for the common run of our everyday experience; they are the common valuers of
our thought and acts from hour to hour. The emotions, or more intense feeling
states, are, however, the occasional high tide of feeling which occurs in crises or
emergencies. We are angry on some particular provocation, we fear some
extraordinary factor in our environment, we are joyful over some unusual good
fortune.
2. THE CONTROL OF EMOTIONS
Dependence on Expression.—Since all emotions rest upon some form of
physical or physiological expression primarily, and upon some thought back of
this secondarily, it follows that the first step in controlling an emotion is to
secure the removal of the state of consciousness which serves as its basis. This
may be done, for instance, with a child, either by banishing the terrifying dog
from his presence, or by convincing him that the dog is harmless. The motor
response will then cease, and the emotion pass away. If the thought is persistent,
however, through the continuance of its stimulus, then what remains is to seek to
control the physical expression, and in that way suppress the emotion. If, instead
of the knit brow, the tense muscles, the quickened heart beat, and all the deeper
organic changes which go along with these, we can keep a smile on the face, the
muscles relaxed, the heart beat steady, and a normal condition in all the other
organs, we shall have no cause to fear an explosion of anger. If we are afraid of
mice and feel an almost irresistible tendency to mount a chair every time we see
a mouse, we can do wonders in suppressing the fear by resolutely refusing to
give expression to these tendencies. Inhibition of the expression inevitably
means the death of the emotion.
This fact has its bad side as well as its good in the feeling life, for it means that
good emotions as well as bad will fade out if we fail to allow them expression.
We are all perfectly familiar with the fact in our own experience that an interest
which does not find means of expression soon passes away. Sympathy
unexpressed ere long passes over into indifference. Even love cannot live
without expression. Religious emotion which does not go out in deeds of service
cannot persist. The natural end and aim of our emotions is to serve as motives to
activity; and missing this opportunity, they have not only failed in their office,
but will themselves die of inaction.
Relief through Expression.—Emotional states not only have their rise in
organic reactions, but they also tend to result in acts. When we are angry, or in