After introducing the “emotionWheel”, this task can be used to develop a better understanding of the eight basic emotions. We often experience emotions, as well as their triggers and their caused reactions, subconsciously. By deconstructing example situations, “emotionalAwareness” can help students to gain insights into their emotions and to build a support structure for future emotional experiences.

 

Every emotion arises because of a trigger. Noticing what makes us feel a certain emotion, is the first step towards understanding and managing it. The next step is to distinguish between our cognitive and emotional reaction. To then be able to see what either caused our behavioural reaction or to pause and think about our behavioural reactions first. Lastly, we can ask ourselves why we react in certain ways to fully reflect upon the emotional experience.

 

For example:

If we experience some kind of thread (trigger situation) we realise “this is dangerous” (cognitive reaction). Which makes us feel fear (emotional reaction). Consequently, we might choose to escape out of the situation and run away (behavioural reaction). When we then think about why all of this happened, we realise that our basic emotion “fear” was activated in order to secure our own safety (function).

 

Originally, the basic emotions are activated to evoke different survival  behaviours. In this task, the students are asked to find their own examples to understand their individual emotional responses.