Principles of Organizational Behavior, 3rd Edition

4Attain Emotional Control by Understanding What Emotions Are^1,2

EDWIN A. LOCKE

University of Maryland, Emeritus

• • “Know thyself”

    • • — Inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece

The theme of this chapter is that emotional control can only be attained by understanding what emotions are and that emotions can only be understood through introspection. There has been considerable interest in emotions in the workplace over the last decades, but most discussions of emotion (even those outside the fields of organizational behavior and industrial/organizational psychology) have lacked one thing: a definition of emotion!

Why? Because, as noted, one can only grasp the nature of emotions by introspection – by looking inwards at one's mental contents and processes – and introspection has been unofficially – and wrongly – banned (for reasons I need not go into here) from the field of psychology for close to 100 years (Locke, 2009).

WHAT EMOTIONS ARE

The causal sequence

I will begin by defining what I am talking about: emotions are the form in which one experiences automatic, subconscious value judgments (value appraisals). The appraisal theory was first identified in psychology, to the author's knowledge, by Arnold (1960), but see Peikoff (1991) for a more complete statement. Every emotion involves a specific type of value appraisal. For example:

• Fear is the form in which one experiences a perceived threat to one's life or well-being (or that of a loved one).
• Anxiety is similar ...