of peers can lead adolescents into risky behaviour.
• As peer influence becomes more powerful than parental influence, adolescents begin to adopt the values, attitudes, style of dress, and language of their peers, sometimes in direct opposition to the wishes of their parents.
• Friendship shows development during adolescence, with adolescents viewing friendship as a principled relationship that serves their interests and allows them to explore aspects of themselves with the guarantee of feedback from a sympathetic critic.