Basic Emotions and EQ

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LECTURE 3 · PSYCHOLOGY
Basic Emotions & Emotional Intelligence

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LECTURE OUTLINE
What we'll explore today
Why does a blocked deploy make your chest tighten? Why does one curt Slack message ruin your afternoon? Emotions are not noise — they are
fast, ancient information systems. This lecture maps what they are, where they come from, and how to work with them skillfully.
What emotions are
Definitions, universal expressions, and the wheel of combinable emotions
Emotional intelligence
The Salovey-Mayer and Goleman models of EQ
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
How emotions work
Competing theories of emotion, and what Inside Out got right
Regulating emotions
Evidence-based strategies for the digital, high-pressure workplace
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SECTION 1 · FOUNDATIONS
What is an emotion, exactly?
Emotions are brief, intense, biologically rooted psychological
states triggered by meaningful events — real, imagined, or
remembered.
▪ Physiological — a burst of arousal: heart rate, hormones,
muscle tension.
▪ Cognitive — a rapid appraisal of what the event means for
you.
▪ Behavioral — an impulse to act: approach, avoid, freeze,
fight.
Why bother having emotions at all?
▪ Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients
with damage to the brain's emotion-reason hub.
▪ Their logic, language, and memory were intact —
but they became paralyzed choosing a
restaurant.
▪ Without an emotional "gut feeling," no option
felt more valuable than another.
▪ Emotions are not noise that corrupts rational
thought — they are essential information that
enables it.
▪ Experiential — the subjective feeling itself, the part we
notice.
▪ These four fire together, coordinating your whole system to
prepare for adaptive action — in seconds, before you
consciously decide anything.
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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SECTION 1 · FOUNDATIONS
Emotion, mood, feeling — not the same thing
Emotion
Seconds – minutes, high intensity, aimed at a specific
event
Fear when your code fails live in a demo
Mood
Hours – days, low intensity, no clear trigger
Vague irritability on a Monday morning
Affect
Variable — the broad umbrella term for all valenced
states
General positive or negative "tone" of a day
Feeling
Variable — the conscious, subjective experience of an
emotion
Being aware "I feel afraid," not just the physiology
Sentiment
Weeks – years, stable evaluative attitude toward
someone or something
Long-term professional admiration for a mentor
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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SECTION 1 · SCALE OF THE FIELD
How many emotions are there?
Across languages and cultures, scientists have named and catalogued an enormous emotional vocabulary — but most agree a small set of "basic" emotions
sits at the root of it all.
300+
distinct named human
emotions identified across
languages and cultures
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
7
8
facial evidence
primary emotions that
combine to form all
universal emotions
with cross-cultural
(Paul Ekman)
others
(Robert Plutchik)
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SECTION 1 · EKMAN'S UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS
Seven faces, understood
everywhere on Earth
Between 1969 and 1992, Paul Ekman traveled to
remote, preliterate communities — including the Fore
people of Papua New Guinea, who had never seen a
photograph, film, or magazine — and asked them to
match faces to stories. They matched the same
expressions to the same emotions as people in the
U.S., Japan, and Brazil.
This became some of psychology's strongest cross-cultural evidence: these expressions are not learned by watching television
— they are wired into being human. Ekman originally proposed six; his later research found the strongest evidence yet for a
seventh — contempt.
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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SECTION 1 · EKMAN'S UNIVERSAL EMOTIONS
Every emotion has a job to
do
Fear
Mobilize rapid escape from threat
Missed deadline; public presentation; technical incident
Anger
Remove an obstruction to a goal; signal dominance
Blocked goal; a critical bug; perceived injustice
Disgust
Avoid contamination — biological and moral
Ethical violation; code that "feels wrong"; hypocrisy
Sadness
Signal loss; promote reflection and support-seeking
Project failure; negative feedback; team conflict
Enjoyment
Approach reward; build social bonds; reinforce success
Goal achievement; recognition; collaborative success
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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SECTION 1 · BEYOND THE BASICS
Secondary emotions: when basics combine with self-judgment
Shame, guilt, pride, contempt, envy, and gratitude are not basic — they require a developed sense of self, and
appear later in childhood (typically after 18 months).
