Despair, Anger, Hope: Emotions Reveal Our Negativity-Positivity Type

Where are emotions such as despair, anger, hope, and appreciation located on the Negativity-Positivity scale?

In this blog post I will talk about emotions and how they are supposed to fit into my new Positivity-Negativity spectrum. This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, where I posed the question “How positive am I?” (…and: “How positive are other people?”)

Today’s post will then, hopefully, give us a more clear picture of each of the six “stations” on the Positivity-Negativity spectrum, so that we can easier identify who is approximately where on that scale.

Some Potential Obstacles

Some aspects of personality typing is equally difficult when one is doing it to measure one’s own personality, compared to when one is trying to do it in regard to other people.

But other aspects may be different. So one of the more tricky ones when one is trying to understand the personality type of others is the potential of “lying”, i.e. not telling the truth.

This is maybe less of a problem when one is observing one’s own state of affairs, because normally, if one is an honest person, one can rather easily detect one’s own insincerity.

But it is harder to do the same for others. Many people do not tell the truth. And even if they do tell some truth, they may not tell you everything.

This is, however, not just a concern in terms of everyday dealings in the community, but of equal concern when we are doing our personality typing.

This “lying” can be done on many levels. It can be a problem in conversations or other exchanges of words, phrases, and sentences, where the communicated message is not really reflecting the thoughts of the individual.

And in such a situation, the assessment done with the help of beliefs and thoughts and words (as we discussed yesterday, in the How Positive Am I post), may be misleading.

One way to correct this, then, is to add “emotions” to the evaluation process. This helps the person who is doing the assessment to be more sure that the person actually belongs in the right “group”.

The reason for this is simply that it is harder to “lie” in emotions, than it is to “lie” in terms of a simple sentence. And even though some persons are experts at theatrical performances, it is, on average, harder to fake emotions than a simple belief or thought.

The upshot of this is that if we measure both emotions and beliefs, we will be better off, in terms of establishing a more robust measurement of that person’s emotional state of affairs.

A Rudimentary Table of Emotions

NOTE: The “table” above should be read from the bottom (“N3” is the most negative on the scale) and up (“P3” is the most positive on the scale.) The idea is that “up” is the positive direction that we want to proceed in (i.e. we want to “upgrade” ourselves into becoming more positive).

Discussion

A first observation is, of course, that words describing emotions do not perfectly match every situation. Different persons have different conceptions of what “appreciation” or “security” looks like.

Still, I think that this sort of system might do very well in practice. For in the “amateur” scenario, the evaluation is always done by the practitioner himself. And that evaluation therefore always has the same reference point, in terms of the understanding of the emotional words.

As in yesterday’s post, we note that we have two important “endpoints”: N3 and P3. At N3, the individual is more or less paralyzed or “immobilized” by his own emotions and worldview.

Therefore, he is in a dysfunctional state, experiences emotions such as despair, hopelessness, and the feeling of being burnt-out. Even weakly positive feelings (such as those in a typical P1) are mostly not seen. Even he occasionally might appreciate something and have some hope, those are not the dominating feelings.

At P3, the situation is “reversed”, in that here the individual has more or less nothing but hope and appreciation for everything and everyone. Although he temporarily may experience hardship, his overall energy state is such that he quickly “recovers” or “bounces back” to his previous state.

In the intermediate levels (N2, N1, P1, P2) there is, naturally, a gradual “improvement” in terms of an increased positive attitude and a decreasing negative one. Thus, for instance, we travel from ANGER (N2) to IRRITATION (N1) to THANKFULNESS (P1) to APPRECIATION (P2).

Chris Bocay

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