Customizing My Emotional Spin Cycle:

Data Collection and Analysis

Date: 5/07/2002

By Skyrunner

Dr. Leon James, Instructor

Instructions for this Report

Here is the new & special feature: Flash Version of This Report 2.

Table of Contents

I.                    Introduction

        a. Main Points of My Annotated Bibliography

        b. Implications

II.                 Data Collection and Analysis   

a.       Threefold Self & Emotional Spin Cycle

b.       My Experimental Design

c.       The Bridge Technique

d.       My Sample Record

III.               Discussion

IV.       Reference & Links

:

I. Introduction

(A)  Main Points of My Annotated Bibliography

            In the part of cognitive appraisal in relation to self-enhancing behavior, I found the relevance in motivation in learning, stress management skills, time management, self talk, and regression therapy.  Motivation is a skill to initiate certain work.  If we have certain motivation, we do our best but we hardly make the job done or don’t finish the job when we don’t have enough motivation.  Although we started work, sometimes we don’t see much progress.  Then we feel stress.  The source suggested doing leisure activity to get rid of the stress.  Good time management is also a key to success.  We can enhance ourselves by using time wisely.  Self talk is a recommended way to change our negative thoughts. 

            In cognitive scripts or schemas in relation to motivation or affect, physical and mind relaxation could lead us to the highly motivated state.  To set the goal to be self actualized could bring another motivation in our monotonous lives.  Hypnosis and subconscious are not well understood however these have potential to increase our motivation. 

            Behavioral routines in relation to socialization brought me the question of what is socialization.  Socialization is learning how to get along with people and learning to confirm the standards of the good behaviors.  Those standards are expressed as etiquettes.  As we learn and follow the etiquettes, we are inclined to enculturation. 

            Emotional intelligence in relation to productivity and stress are explained in many fields including success series.  There are lots of tips to be successful in the future.  Saying “no” could be a key because we don’t get burn out.  We need to increase personal power by thinking positively and take the leadership.  Also we need to know how to deal with the difficult behaviors in our work place. 

Report1

(B)   Implications

            My bibliography brings the topic of the nature of our society in socialization practices and interpersonal relations.  Socialization is to place under group or government control especially to regulate according to socialist principles (http://www.hsu.edu/faculty/worthf/social.html).  It is also to convert from an antisocial to a social attitude;  It makes friendly, cooperative, or sociable.  Socialization converts or adapts to the needs of a social group.  Socialization is to take part in social activities.  This socialization influence our interpersonal relations because we need interaction with other people in our society.  As we learn more etiquettes, we will behave more appropriately and it will induce better interpersonal relationship.  Stress is related with motivation.  As we live together in our society, there should be some conflicts and these will make stress.  Then the stress will induce the lower motivation then eventually this phenomenon will induce too much industrialized society. 

            According to Dr. James’ web site (http://www.aloha.net/~dyc/articles/violence.htm, 180 millions get the license and 4 million get into serious accidents.  The main reason is caused by people’s road rage.  It is happening because people don’t know how to control their emotions.  If they knew the emotional spin cycle and practice it, the accident rate will go down significantly.  He also suggested moral training. 

            We can’t expect bright future without our endeavors on controlling our emotions.  For example, our car will have faster and faster speed.  There would be more airplanes than now.  If people don’t learn how to control their emotions, it is obvious we will have more accidents.  From our class, I found a lot of husbands don’t have good emotional intelligence.  Their level of emotional intelligence is similar to their teenage daughters.  We need to teach emotional intelligence to the husband and the children.  

            According to our text book “Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life: A Scientific Inquiry” suggested several ways of educating our children in the chapter on education.  For example, the text book talked about problem behavior prevention such as violence.  There are six key areas for skill development.  Theses are giving positive feedback, giving negative feedback, accepting negative feedback, resisting peer pressure, solving problems, and negotiating.  General instructions also suggests bridge techniques to solve the difficult situations.  By having positive emotions by bridge techniques, we can approach to the problems with more motivation and desire to solve the problems. 

