Emotions are an important part of our everyday lives. People who can understand and use their emotions tend to be successful both in their professional and private lives. The word emotion has its roots in the Latin for movement. This suggests that our emotions encourage and guide our actions. Emotions arouse us, help us to organise our lives, focus and concentrate our behaviour and communicate our actions. Darwin recognised the importance that people attach to facial expressions of emotions. He suggested that there are some emotions that are universal. This means that an emotion such as happiness can be recognised as happiness by people from a different culture.

Children are fairly good at recognising facial expressions of emotion such as happiness and sadness. Even babies respond to a sad or frowning face by crying and to a happy face with a smile. But some emotions are not so easy to recognise. It is useful to us in our everyday life if we can pick up on how someone is feeling. In business it is beneficial to both parties, engaged in negotiation, to understand the subtle nuances of emotion that can indicate whether a deal is going to be successful. Of course, we also have those eminently successful business people who know how to hide their emotions – keeping a ‘poker face’ is always a useful strategy in games and in negotiations. But do we always want to engage in negotiations with someone who masks their feelings? How can we be certain we can trust them? There is some research which shows that we are good at judging who we can trust.

How can emotions help us to get on with other people? We all want to belong. The need to be included in activities – to be part of the group – begins when we are young. I have done research in schools where I have measured how well children can recognise facial expressions of emotions such as happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise. Younger children have more difficulty in recognising fear in a face. Perhaps recognition of some emotions develops over time? In the same study, children were asked to write about a time when another child had upset them. The children who wrote about rejection (e.g. being excluded from the group) were significantly better at recognising facial expressions of emotions than other children in their class. What does this mean? I suggest that having well developed abilities to recognise emotions helps us to judge when we are likely to be excluded from a group. If we don’t want to be excluded we will change our behaviour. The need to belong – to be part of a group – is a strong urge in humans. From an evolutionary perspective it would have been disastrous to be excluded from our group. It might have meant the difference between survival and death. Emotions have helped us to survive and across time we have become sophisticated at using them. However not everyone who is good at using their emotions is necessarily a good person – remember Machiavelli.