or suppress the subjective feelings) arise. We don’t know how quickly these occur. Do they
occur before signals and actions, or immediately during the onset of signals and actions?
Impulses are translated into actions and signals.
7.
Refractory Period
is initiated with the onset of actions and signals – perception is narrowed
and distorted, filtering and interpreting information relevant to and consistent with the
prevailing emotion. For example,when fear is aroused, there is a heightened sensitivity to real
and imagined threats.
8.
The gap between impulses
(Step 2) and action/signals (Step 4) is variable, depending on:
• The individual characteristics of each person, the person’s emotional profile.
• The intensity of the appraised trigger.
• The momentary psychological state of the individual when the trigger is appraised (how much
sleep the person had last night; what, if any, emotion the person last experienced or is
currently experiencing, etc.).
The image below is from a participant who developed an example of the timeline with her group for
an emotional episode she had earlier that week. She was encouraged to find an episode in which
she felt her emotional experience was exaggerated. Her emotion was great sadness, she felt this
emotion when not receiving and e-mail response from her son. She traced this sadness back to a
feeling of being forgotten, which exists in her emotion alert database from her parents being out of
touch with her while she was away during the summers over thirty years prior. She recognized that
her refractory period prevented her from seeing the reality of the situation as it was, that her son
was simply busy and not avoiding or abandoning her.
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