Introduction
"Emotions determine the quality of our lives," the author suggests. They occur in every relationship in the workplace, the home, and our social lives. They can foster or inhibit relationships and be supportive or damaging to them.
Consider these scenarios:
- Your boss criticizes work you felt was done well.
- Your spouse takes money from the household budget to buy an expensive luxury item for himself.
- Your daughter comes home two hours after curfew.
In each instance, it should be obvious that your emotional reaction will have a significant impact on an important relationship, and one which will have repercussions for your professional and personal life, as well as the lives of the other parties involved.
There are many books written about building positive relationships and dealing with difficult situations such as these - but very few of them have any solid foundation in the psychology of emotions. Even practical solutions, that suggest what one should say, often lack a consideration of the emotional impact of the words they are suggesting.
The emotions we express, and our ability to recognize and respond to the emotions of others, are critically important social skills that have received alarmingly little attention.
Psychologists know little about them, and while they acknowledge their existence, their approach seems little better than the layman, who generally considers emotions to be in the manner of an unpredictable supernatural force that takes possession of a person in the manner of an evil spirit.
Ekman suggests he has been studying emotions for more than forty years, focusing primarily on their expression and physiology, in dysfunctional as well as normal individuals - primarily in adults in the United States but also in other age groups and cultures.
(EN: He then outlines the book, suggesting the content of each chapter, in a more suggestive than descriptive manner - which is a sales tactic, so I'm skipping it.)
He concedes that this book is not a comprehensive treatise on the subject, and he covers only those emotions that seem to be universal and which have a significant impact on our relationships with other people as well as individual behavior.
The goal of the book is not to teach us to escape our emotions, for that is impossible. Instead, it is about how to deal with emotions in a practical manner.