INTENSITY OF EMOTION TIED TO PERCEPTION AND THINKING (Published 1987) (2024)

EMOTIONAL intensity, a major, lifelong aspect of temperament, is emerging as a fruitful area of research that is yielding rich insights into how people experience themselves and others. Although the idea that people differ in emotional intensity is not new, the systematic new research is revealing important differences in the way that those with high and low intensity perceive, think about and react to events.

Some people, psychologists are observing, find themselves in emotional tumult even in reaction to mundane events, while others remain unperturbed under the most trying of circ*mstances. These levels of feeling characterize a person's entire emotional life: those with the deepest lows also have the loftiest highs, the research shows. And differences between people seem to emerge early in childhood, if not from birth, and remain a major mark of character throughout life.

Those who live lives of deep emotional intensity, researchers have found, seem to have a more complex sense of themselves and lead lives that are more complicated than do those whose emotions are less strong.

The inner lives of people at the extremes - those whose feelings burn with intensity or those who are utterly cool - are worlds apart regardless of the emotions they may express outwardly. For the emotionally intense person, events that to an outside observer seem unremarkable can take on a crucial importance. But the stolid react to even the gravest crisis with little feeling.

''One of the more emotionally intense people we studied was a woman who, for instance, was once depressed and distraught for days after she lost her pen,'' said Edward Diener, a psychologist at the University of Illinois, who has done much of the new research. On the other hand, he said, she became so thrilled on seeing an advertisem*nt for a big sale on expensive women's shoes that ''she hopped in her car on the spot and drove three hours to the store in Chicago.''

''One of the least intense,'' Dr. Diener added, ''was a man who, one evening, spotted a fire that had broken out in a college dorm and got an extinguisher and put it out. But instead of running, he walked to get the extinguisher and walked back to the fire. Another man, who was being treated for cancer, was so unexcitable that when he was told that the disease was in remission, he reported being somewhat happy for a day or so, then went back to his usual neutral state.''

Understanding temperament with more precision can help psychotherapists better understand where normality ends and pathology begins. The new data are showing that what are considered discrete psychological disorders may, in fact, be simply the extremes of a continuum of normality.

The most highly reactive people seem to have what psychotherapists call a ''cyclothymic'' personality given to grand mood swings. At the extreme, he said, the tendency slides into a mild form of manic-depressive disorder.

At the other end of the continuum are people who are so imperturbable that they hardly seem to have emotions. Some of these may have ''alexthymia,'' a term applied to those who say they have no feelings at all - or who at least cannot find the words to describe the feelings - or anhedonia, the inability to feel pleasure.

Those people whose emotions are more intense, the research is showing, seem to have more complex lives in general. ''The emotionally intense people seek variety, novelty, complexity,'' said Robert Emmons, a psychologist at Michigan State University. ''They have more varied goals in life, know more people in more different situations, and because they are doing so many different things, feel more conflict in their lives. They may want to work harder to achieve success at work, while at the same time trying to spend more time with a range of friends.

''These conflicts can be a source of stress for the emotionally intense, and may explain why they report getting more minor illnesses, like colds and flus, than do less emotional people,'' said Dr. Emmons.

Much of the conflict felt by the highly emotional, according to Dr. Emmons, is over whether to express or act on their feelings. ''Although they may feel intensely, they do not always express themselves openly,'' Dr. Emmons said. ''Intense people who are bottled up are in the worst situation.''

Despite the conflicts and afflictions that intensity seems to bring, the emotionally intense thrive on the richness of their feelings. Research to be reported in the Journal of Research in Personality shows that, in spite of their sufferings, emotionally intense people report as great a sense of well-being and contentment as do those whose lives lack such turmoil.

In an article to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Diener and Randy Larsen, a psychologist at Purdue University, report that the difference in emotional styles is closely tied to a difference in how people think about events. In one study, volunteers kept a record of their day-to-day lives and their emotional reactions; in another they were shown disturbing slides and their responses were analyzed. From studies such as these a portrait is emerging of the distinctive mental lives of those who have tumultuous or placid emotions.

