Incidences of unruly passengers assaulting flight attendants have spiked in recent months. Eva Lee Ngai,  Federal Aviation spokesperson, had quoted, “The number of unruly passengers went up so dramatically last winter that it started tracking them for first time.” The quotation had been recorded in Summers’ article Number of fights on flights soars in 2021 driven by mask mandates. 923 unruly passengers reports investigated in 2021.  As of December 21, 2021 and according to FAA.gov unruly passengers data under Passenger and Cargo research, open investigations were 1,054. The number is extremely small compared to the number of unruly passengers incidences of 5,779.  In the first quarter of 2021, Summers’ data highlights that approximate 13 unruly passengers per every 10,000 flights. The previous quarter (i.e., Q4 2020) had 2.45 unruly passengers per every 10,000 flights. The latest occurrence of an unruly passenger happened on December 23, 2021 on a Delta flight from Tampa to Atlanta.  A federal assault charge that includes spitting and punching was filed in the Northern District of Georgia according to Sarah Rumpf.

The blog isn’t about unruly passengers, yet unhappiness and happiness are subjective rather than explicit emotional occurrences.  This is much different than the nature nurture predispositions on human development.  Before unraveling happiness, emotion requires review. Feeling, mood and emotion are often used interchangeably, but these are three distinct phenomenons according to the American Psychological Association (APA).

APA’s definition of emotion is “A complex reaction pattern, involving experiential, behavioral and physiological elements.” To put the phrase into Layman’s Terms, emotions are compounded patterns that “you” discern as important. You-as a human being- are full of indiscriminate and discriminate (i.e., selective) experiences. A walk in a park is indiscriminate. To lose weight, a walk in a park is discriminate (selective). The latter, walk in the park, produced some type of feeling, arising from an emotional experience/incident. Feeling is the result of emotional incident(s) which can be either indiscriminate or discriminate. The author of The Science of Emotion: Exploring The Basics of Emotional Psychology states, “A feeling is the result of an emotion and may be influenced by memories beliefs and other factors.” What is a mood? APA’s definition of mood is “Any short-lived emotional state, usually of low intensity,” and “moods differ from emotions because they lack stimuli and have no clear starting point.” Moods can be misconstrued? Try this on for size!  For example, being in a bad mood does not equate to being unhappy. Or, mask mandate triggers an emotion of happiness while an angry mood may arise without cause. Paul Ekman, Clinical Psychologist, was best known for identifying the relationship between emotions and facial expressions. He discovered six basic universal emotions that were common to humans that include anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.

All emotions have a coordinated set of processes, such as a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavior response or expressive response according to author of The Science of Emotion: Exploring The Basics of Emotional Psychology.  The first component of emotion is a subjective experience or stimulus. For example, being fired from a job with $125K salary, an individual may feel anger while another individual feels happiness, exploring entrepreneurship. The second component is a physiological response comprised of the autonomic nervous system- fight-or-flight responses. The intensity of physiological responses coincides with facial expressions or emotions, contributing to human development. For example, the intensity of the experience triggers the facial expression of that emotion. If you have lost parents recently and the experiences caused intense sadness, your facial expression expresses sadness every time you think of them. This allows you to express positive and negative emotions, which is always a good thing. In the end, your smile rather than a grimace shall prevail. The final component is behavioral responses or emotion regulation. This response is the actual expression of emotions, signaling to others how we’re feeling and contributing to our subjective well-being. You must guard your heart!  Proverbs 4:23–26 instructs believers to, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” The importance of happiness is a vital source of well-being just as the heart is vital to circulatory system. The activity of suppressing an emotion is apart of the emotional regulation process according to the author of The Science of Emotion: Exploring The Basics of Emotional Psychology.

Excerpt is from The Science of Emotion: Exploring The Basics of Emotional Psychology:

A study in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found that while watching negative and positive emotional films, suppression of behavioral responses to emotion had physical effects on the participants. The effects included elevated heart rates. This suggests that expressing behavioral responsible to stimuli, both positive and negative, is better for your overall health than holding those responses inside.

Ignoring your emotions or emotional suppression can cause more harm than good. Emotional regulation reduces the “intensity” of any emotion and not just sweeping it/them under a rug. Humans are connected through complex experiences, social cues, processes, cultural scripts, relationships, communication, adaptation, etc.  Here’s a tip you can use right away. You can take a walk in the park. Or, if you are on an airplane, ask the flight attendant how was his/her previous flight, remembering that happiness is a skill and emotionally expressive behavior is regulated. And without happiness, nothing else works.

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