The meaning of emotion

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Purpose – To describe the meaning of emotion.

Design/methodology/approach – Describes how emotion has recently become a popular concept for discussion, but it is not often recognised that human beings are, in essence, meaning-creating creatures and that emotion is one of the forms of meaning they create.

Findings – What one experiences as “I”, “me”, “myself”, that is, one's sense of being a person, is a meaning-structure, which has developed through one's interaction with one's environment. One's physiological make-up is such that all the meanings are guesses about what is going on. Consequently the sense of being a person is always in danger of being invalidated by events. Emotions are meanings, which relate to the validation or invalidation of one's sense of being a person. It is necessary to survive both physically and as a person, but, if there is to be a choice between these two ways of surviving, one almost always chooses to survive as a person and let one's body go. This is seen in acts of heroism and in suicide.

Originality/value – Emphasises how the need to survive as a person is so important that children as young as 16 months are able to understand and respond to the emotional meanings of their parents and siblings even though they do not develop an intellectual understanding of the theory of mind until they are about four years old. All interactions between people in health-care management involve validation and invalidation.

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