| In psychology, there is a so-called concept, Emotional Dissonance, which refers to a kind of feeling experienced when one is forced to fake his/her own emotion, resulting in a psychological conflict due to the difference between the initial feeling in his/her mind and the feeling he/she is required to change in connection with his/her environment and the circumstance. For example, a flight attendant who had a serious argument with her husband before work and got angry has to provide the best service with the brightest smile to her customers, or someone who is so happy with winning the first prize at lotto has to offer words of consolation with a sad look at a funeral. Usually, we can¡¯t stand this Emotional Dissonance by nature and we try to reduce or minimize the gap in emotions between the initial one and the faked one, whose progress is called Emotional Regulation. There are two kinds of Emotional Regulations. The first one is called Antecedent-focused Emotional Regulation that refers to modifying initial feelings by changing the situation or the cognitions of the situation. The second method is coined as Response-focused Emotional Regulation, which refers to modifying behavior once emotions are experienced by suppressing, faking or amplifying an emotional response. In general, we overcome our emotional dissonance by these two methods, but when we fail to regulate our emotion, it will gust up violently. In most cases when we unleash our emotion, we are inclined to impute the reason of why we vented our anger to situations which have been existing externally. Human beings tend to feel comfortable and peaceful only if we can find the suitable reason for no matter what actions we have made. When a person gets into violent outbursts, he tries to suppress his psychological conflict and rationalize his actions by shifting his/her reason why he/she has lost his/her temper onto the external situation, not onto himself/herself, which can be called a sort of external attributions. In this case, he can feel comfortable or peaceful by pointing out the other people or situation as the reason for his anger, but people around him can not help being definitely embarrassed, because they should be an object of his blame without knowing why they should be. A person called ¡®A¡¯ is usually tolerant of any kinds of jokes, laughing off them without take them seriously. This morning, ¡®B¡¯, his coworker told as a same level of joke as usual to ¡®A¡¯, but ¡®A¡¯ unexpectedly yelled at ¡®B¡¯, red-faced, saying ¡°what the hell are you doing?¡±, and walked out of the room and slammed the door. In B¡¯s view, he become so bewildered that he couldn¡¯t understand A¡¯s attitude this morning. ¡®B¡¯ could see a totally different person, even with almost same leveled joke as usual. B even felt a sense of betrayal. Actually, ¡®A¡¯ who has had an intense fight with his wife by the wee hour of the morning was still fuming with anger even after coming to office, when ¡®B¡¯ gave him a meaningless joke. ¡®A¡¯ attributed his anger exploded to ¡®B¡¯ who didn¡¯t know what situation ¡®A¡¯ was in and pushed his button with rubbish joke. This situation can often happen to family members. In this case, a sense of disappointment or a sense of betrayal felt among family members is so serious as to be beyond description, because it could blow a deal to each family member who has thought that he/she is supposed to be loved and taken care of by other members in any cases. The best way to prevent this unexpected and undesirable situation from which our family members can fall into a stalemate nobody can get out of only with irreparable hurts in their minds is my emotional mood card. First of all, all family members should get together to decide what the cards look like. Any forms would be OK. The numbers, English words, the sign of weathers, the character of animals could be chosen for them once all of them have decided together with discussion and recognized which meant what emotional mood was. For example, one out of numbers, VB standing for very bad, or the picture of lightening can be decided by family members to imply the so bad mood. Snakes of animal can be chosen to signify the mood in which he/she could be vicious towards other family members in anger once they touched him/her. In particular, a card saying ¡°Please leave me alone today¡± must be made with any form of something, which is absolutely necessary not to create extremely worst scenes making some family members blush furiously at each other. Once the cards and their contents on them were chosen by family members, the sets of the cards must be made as many as the number of the family, and each card should be laminated after names of each family member written on each set of the cards for each members to have his/her own cards to express his/her moods. After getting them laminated, the card should be either holed on their top, or glued with Velcro fasteners, with the aim of hanging them on the door of rooms of family members. Now, each family member is asked to keep one set of his emotional mood cards and use it in expressing his/her mood to other members by hanging it on the door of his/her room everyday. Other family members can realize what mood the member is in today by seeing the card and try to avoid unnecessary jokes or offensive remarks for that day. And, they can notice which day could be good for them to have a good conversation by the cards. While being used, the card as aforementioned among family members, the usage of the cards can be collected statistics on a monthly basis. With an A4 page with dates of the month written vertically and names of family members horizontally, what mood each family member has had for the month can be tracked. One of family members is responsible for filling in the form by reading the emotional mood card hung on the door of each family member every day. With this form filled in with the moods for the month, how many good or bad days each family member has had. When this statistics of individual moods for a month was shared with family members every month, good days family members have will increase gradually. My emotional mood card is a very simple and easy tool, but its effectiveness is more than you can expect of, in preventing family members from having unnecessary misunderstandings or conflicts as well as their negative consequences. Furthermore, family can help more actively a member who has some problem get out of it, because they can easily understand what mood he/she has by the card. When a family knows the characteristics each member more than other people can understand the situation he/she has for a certain reason, they can be second to none to solve the problems he/she has. |