Feelings

Majority of people experience feelings, but how we express them is a function of cultural, personal, and conditions in the immediate environment. For instance, if someone yells at me, of course this is going to lead me to being angry, but how I express this anger is dependent on the situation. For instance if it's my boss that's yelling at me, I very much doubt I will yell back or reveal my emotion in an explicit way because this obviously could lead to me getting fired.

With experience it becomes easier to identify what a person is feeling based off of their emotional expression. Something I've noticed is that it's become much easier to know when someone is faking an emotion i.e. sounding happy about something they really don't care about and unfortunately for them - the lack of genuity in their emotional expressiveness is more telling than the emotion they try to convey in the first place.

For instance, why would someone fake happiness? Today I heard a girl meet a guy who she was tutoring in English. When he came to the table (without ever meeting eachother) the girl instantly threw out a fake smile and in that forced happy voice sound uttered how glad she was to meet this person. How can someone be glad to meet someone they know nothing about? What if this dude was an animal rapist who carried a machete and was waiting for her to look away before giving the ole slicy and dicey?

But that's not the point.

What does it say about someone when they fake an emotional expression? First, it says they understand how a person with a genuine feeling would react in a circumstance. So, even though they don't have this genuine feeling they want to convey that they do. This is a form of manipulation, but why do people feel compelled to manipulate in circumstances such as these where it really doesn't matter what the other person thinks?

Emotions are no doubt how we connect with eachother. Emotions are just as important as the words in conveying a message. I can generally tell what a person is feeling or thinking based off of the emotions they convey. People realize this of course, and so often times they manipulate how they express their emotions either out of fear of being judged or just a subconscious fear or even a malicious desire to manipulate.

But the thing is, since emotions are so widespread and accessible to everyone, people know when someone has a genuine feeling or not, and really by hiding our emotions and by hiding our expressions we're in fact stating that we can't be trusted entirely. That we're manipulating for some reason or another.