II. Data Collection and Analysis

a.       Threefold Self & Emotional Spin Cycle

            We feel, think, and act out.  Those are the whole things we do in our life.  For example, we feel hungry then think we need to order pizza and call the pizza place and eat the pizza.  Now, our emotion of hungry disappears.  In case of feeling, thinking, and acting out, we can subdivide these with neutral, negative, and positive.  Since neutral aspects wouldn't have that much effects, I will discuss only negative and positive aspects.  More specifically, we can feel, think, and act out either more positively or negatively to ourselves or the others. 

            Now, let's talk about bridges.  Emotionally intelligent people have quite a good bridges so that they can change their emotions to the positive how bad they feel or how many negative emotions they have.  Think of this.  If you go NY Manhattan, there are some bridges.  Always there are traffic because there are too many cars to try to go through the bridges.  Especially, some days like new years eve or like that, we need to wait couple of hours just to pass the bridges.  Likewise, if we have many of bad emotions such as unhappiness, upset, feeling blue etc, it takes time to switch these emotions to the good emotions.  It usually becomes sever when we just experienced bad events.  Emotionally intelligent people have wider bridges and many other bridges and tunnels so that they can change their emotion sooner.  Sometimes, if someone is driving a truck, they can't pass the bridge because it is too heavy which might hurt the structure of the bridge.  Then the truck needs to detour the route and usually it takes longer time to get to the desired place.  Likewise, emotionally intelligent people have stronger bridges so that they can pass the somewhat sever emotions through their bridges.  For the normal people, if the emotion is too significant, it can't pass the bridge so that it resides in their mind and even results in  PTSD.  I didn’t think myself as threefold before.  It was not because I don’t agree the concept but it is because I didn’t know well about myself.  The threefold self concept is useful because it differentiate behavior, thinking, and feelings so that I could diagnosis myself better.  For example, I used to say something is wrong when my car stopped in the highway.  Now, I can tell either engine is wrong or the transmission is wrong.  This concept fit what I know about myself and others.  My thinking affects feelings and these will induce my behaviors.  People sometimes make the logical decisions but sometimes make emotional decisions too.  This threefold self concept also fit the psychology.  Psychology is the scientific study of human mind and behaviors.  This concept shows the relationship between mind and behaviors.

            Positive spin cycle starts from our positive feelings such as compassion or confidence.  These emotion leads to emotionally intelligent realistic thinking which bring out constructive and enhancing behaviors.  Negative spin cycle starts from the negative feelings such as rage or depression and these lead to emotionally impaired and pessimistic, cynical thinking then people become aggressive or destructive.  The word spin was used to put focus on the characteristics of our emotion that changes all the time.  In addition, we can make the change too instead of waiting for our emotion to spin naturally.  Some people naturally spin their emotions faster than others.  We infer them as good people or somewhat self-actualized people because they don’t show bad behaviors to any other people.  Most of us can practice and make our emotions spin.  As we spin our emotions from negative side to the positive side, it becomes habit and it will make us better people.  According to my everyday experience, women have higher emotional intelligence but men have better emotional spin skills.  Men don’t know what their partners feel.  However, they usually get rid of their stress by doing other things such as basketball so that they don’t keep their anger or bad feelings too long. 

b.      My Experimental Design

            I chose my daily two activities of soccer computer game and reading internet newspaper.  I play soccer game against the computer but it is almost like to play against myself.  Also it often negative feelings and thoughts because computer game is usually time wasting.  In the other hand, I read internet newspapers everyday and learn what are happening in our world.  Often the news give negative impressions to the world because not many good activities are reported there.  For the first three days, I just played the computer game and read the newspaper.  I just recorded my feelings and thoughts on my computer.  This is called baseline.  After three days of baseline observation, I applied bridge technique to make my bad feelings and thoughts to the good side.  Then I observed three fold myself.  I wasn’t familiar with the bridge technique and sometimes I use the bridge technique nowadays other than my experiment.  I not only observed threefold myself but also rated myself to understand the data statistically.  The global rating scale is in the table below.

