Emotions are very prevalent in most people’s lives because we are human and
humans are typically emotional beings. As we discussed last week, critical thinking is
also something people use all of the time in their lives; add those two together, and
emotion is definitely going to have some effect on critical thinking. According to Ch.
3 of THiNK: Critical Thinking and Logic Skills for Everyday Life, emotion can have
either hinder decision making or assist in making a strong decision for the best
outcome. Emotions can positively influence by giving you a way of seeing things
from all angles and having sympathy for others, emotions can negatively influence if
you have intensely strong feelings one way or the other which clouds your judgment
from seeing the full picture.
I am, by nature, a very emotional person. I have been deemed the empath within my
family and friends. I am constantly ensuring the needs of everyone are taken care of
well before mine, I feel what my people go through and I literally feel like I go
through much of it with them. Because of these emotions I constantly feel, emotion
is a large part of the decisions I make on an everyday basis. For example, a decision
I have made with emotion; it was a weekend and I had a lot on my plate in my
personal life to take care of (a doctor appointment, a grocery store trip, a workout
planned, organizing me week) but my mother asked me to come home for the
weekend because she missed me. Did I go? Absolutely I did, because I knew she had
been missing me and feeling bad. Did I think things through reasonably? Probably
not, because I set myself behind for the upcoming week by not taking care of things I
needed to take care of, but at least my mom was happy. On the other hand, a
decision that I did make reasonably; my fiancé and I were redoing our home and
spending what felt like 100% of our money and attention on the house and these
projects. I wanted so desperately to take a day off and go do something else, go to
the cities for a nice dinner, maybe shop a little bit. I had to use my reasoning skills in
order to make the appropriate decision to continue to work on the house while I had
the motivation, which helped in the long run because it got it done faster and now
we have all the time in the world to do other things.
Chapter three of the textbook brings up interesting points that I had not really
broken down before. There are many different styles of communication; assertive,
aggressive, passive, and passive aggressive. It is interesting because each of us are
very different in the way we communicate and which forms of communication we
best understand. I am definitely passive aggressive when I communicate; I am very
low key when I communicate my own feelings and quiet but I tend to show my
emotions on my face. I have learned to use communication in my critical thinking
processes while working a job directly with people. I have to read people and work
with individuals that have a variety of learning and intellectual disabilities who have
incredibly unique forms of communication. A lot of the time when I am at work I need
to think about the specific individual I am working with and what their signs and non-
verbal communication is pointing to, and make a decision based on that.
After the learning activities this week and reading through the textbook chapters,
the most interesting to me was actually the definitions section. It was interesting to
me because I have never really thought very in-depth at all about definitions of
words; lexical (dictionary definition, defined), stipulative (definition given to a new
term of a word), connotative and denotative meanings, etc. It is also interesting to
know that the English language is such a huge language with a quarter of a million
words, many of them having different meanings!
