Customizing My Emotional Spincycle:
Data Analysis

by

Bumyong Sung

PSY409A Fall 2001 G15
Instructor: Dr. Leon James

Instrutction to This Report

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Data Collections and Analysis

Discussion

Conclusion

References

6

Introduction

Rage and Our Society

As above examples show, rages result in catastrophic events. What made this man to come out of the car and shot another driver? What made this a 17 year-old man with no prior history of arrest to argue with an officer and shoved him over the bridge? Perhaps, he did not mean to kill the officer, but what made him so angry to forget that there is a bridge and the officer would die if he falls off?

Of course, most of us do not have catastrophic experiences such as above. However, every one of us is guilty of venting our rage at somebody. When it comes to managing our emotions, we are inexperienced. We do not manage our emotions. Rather, we vent our emotions and justify venting.

Also, violent movies and cartoons reinforce justifications of venting rage as punishmet toward evil. According to the article, "Understanding violent behaviors in Children and Teens," violence in media is one of the risk factors that will increase violent behaviors in them. We do not see good guys teaching values to bad guys in a movie. Instead, 'good guys' just punish them by beating or killing them. Punishing bad guys by beating or killing them is not justified in the real world but media never mentions it.

Emotional Spin Cycle

Dr. Leon James' emotional spin cycle help us to manage our emotions. Emotional spin cycle is divided into four areas. First, there are Blue and Red zones. Blue zone represents emotions that an individual experieces about oneself while Red zone represents an individual's emotions toward others. Then, each of these zones are divided into positive and negative zones. Emotions in positive zones are feelings such as appreciations, and self-confidence. You feel 'good' toward yourslef or others when you are in positive zones. Emotions in negative zones include feelings such as angry and sadness. You feel 'bad' toward yourself or others when you are in negative zones. According to Report 1, improving an individual's emotional health can be achieved by understanding emotional spin cycle and three-self process.

Emotional Spin Cycle, A Solution for The Future?

The world is changing faster than ever. Cutting-edge technology made the impossible possilbe. Nowadays, people can have sex-change operations. More over, human cloning can be possible in a near future that can save hundres of life. However, it raises a question of morality. How would we feel to have another person who look exactly like us?

As sicence advances, we will have more power in our hands. However, when we do not understand ourselves, we can abuse these power. SUV is one example. It is definetly safer than other types of car but what if it makes people to drive their cars faster? Is it really safer than? It seems that we did not have the same kind of prosperity that science had when it comes to understand our emotions. "Know thy self." When we do not know ourselves and recognize the consequence of our behavior, our society will not be able to enjoy these prosperity that science provide. Rather, our society will be more dangerouse because of people who abuse their power.

6

Data Collection and Analysis

Threefold Self

The threefold self refers to feeling, thinking and doing. According to Dr. James, every behavior that is expressed goes through this process. However, not every feeling is expressed to doing. Sometimes, feelings do not go through the next two steps and just buried.

It is important to distinguihs these three steps, especially between feeling and thinking since it is not observable. Feeling is the first step of the process and it is the most primitive one. It does not contain interpretations or judgements. It is a sense at the most primitive stage. General Instructions lists negative feeligs as feeling of disapproval, wanting to talk back, feeling of condemnation and etc. In my personal opinion, if you say you are disapproved, that is more close to a thought than a feeling because it contains judgement. However, feeling fo disapproval is more close to a feeling because it lacks judgement. Also, think contains planning. In general instructions, thinking about or planning to take revenge, engaging in fantasy of violence, and justifying are listed as thoughts.

In emotional spin cycle, Dr. James name these components as affective, cognitive and Sensori-motor. Affective domain will be feelings and congnitive domain will be thinking. Lastly, actual behavior will be sensori-motor domain.

Three-Step Method

Just understand the emotional spin cycle will be useless if we do not incorporate our new understanding of selves to change our lives. Three-step method is the way to incorporate our new knowledges to modify target behaviors.