            This global rating scale measures my overall thoughts, feelings, and the prediction of the future behavior.  In other word, it is measuring threefold myself.  By keeping the record of threefold myself, I can find out the progress of myself.  I observed myself according to my feelings, thoughts, and behaviors from the activity I chose.  During the playing time or reading time, I also focused on threefold myself so that I could write the record right after the activity. 

c.       The Bridge Technique

            We need to justify to change our emotions.  Sometimes just talking or forcing our emotions to become positive way might work but if we can justify it, it will work better.  For example, I applied the bridge technique to myself while I was playing the game.  Sometimes, the other team achieved one goal.  In other word, I lost the one goal.  Now, I am losing zero to one.  Then the half time comes.  It is the time for the bridge technique.  ‘I have still 45 minutes to earn the score.  I will substitute one striker whom will make the goal.  Since he is just running, he can run faster.’  As I change my attitude from negative to the positive, my finger movement becomes faster which induce faster movement of the players.  Most of the times, I was able to win the game when I applied the bridge technique.  The bridge technique worked differently day by day.  Sometimes, I won the game when I applied the bridge technique but sometimes I didn’t win.  When I am really tired, the bridge technique didn’t work well.  When I couldn’t concentrate well, it didn’t work well either.  Sometimes, I get the resistance when I try to apply the bridge technique.  For example, it is the moment right around 88 minutes and I was still losing by two points.  There is no way to win this game by my experience.  Then it is hard to apply the bridge technique and it usually doesn’t work.  The success of bridge technique is knowing what is possible and what is impossible.  The border line is very hard to decide.  If we limit the border line far close to the positive side, the bridge technique could be used many more cases.  So the origin of the weaknesses, strengths, and the resistances are coming from our definition of limit.  I will teach my friend with the computer game.  It will clearly show the result right away.  Basically, I will ask them to play the game without the intervention of bridge technique and with the bridge technique.  The results will prove the effectiveness of the bridge technique.  When I teach them by this way, I will be stressful because the significant increase of the game performance might not occur.  If people think using bridge technique is not worthy, this thought will prevent them to use the bridge technique.  That will eventually lead away from their happiness and perfection.  The limitation of the bridge technique would be the event that people can’t control.  For example, if the computer plays far better than me, it is so hard to win against the computer.  The actual skill is also important limiting factor in bridge technique. 

d.      My Sample Record

 Records Files

III. Discussion

            I have learned that I have threefold myself by doing this project.  The three elements of feeling, thinking, and behavior interact each other.  As the interaction occurs, we can influence them with our thoughts.  By applying positive thoughts, we can induce more positive feelings and behaviors.  Then our thoughts become naturally positive rather than trying to think positively.  The four options vocabulary, the diagram and the lists were helpful.  We need certain terms to describe complex phenomena such as our emotions.  However, the distinction of red and blue were not intuitive.  Instead, I would like to suggest use red for the positive side and blue for the negative side as we say blue mood.  Then I would like to call “to self” and “to the others” by words.  For example, if I feel negatively on myself, I say “blue self”.  For example, if I feel positively on others, I say “red others”.  I found my strength in keep trying and not losing hope in any hard cases.  My weaknesses were I had somewhat addictive characteristics and starting the work was not easy.  I would like to apply this bridge technique into other fields in my life such as studying discipline.  I believe using the bridge technique will make the difference in my future life.  This technique will be useful to everyone because all of us experience emotional hardships as well as joy.  By the bridge technique, we can control our emotions.  As we control our emotions, we will feel more free to ourselves.  Once people learn the bridge technique, they would like to use it.  The basic concept is simple so that people would understand the theory of emotional spin cycle and it will increase their motivation of everything in their lives.  However, applying the bridge technique will require some degrees of self discipline.  That would be one hardship people should go over.  Since this emotional spin cycle is so beneficial in our lives, the school should teach this technique.  Then it will make less violence because the students will control their anger better.  People will work harder because they know how to get over the stress.  As a class project, we wrote twice every week about our emotions as in the generation 15 web forum disscussion by generation 15 students (our generation is 16).    

