We’re excited to announce the launch of The Humintell Emotion Primer – a pocketbook guide to the basics of emotion.

It’s a little book that we put together that summarizes and describes some of the major points about emotions, especially about the basic emotions that we talk about in our work and that we’ve studied and written about for decades.

This Emotion Primer starts with a little introduction and it has 7 sections– each dealing with an important aspect about what makes emotion special.

1. The first section defines an emotion from our perspective. This is so important because in our experience, most debates and arguments about emotion occur because of differences in people‘s definitions of emotion and we think it’s always important to let people know what our definition of emotion is.

2. The second section describes the various types of emotions that exist and focuses on basic emotions. Research over the past half century plus has shown that basic emotions have features that other emotions don’t have. Now, humans have a lot of different emotions and some people have suggested that we don’t believe that other emotions are emotions. Of course we do! It’s just that basic emotions are a special class or category of emotion.

3. The third section talks about those features of basic emotions that distinguish them from other types of emotion. Remember, these features have been demonstrated in decades of research.

4. The fourth section talks about the differences between emotions and feelings. This is important because many people confuse them and use those terms interchangeably in our everyday lives.

5. The fifth section is on our affective world and distinguishes emotions from other phenomena that are emotional, like moods, personalities, and psychopathologies. This is also important because many of us don’t distinguish between emotion and other affective phenomena.

6. The sixth section lists the elicitors and functions of each of the seven basic emotions. This section is really important to understand the differences among them and to gain an appreciation of why emotions were important in the history of humans and in our every day lives today.

7. The seventh section has examples of each of the seven universal facial expressions along with a summary listing of the points that are mentioned in the other sections.

8. At the end, there’s a QR code that you can also scan and that leads you to a place on our website where we have all kinds of additional readings, blogs, and videos about emotions that we’ve done in the past. This section should round out this program well with additional insights and examples.

If you put it all together, there’s a lot of information about emotions that start with this little primer and then point us in different directions.

In the end, this primer is not a novel or a long and boring scientific treatise, but it does have very quick descriptions of the most important aspects of emotions.

This is exactly the same kind of information that anyone who wants to improve their knowledge and understanding of emotion should access.

We really hope you enjoy it. Get a Humintell Emotion Primer for yourself!

The post A Pocketbook Guide to the Basics of Emotion first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.

Every interaction is a negotiation

Whether we realize it or not, we’re all salespeople and every interaction is a negotiation in which we persuade and influence others.

Some of us do this professionally; sales people sell products and attempt to have people purchase those products; teachers sell knowledge and skills and attempt to persuade students to learn that knowledge and skills; law enforcement officers sell jail and attempt to persuade alleged criminals to buy jail time.

All of us do so as well in our personal lives; parents try to get their kids to clean their rooms and married couples get their partners to take out the trash.

Not only are we all salespeople trying to persuade and influence others; we’re all relatively good at it.

In fact, every individual needs to be at least somewhat successful in doing so because without some degree of success at persuading and influencing others, individuals would not survive.

Every group, society, and culture requires people and groups to persuade and influence others for the individual’s, group’s, society’s, and culture’s survival.

As John Donne once wrote in his famous poem, no man [person] is an island, and our ability to live and thrive in our families, communities, societies, and cultures is evidence of our ability to persuade and influence others.

Thus, people have learned or acquired a long time ago the basic skills necessary to persuade and influence others.

I say “acquired” because we don’t know the degree to which our abilities to influence others are hardwired into us as humans, or whether those skills are entirely learned from our cultures and communities.

I suspect that we have the biological hardware (brains) and some innate software in our minds to learn those skills from our families and communities. Regardless of their origins, however, we all persuade and influence others, and we’re relatively good at it.

Just look at the growth of the world’s population across time. If people weren’t good at persuading and influencing others, we wouldn’t get along and our societies and cultures, let alone marriages and families, would not survive and thrive.

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How does this persuasion and influence occur?

There’s a long history of research in psychology examining how people influence others.

For example, very classic research on conformity and compliance conducted by Solomon Asch demonstrated how groups can influence individuals to make obviously mistaken judgments or say obviously incorrect things.

Stanley Milgram’s classic research on obedience showed how average people will do drastic things against others on the basis of instruction from an authority figure.

Phil Zimbardo’s well-known prison study demonstrated how power assigned to a group of people made that group engage in demeaning behaviors against others who were not so assigned.

Perhaps the most well-known author in this area is Robert Cialdini. Through his own ingenious experiments and collating the results from many other studies, Cialdini extracted six universal principles of persuasion and influence that were at work when people persuade others to do something. (His more recent work identified a 7th principle as well.).

For example, consider the principle of reciprocity, which Cialdini suggested activated “the web of indebtedness.” When we receive something from someone, we have an obligation to give something back in return. This is true for getting a gift, receiving an invitation, or hearing a compliment.

Every society and culture is built on this principle; if this principle didn’t exist no society would function correctly and the alternative is social chaos.

Same is true for the principle of authority. Hierarchies exist in every society, culture, group, and organization, and if we didn’t comply to the wishes of authority, hierarchies would cease to exist and societies and cultures would not function properly. The alternative again is social chaos.

What is Tactical Social Influence?

Here at Humintell, we take that classic work on persuasion and influence and incorporate other scientific breakthroughs over the decades to deliver what we call Tactical Social Influence.

For example, one interesting aspect of all principles of persuasion and influence that is not discussed much is the fact that they all operate because of affect and emotion.

The post Why Every Interaction You Have Is A Negotiation first appeared on Humintell | Master the Art of Reading Body Language.