Emotion 1: Emotional cause and effect

Expanding loops with feelings and thoughts

Pick an emotion, any emotion. How would you describe it?

Happy, sad, angry, afraid, contemptuous, greedy, disgusted, satsified, content, proud, joyous, lonely, bitter, remorseful, awestruck, in love, amazed, hopeful, hopeless, perturbed, smug, comfortable, irritated, glad, delighted, cheerful, miserable, gloomy, tormented.

Writelike
Pick any of these emotions and try to describe what it really is—what happens when you experience this emotion?

How did you find it trying to explain what a single emotion is?

If you found it challenging it's because these emotion-words are really just labels that we use to summarise more complex feelings and thoughts.

We can expand our emotional loop to include feelings and thoughts as precursors to 'emotions':

Expanded emotion behaviour loop. Trigger: Monster appears. Feeling: Stomach drops. Thought: "It's going to catch me!" Emotion: Fear. Behaviour: Run away.

What do these new terms mean?

  • Feeling: Any internal, physical, bodily sensations you have in response to the trigger.
  • For example: throat clenches, stomach drops, butterflies in belly, heart skips, feeling of weightlessness.
  • Thought: Any internal self-talk or imagery in response to the trigger.
  • For example: when you feel sick from eating too much chocolate and think to yourself, “I should stop eating so much chocolate.”

Below are some panels from El Deafo. This is a graphic novel about a girl who suddenly loses her hearing, and this is the scene where she loses it.

The first blank speech bubble represents Cece speaking but not hearing her own words.

Can you break this sequence down in terms of trigger, thought, emotion, and behaviour?

Panels from El Deafo that show young Cece playing with her mother and then suddenly losing her hearing and wondering where her mother is
Panels from El Deafo that show young Cece running around looking for her mother and then finally finding her and both of them realising that she is deaf
From 'El Deafo' by Cece Bell (Source)
What are the trigger, thoughts, emotion, and behaviour?

Trigger: Cece suddenly 'loses' her mother.

Thought: Where is she? Why won’t she answer me?

Emotion: Fear.

Behaviour: Runs around calling and looking for her mother.

Also: Do you notice how this loop sets up the next loop? "Everything is different." Discovering that Cece is deaf becomes the trigger for the next loop of emotions and behaviour (sadness then resolve, getting Cece tested, getting a hearing aid, and so on).

We can see that thoughts can be represented as self-talk, although they could also be images, sounds, and smells.

That was an example of thoughts. What about feelings?

In the panel below, Peter has just hit his friend Chris while driving drunk and runs over to check on him.

What is the main emotion-behaviour loop?

(Click to open a larger image in a new tab.)

Comic panel from Commando Comics in which a World War 2 crew member has run over a pilot while drunk and is helping him up and feeling a wave of relief that he is still breathing
From Commando Comics #2724: They Fought By Night (Source)
What are the trigger, feeling, thought, emotion, and behaviour?

Trigger: Finds Chris is still breathing. 

Feeling: Wave of relief.

Thought: I must have been crazy. I need to get him to a hospital. I hope he's alright.

Emotion: Shock and remorse.

Behaviour: Lift him up (and get him to hospital).

Graphic novels often spell out thoughts, either through characters talking to themselves in speech bubbles, or through narration in captions. 

It’s unusual for a comic to spell out feelings. Since comics are visual, artists more commonly use body language and graphic devices.

Also FYI notice that the feeling is described with a metaphor ("a wave of relief").

To recap

  • Characters go through continual emotion-behaviour loops.
  • They experience triggers, have emotional reactions, and respond with behaviour.
  • Underlying those emotions are physical feelings and thoughts.

Next

Let's look at what happens when we chain loops together.

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