For example, highly emotional people, when shown disturbing slides - a woman holding an injured, bleeding baby, for example - had an immediate thought that personalized the event, such as ''What if this happened to me, or someone in my family.''

The unemotional people, though, more often focused on a factual detail of the pictures; one commented about a slide of a dying man, ''It looks like his pants are brand new.''

''Some mental tactics used to avoid emotion are similar to the psychoanalytic defense mechanisms,'' Dr. Diener said. ''We find that when people avoid their unpleasant feelings in this way, they pay a price: they blunt their positive feelings, too.''

In addition to relating the disturbing slides to themselves, the highly emotional people tended to focus their attention on the worst part of the slide and to make a generalization about it, such as thinking about how much evil there is in the world. Such people, Dr. Larsen and Dr. Diener conclude, tend to see themselves as at the center of an emotional vortex: they overestimate the extent to which events relate to them, and become excessively absorbed in what those events mean to them.

This tendency to exaggerate the emotional impact of events extends, too, to how highly emotional people assume others respond to those same events. Dr. Larsen has found that the emotionally intense tend to assume that everyone else experiences things with similar emotional urgency.

Emotional style also seems to determine what sorts of arguments a person will find more persuasive. ''Highly emotional people are attuned to emotional appeals, while low-intensity people are more influenced by rational ones,'' Dr. Diener said.

The tendency to amplify or diminish emotions seems to appear quite early in life, according to research by Dr. Larsen. He asked the parents of 76 college students to describe what those students had been like as young children - whether, for instance, they were generally fussy, or would cry loudly if a toy were taken away, or would fight back when teased. The evaluations generally agreed with separate ratings, made by Dr. Larsen, of the students' emotional intensity as young adults.

Not every fussy baby will become an emotionally intense adult. But work by other researchers suggests that the level of intensity is largely hereditary, shows up virtually from birth, and persists throughout life. One of the earliest studies to suggest that children's temperament differed in terms of emotional intensity, among other dimensions, was that of Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, psychiatrists who directed the New York Longitudinal Study, which studied infants beginning in the 1950's and followed them for 20 years.

In a more recent study, Ian Cesa and Laura Baker, psychologists at the University of Southern California, compared levels of emotional intensity in 75 pairs of fraternal and identical twins, and found that, in general, identical twins were more likely to be similar in temperament than were fraternal twins.

Even the most volatile people seem gradually to mellow with age, according to a study of emotional intensity in 242 people aged 15 to 70, as reported last year in the journal Developmental Psychology. The average level of intensity, the study found, drops with each decade of life, with the most pronounced drop between early adulthood - roughly the 20's -and early middle-age in the 40's.

Some researchers believe that highly emotional people thrive on emotional-provoking situations, and the intense highs or lows that result. This idea is based on a more general theory that too high or too low a level of brain arousal is uncomfortable, producing either boredom or anxiety. As a result, this theory holds, people are driven to raise or lower their emotional arousal to optimal levels. That reasoning has been proposed, for instance, to explain the heightened social activities of extroverts, who are seen as needing social stimulation in order to increase an innately low level of central nervous system activity.

In a recent study Dr. Larsen found that, paradoxically, the more emotionally intense people had less physiological activity - as measured, for example, by heart rate -when they were at rest than did those whose emotions are less intense. In Dr. Larsen's view, this suggests that the steady diet of roiling emotions in high-intensity people satisfies a biological craving for a greater level of brain activity.

The stronger a person's emotions, the less sophisticated his awareness of emotions may be, according to Richard Lane, a psychiatrist at Chicago Medical College. In an article in the current issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, written with Gary Schwartz, a psychologist at Yale, Dr. Lane points out that, apart from the intensity with which people feel their emotions, people differ, too, in the sophistication with which they are aware of them.

The levels of awareness run from an unreflective, but vivid, emotional outburst, to the sophisticated subtlety of emotional nuance typical, say, of the characters of Henry James.