Emotions positively influence our critical thinking through empathy, moral
indignation or outrage, love, happiness and even guilt. These lead to making better
decisions. Critical thinking can be negatively influenced by other emotions that are
based on negative stereotypes and anxieties stemming from unresolved past
experiences, such as anger and fear of abandonment. We can end up in trouble
when our actions are governed solely by feelings.
When it comes to balancing my emotion and reason when making decisions, I find
myself an emotional thinker. If I have anger or fear towards a certain decision that’s
being made in politics for example, I find myself not balanced so I try to go back to
neutral ground and see both sides of the argument although I may not disagree.
The role of communication in critical thinking can be symbols, whether spoken,
written or sign language. Some communication can be hand without symbolic
elements but include vocalizations such as babies in the state of discomfort. When I
was growing up, I was only 9 when I had to babysit my baby brother during the
summer so I had to quickly learn how he communicated that he was content or not,
and figure out how to fix it by communication through crying.
The use of language to manipulate and deceive through emotive language,
rhetorical devices and deception was eye opening to me. You can connect a lot of
political statements, along with a lot of advertisement to manipulative techniques
used to drive a specific agenda.