This method is called AWM method. By using AWM method, we can identify which behaviors need modification and define that behavior as the target behavior. However, for the purpose of this project, I did not choose any specific behavior to modify. I focused more on recognizing my emotional spin cycle, thus concentrated more on modifing general negative thoughts and briding technique which enables an individual to move himself from the negative zone to the positive zone. This will be more discussed later of this report.

The Sampling Technique and Record Keeping

As the general instruction indicated, I recorded my emotions three times a day for two weeks which gave me 21 samples a week. I recorded my emotions at morning, afternoon and night. I tried to make this record at the same time in a week. I carried a small notepad with me and jotdown feelings at the moments. However, at nights, I did not follow my usual time to record my feelings. Instead, I recorded my feelings right before I go to bed because I thought it will give me an oppertunity to have a greater impact on me. At the end of the project, I was able to obtain my daily emotional spin cycle. During the first week, it was just recording my daily emotions. However, in second week, I used three-method technique to modify my negtive feelings which was interesting and rewarding.

The Daily Spin Cycle and Design with the Rating Scale

Week 1

Week 1 is basically consisted of sampling and differentiating. I basically recorded my samples which include my threefold-self(feelings, thinking, and doings)sample. What I did was I wrote the most intense feelings and thinkings that came to my mind. Then I also included behaviors that went according to my feelings and thinkings. Below are some questions that I asked myself.

I also made sure I record surroundings such as time, place and the people who were involved. I believed this is absolutely necessary not only for the recording purpose but also to have a better intepretation of the situation which will give more room for improvement.

In addition to recording my feelings and emotions, I did the Global Rating once at the end of each day.

Week2

Bridge techniques allows an individual to cross from negative zones to positive zones. Because of this, bridge techniques are the core essence of this project.

If an individual is in negativ red zone, which means negative threefold-self toward others, he needs to say appropriate self-regulatory sentences which needed to be prepared ahead of time. From my personal experiences, all these self-regulatory sentences did not work, however, from trial-error process, I was able to find effective sentences from one situation to another.

Bridge technique for Blue zone is similar to bridge technique for Red zone. Self-regulatory sentences are effetive in this situation, too. The differnces is that the focus was more on my personality.

Observations

My computer broke down. The registry was not working properly, so I had to do this report again from scratch. So, it was very stressful week and it definetly put me in the negative zones. I blame myself for not fixing A-drive, which is also broken. Imagine every work you saved in a hard drive because you can not save on A- drive, then everything is gone. I was terrified.

I was really mad at myself. Frankly, I was mad at the class that I had to do so much work on computer. But it is the same class that I learned a bridge technique. Somehow, in my mind, there was an association between a bridge technique and computer which elicited negative feelings. So, everytime I tried to use a bridge technique(positive), it reminded me of computer(negative). Perhaps this is why self-modification method did not have much impact as the result shows.

Week 1

Week 2

Doing the report again really stressed me out. It was catastrophic event for me. As you can see, my level of stress was very high in first week. During first week, I tried to regain my composure to focus on finishing the report, but it just got me more upset.

Discussions

First, it was difficult to write down every feelings and thoughts. Sometimes, situation just did not let me record my emotions. Also, since it was self-recorded, this project is self-biased. Validity and reliaibility of the project is low. However, I became more familiar with my daily spin cycle and realized that, sometimes, I make situations worse that they actually are. This was possible only because I was recording my feelings and thinkings. Writing down feelings made me think more logicially, thus manage my emotions more logically.

Conclusion

Emotional spin cycle is about understading innere self. We are so busy that we just behave the way we are used to without delibereations of recognizing what our real needs are. Doing this project gave me an opportunity to understand my inner self and learn how to control my negative feelings. Also, bridge techniques are effective to cope with stress that I begin to see new perspective on things. When you have positive thoughts, you will behave more positivel which will eventually produce more positive results.

References

"Make Their Day" Internet Dec132001. Available.
http://www.drnerenberg.com/people.htm

"General Instruction for your research project." Internet.17Oct2001 Available:
http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy15/g15reports-instructions.html

Class Home Page Report 1