Shame
Guilt
Pride
"I am fundamentally flawed." Total self seen
as a failure — fuels imposter syndrome and
over-defensiveness.
"My action was wrong." Judges a specific
behavior, not the whole self — motivates
repair.
"I caused this good outcome." Motivating
when tied to effort; risky when tied to fixed
ability.
Contempt
Envy
Gratitude
"They are beneath consideration." Anger +
disgust aimed at a person's character — the
most corrosive workplace emotion.
"They have what I want." Can motivate selfimprovement, or curdle into sabotage.
"Someone helped me, and I am better for it."
The strongest single predictor of team
cohesion.
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SECTION 1 · THE ATLAS OF EMOTIONS
The Atlas of Emotions: five continents
Commissioned by the Dalai Lama and built by Paul and Eve Ekman, the Atlas maps each emotion as a "continent" — showing its triggers, its states, and whether each
response is constructive or destructive.
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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https://atlasofemotions.org/#actions/

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CASE STUDY · EMOTIONS IN CULTURE
The science behind Pixar's Inside Out
CASE STUDY
When director Pete Docter set out to build a movie inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl, he brought in two real emotion scientists: Paul Ekman and
Dacher Keltner. Their brief: make Riley's inner world scientifically real, not just cute.
Ekman's research pointed to six or seven basic emotions. Docter kept five as main characters — Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust — and cut Surprise,
folding it into Fear ("as a cartoon, surprise is probably fairly similar to fear," Docter explained). Contempt was left out for simplicity. Keltner, the film's
second consultant, later noted the choice also left out subtler emotions like awe.
The film's deeper insight — that Sadness, not Joy, is what ultimately helps Riley process her move and reconnect with her parents — closely tracks real
research on sadness's social function: signaling a need for support and prompting others to offer it.
The psychology behind it — simplification is a real scientific tradeoff
Reducing "all human emotion" to five charming characters necessarily leaves things out — and the filmmakers were transparent about that tradeoff. It is a useful
reminder for any model in this lecture: frameworks (Ekman's six, Plutchik's eight, five Pixar characters) are tools for thinking, not the full territory of what people
actually feel.
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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SECTION 2 · HOW EMOTIONS ARISE
Four theories of where emotion comes from
James-Lange · 1884
We feel afraid because we tremble — physiological
arousal comes first, emotion follows.
Facial-feedback effects; spinal injury
reduces emotion intensity.
Cannon-Bard · 1927
Arousal and the subjective feeling happen at the
same time, both triggered by the brain.
People with severed sympathetic nervous
systems still feel emotion.
Schachter-Singer ·
Emotion = physiological arousal + a cognitive label
explaining it. Same arousal, different label, different
feeling.
The classic "misattribution of arousal"
suspension-bridge studies.
Emotions come from how you evaluate an event's
personal significance — not the event itself.
The same exam produces fear in some
students, excitement in others.
1962
Appraisal Theory ·
1991
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
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SECTION 3 · EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
What is emotional intelligence?
Emotional intelligence (EI or EQ) is the ability to perceive, understand, use, and manage emotions — your own
and other people's — in ways that support thinking and behavior.
1990
1995
Today
Salovey & Mayer
Daniel Goleman
Two live frameworks
Coin "emotional intelligence" as a
Publishes the bestseller
Both models remain in active use
specific, measurable mental
Emotional Intelligence,
— one for precise measurement,
ability — a true intelligence.
popularizing EQ as a broad
one for applied training.
competency for life and
leadership.
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SECTION 5 · A PRACTICAL DISTINCTION
IQ and EQ: different tools for different jobs
IQ
EQ
▪ Measures competencies and individual
cognitive capacity.
Determines how you interact with and treat
other people.
▪ Relatively stable across the lifespan after
childhood.
Meaningfully trainable throughout adulthood
with practice.
▪ Predicts what tasks you can learn to perform.
