A Guide on Linking Emotions with Behavior

A Quick Guide

As suggested in our previous articles, the first step to developing your emotional awareness is to build your emotional vocabulary. And use it to identify your emotions and their intensity. However, just labeling and knowing the name of your emotion is not enough. It is better that you understand your emotional experience further by linking emotions with behavior. Especially by observing your physiological responses, and examining your behavior and other people’s behavior as well.

Linking Emotions with Behavior

Sometimes the way we are feeling does not match how we behave. For example, someone may tell you they are completely fine, yet their body language, facial expressions, and behavior indicate they are feeling low and sad. So, to understand your emotions fully, you need to start paying attention to your own behavior and other people’s behavior. Since our response depicts how we are truly feeling and thinking. To sum up,

‘you may lie with your words, but your body never lies.’

Try to become more actively aware of your behavior and link it with how you feel. Since developing this sensitivity to behavior will give you a cue about the underlying emotion or feeling. Similarly, you can use and extend this knowledge to others by noticing their nonverbal behavior to identify their true feelings and thoughts.

An exercise on linking emotions with behavior

Start observing people in your surroundings.

This could be at a public place, a park, at your workplace, or even at a restaurant. Discreetly notice people expressing their emotions and observe their nonverbal cues & behavior. For example, their posture, eyes, facial expression, how they speak, what they say, etc.

You may even apply this exercise to yourself. Whenever you feel an emotion, notice how you behave and how your body responds e.g. your breathing rate, heart rate, facial expression, eye contact, energy level, etc.

Note down whatever you have observed.

1. For each emotion, label it and categorize it as positive, negative, or neutral.
2. Guess and rate its intensity from 1 to 10.
3. Write down the nonverbal cues you have identified associated with the particular emotion.
4. Try to guess what triggered the particular emotion and in what context.

For example,

• The observed emotion: A sad girl
• Type of emotion: negative
• The intensity of emotion: 7
• Body language or nonverbal cues associated with emotion: wet eyes, low vocal tone, downward body posture, sad facial expression, low energy.
• Trigger or context: a class fellow said something mean to her.

In the above example, the observed emotion is in line with the nonverbal body cues. However, this is not always the case. Often, we suppress hide or deny our actual feelings. Yet, they seep through our nonverbal behavior. So, notice that while observing emotions and see if it is in line with the behavior to gauge its authenticity.

You may apply this to yourself and reflect on why you behaved a certain way when you were feeling the so and so emotion. For example, you may have felt vulnerable. So you avoided meeting people at a crowded and exciting party where the overall mood was happy.

To understand more about emotional awareness and the role of body language, check out the related articles.