Emotions- A Journey from Physical Expression to Digital Expression

Emotions- A Way Far More than Chatting Emotions

Emotions in psychology means that complex state of mind which results in psychological and physical behavioral changes. They, even change our thought process.
Emotions decides our psychological phenomena such as:

1. Temperament;
2. Personality;
3. Mood; and
4. Motivation.
   

Basic Kinds of Emotions:

Paul Ekman, in 20th century, has given us 6 basic kinds of emotions, such as:

1. Anger;
2. Disgust;
3. Fear;
4. Happiness;
5. Sadness; and
6. Surprise.

Also, Robert Plutchik has paired 8 emotions into 4 groups of opposite emotions, like:

1. Anger-Fear
2. Joy-Sadness
3.  Trust-Distrust
4. Surprise-Anticipation

Physical Emotions:

From ancient times till 2011, we always express ourselves through physical emotions, for example:
Whenever we have emotion of happiness we laugh, when we are surprise we jump out of excitement.
These expressions can be seen and felt through our senses because these all are happening right in front of our eyes. In other words, when an emotion is triggered in our brain, it sends signals to our body parts and according to that we use our body parts to express these emotions.
But, now a days, we have left all these far behind and have entered into a phase of digital emotions from 2012.
Digital emotions means emotions through emojis. First of all we should know what are emojis?

Digital Emotions- New Generation Way of Expressing Emotions

Emojis is a Japanese Word which means 'Picture Character'.  Today's generation use these pictorial faces to express their feelings or the gesture as per the situation.

For example: Heart Throbbing ❤ Emoji is used for showing emotion of love.
Emojis these days has captured the whole generation and, therefore, has replaced the natural human body and facial expression. If a person is actually not happy or peaceful from within, but, through emojis he/she hides the true emotion and replies with happy-go-faces emojis.


Is it beneficial for humans who are going through a lot of hardships, hide their true self through emojis, in order to show the world, how perfect is everything?
The answer to the above question is NO. The emojis have a negative mental impact on a person towards others or rest of the World. There are some Negative Effect of Emojis, which are as follows:

1. It creates a non-verbal communication environment.
2. People hide their real emotion, behind these emojis, which is honestly not good for a person's mental health.
3. It has made people expressionless in their real physical world.
4. Sometimes, emoticons send by us to the other person, creates misunderstanding as there's lack of physical expression.

For understanding the situation let's put a light on the following short stories:
Today is not so good day for Rakesh. He works in a bpo, he just booked his first bike and today he got a pink slip. But sends a happy emoticon to his girlfriend. Thus, hiding his true emotions.

But, nevertheless, we can't ignore some benefits of it such as:

1. It saves our time.
2. Written conversations gets enjoyable.
3. It helps to connect with the people globally.

Emojis has captured the world in such a way, that, Oxford also has said that word of the year is "EMOJI". We should all keep in mind that to some extent for fun we can communicate through emoticons or emojis but once in a while we need someone special to share our true emotions.