Four Components to Emotions

The primary emotions are joy, anger, sadness and fear and other emotions develop from these.Children's emotional self-awareness, their understanding of other people's feelings and their ability to manage what they feel is what emotional intelligence is. Feelings can be felt, expressed, acted on and thought about. Feelings are how we react to experiences and help us organize and make sense of our world.

There are four components to emotions. The first one is trigger events. An example of a trigger event is when a child bites. For example, I had a child in the first child care center I worked in who would bite every time she got enclosed or felt enclosed.The enclosure of other children or even if she felt enclosed triggered her to bite. As a result I kept an eye on her throughout the day and noticed how many children were around her at any given time. When a certain amount of children were around her I would either remover her from the situation and take her to a different area or I would remove a certain number of the other children from around her and give them a different activity to do. This helped her control her emotions and kept the emotion of feeling enclosed and the need to bite under control and in most cases stopped the biting.

The second component to emotions is physical response. An example of a physical response is to cringe at something unpleasant or frightening or to flinch in surprise or pain. We've all done this just probably not thought of it as expressing emotion. Where something can make us cringe, flinch or frighten us though, those are all emotions and the response to the emotion is the cringe or flinch.

The third component to emotion is the expressive way we respond. An expressive way to respond to an emotion is when someone smiles when a person brings them flowers or someone rolls their eyes when someone is dramatic. Again, we've all expressed our emotions this way but we tend to think of it as a reaction instead of an expression. However, just the action of bringing flowers is a way to show someone they love them or feel sad for the death of someone we then express the emotion we feel at this gesture by smiling, hugging or thanking the person.

The last way component of emotion is a cognitive response. A person has a cognitive response to an emotion when they engage in self-talk. For example, if a child has to give a presentation in class and they are telling themselves everything will be fine and there is no need to worry or be afraid, they're using cognitive abilities to determine what emotion to feel and to regulate their emotions.

As parents help children work through their emotions this is a good place to start. It helps a parent know what why the child is choosing to express their emotions and can then help them not only regulate their emotions but help them express that emotion in a healthy, non-violent way.