<Table 1>

        This table and the graph shows the pattern of my experiment.  This graph is for the blue which is about myself.  The experiment was done while I was playing the FIFA 2000 Soccer Game. Up to the third day, the graph is pretty constant.  From the forth day, the pattern of the graph drastically changes.  The question (series) 2, 4, 5 went up.  These questions are level of satisfaction, coping successfully with my feelings today, and hope for the future.  These three questions are more positive way.  As the graph shows, these scores shoot up.  It showed that my bridge technique work not only for the current situation but also for the future.

        In the other hand, the question 1,3, 6 scores went down after the intervention.  The questions are the level of stress, dissatisfaction with others, and worst level of negativity.  The downward shape showed that my negative feeling and thoughts decreased.  It also happened right after the intervention.  Therefore, this graph showed the effectiveness of bridge technique.    

<Table 2>

        This graph is for red which is concerned on the world.  I read newspapers to do this experiment.  According to the graph, question 3 and 6 showed significant decrease.  Question 1 showed somewhat neutral. These questions are negative.  From the fourth day, the decreasing rate were great.  It proved the bridge technique affected more positively. 

        The question 2,4,5 showed increasing tendency.  It indicates that my positive attitudes were reinforced especially after the intervention.  Interestingly, question 5 had highest score.  The question 5 is "current level of hope for the future".  It was surprising because I was reading not a good news.  However, I had very high level of future hope.  This ironical results were possible because I had intervention of bridge technique.  As it is indicated in the graph, the level of hope was lowest on average for the first three days when I didn't use any intervention.  It is natural because the news usually made me feeling blue.  However, the bridge technique brought me optimism.  This optimism is a power source of motivation.  As I have hope for the future, I got more motivated and could behave more positively.  This sequence brought more positive attitudes and thinking and it reinforced again so that my emotional cycle stayed in the good positive track.

<Table 3>

        This graph is overall summary.  I divided the questions into two categories.   One is positive and the other is negative.  Since I was doing experiment on red and blue which is on myself and the world, I have two more variable.  Therefore, I total have four categories.  They are blue negative side, blue positive side, red negative side, and red positive side. 

        According to the graph, both of my blue negative side and red negative side showed significant decreasing after the intervention.  It is interesting to take a close look at the rate differences between blue and red.  Blue is for myself.  The blue graph showed more rapid and extreme changes.  It is natural that I am more sensitive on myself.  This is unexpected finding from the experiment.

        For the blue positive side and red positive side, both graph increased drastically after the intervention.  According to my experiment, myself which is red indicate more extreme value.  I had a tendency to feel more strongly and react better on myself. 

        As a conclusion, I found my feeling, attitude, thinking, and behaviors are changed after applying the bridge technique.  The emotional spin cycle was significantly effective from the data of my experiment.  In addition, I found that I was more sensitive to myself in evaluation of the score.  It means I feel more strongly about myself rather than the world.  Therefore, it also suggests good vision of the bridge technique.  Since the effect of my thinking is great, I can change myself to more positive ways by applying bridge technique. 

 IV. Reference & Links

a. Reference:

Joseph Ciarrochi, Joseph P. Forgas, and John D. Mayer eds.  Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life: A Scientific Inquiry.  Philadelphia, PA: Psychology Press, 2001.

http://www.hsu.edu/faculty/worthf/social.html

http://www.aloha.net/~dyc/articles/violence.htm

http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/leonj/leonpsy16/g16report2.html

b. Links:

Class Home Page

My Home Page

Report 1

Records Files