Predicts how you cope with pressure and crisis.
▪ Assessed with standardized, "correct-answer"
tests.
Assessed through ability tests, self-report, or
peer review.
A person can have a high IQ and a low EQ, or the reverse — the two are only modestly correlated, and both matter.
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SECTION 5 · FASCINATING FINDINGS
What emotion research has discovered, part I
Removing emotion doesn't
make you rational — it
makes you unable to
decide
Patients with damage to the brain's emotion-reason hub retained perfect logic, language, and memory — but became
paralyzed choosing a restaurant. Without emotional "somatic markers," no option felt more valuable than another.
Damasio, Descartes' Error, 1994
A genuine smile is nearly
impossible to fake — and
people detect the
difference
The "Duchenne smile" engages both the mouth and the eye muscles and is largely involuntary. Polite, non-Duchenne
smiles use only the mouth — and observers reliably sense the difference, even without training.
Ekman & Friesen, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1982
EQ predicts leadership
success better than IQ in 9
of 10 top performers
An assessment of over one million people found 90% of top performers scored high in EQ, versus only 20% of bottom
performers. People with average IQ outperform those with the highest IQ 70% of the time.
Bradberry & Greaves, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, 2009
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SECTION 5 · FASCINATING FINDINGS
What emotion research has discovered, part II
You "catch" emotions from
people around you — even
through text
Emotional contagion spreads through facial mimicry, tone, and behavioral sync — and a landmark study found it spreads
through text-only social feeds too. One chronically dysregulated teammate measurably shifts team-wide mood.
Kramer et al., PNAS, 2014
Simply naming an emotion
turns down its intensity
When participants labeled emotional faces with words like "angry" or "scared," activity in the brain's fear center dropped
significantly — the verbal act of labeling itself is a form of regulation. "Name it to tame it."
Lieberman et al., Psychological Science, 2007
Contempt is the single
most destructive emotion
in relationships —
romantic or professional
Unlike criticism, which targets behavior, contempt communicates "I am better than you." It is the strongest known
predictor of relationship breakdown — showing up at work as eye-rolling, sarcasm, and dismissiveness.
Gottman, What Predicts Divorce?, 1994
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SUMMARY
Key takeaways
Emotions are brief, adaptive, biologically rooted responses that coordinate the body, mind, and behavior — not
irrational noise to suppress.
Ekman's 7 universal facial expressions and Plutchik's 8-primary-color wheel are two well-evidenced ways to organize the
300+ emotions humans' name.
No single theory fully explains how emotion arises — James-Lange, Cannon-Bard, Schachter-Singer, and appraisal
theory each capture part of the picture.
Emotional intelligence has two live models: Salovey-Mayer's precise four-branch ability, and Goleman's broader fourdomain competency framework.
Digital communication strips emotional cues and amplifies dysregulation — awareness and a pause are the simplest,
most reliable countermeasures.
Of Gross's five regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal has the strongest evidence and the lowest cost.
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SOURCES & FURTHER READING
Sources
– Ekman, P. Universal Emotions. paulekman.com/universal-emotions
– Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation. Review of General
Psychology.
– Ekman, P., & Ekman, E. Atlas of Emotions. atlasofemotions.org
– Gottman, J. M. (1994). What Predicts Divorce? Lawrence Erlbaum.
– Plutchik, R. (1980). Emotion: A Psychoevolutionary Synthesis. Harper & Row.
– Lieberman, M. D., et al. (2007). Affect labeling. Psychological Science.
– Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition and
Personality.
– Kramer, A. D. I., et al. (2014). Emotional contagion through social networks. PNAS.
– Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.
– Bradberry, T., & Greaves, J. (2009). Emotional Intelligence 2.0. TalentSmart.
– Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' Error. Putnam.
– Docter, P. (Dir.). (2015). Inside Out [Film]. Pixar Animation Studios.
– Verywell Mind. What Are Emotions? verywellmind.com
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Thank you for your attention!
Questions & discussion
Basic Emotions and Emotional Intelligence · Lecture 3