You are responsible for the authenticity of your feelings, but not for their duration.
Otto Baumberger
The role of emotions is central to successful communication, because emotions are always integrated in behaviour and especially in communicative behaviour. Emotions accompany and colour all human consciousness and actions, whereby they are usually experienced directly as fear, joy, anger or rage and thus directly influence actions.
However, emotions are sometimes of little use as action-controlling elements because they usually only indicate very general tendencies to act, and at high levels of arousal, emotions often block human action (fight, flight, avoidance). At medium levels of arousal and pleasant feelings, however, emotions are conducive to action, whereby one of the aims of optimising effective communication is to influence negative or inhibiting emotions in such a way that they do not block action. Anti-stress training, cooling-down strategies or other forms of conscious emotion control can help here. This is particularly important in professions where conversations often take place in the context of stressful emotional situations and require confident handling of one’s own feelings.
In psychology, emotions are very complex and should not be confused with a person’s mere mood, as they manifest themselves both psychologically and physically, whereby strong emotions in particular can have an impact on personality. Emotions form the basis of all human behaviour, especially the basic or primary emotions. In addition to these emotions, which are also known as primary emotions, there are numerous other emotions that can usually be described as a mixture of the primary emotions: Worry, horror, romance, confusion, rapture, nostalgia, sexual pleasure, serenity, appreciation, desire, awe, admiration, adoration, amusement, awkwardness, satisfaction, excitement, interest, pain, relief, boredom.