The Increasing Importance of Attachment Emotions in Every Sphere of Life: Part 01

What are The Attachment Emotions?

We have generally eight types of emotions. These are fear, anger, disgust, shame and sadness, trust, excitement and surprise. Among these fear, anger, disgust, shame and sadness are called survival emotions. Trust/love and excitement/joy are called attachment emotions. Surprise is called the potentiator because it is responsible for flipping a response state from survival to attachment and from attachment to survival state.

Survival emotions are associated with releasing cortisol hormone in our body, which is responsible for all types of avoidance, escape and survival activities. On the other hand, attachment emotions secrete oxytocin, dopamine and noradrenalin which are responsible for creating good feelings in us, which ensures long-term physical, mental and spiritual well-being.

How Attachment Emotions Shape an Individual

Attachment is not only unique to humans. It is also prevalent in other living beings as well. But humans have one thing which other living beings do not possess. That is language. With the help of our verbal language, we can express our emotions and feelings that an animal can not. Every single being has the root of its emotions deep into the brain. Each relationship whether it is positive or negative has a neural link. A person for being emotionally attached requires huge conscious brain activity and long-term investment in terms of relationship building. A person with love, joy and excitement is able to build strong trust which is the prime factor of relationship building.

Attachment Emotions in A Group

The main spirit of building a group is attachment emotions i.e love, joy, excitement and trust. The ancient and smallest group on the planet is the family. It is also the first socially recognized institution. Consequently, other groups evolve over the course of time. Whatever the size of the group is, attachment emotions are immensely important for the efficiency, effectiveness, existence and sustainability of the group. If each member is equally loving, joyful and trustworthy, that group is able to produce the highest collective efforts, ensuring each other's well-being. Nobody is unhappy at the end of the day. Everybody is well aware of their collective strength and ready to undertake any challenge at any time. Everybody is each other's ally. For example, The emotional attachment between players and sports fans during a game in a stadium can be mentioned here. Thousands of people visit a stadium to watch a game and millions more watch on electronic media like television, Facebook or Youtube. This has a serious impact on the players. Players' performances culminate to the peak when they feel love, joy and get excited equally with the fans.

Attachment Emotions in an Organization

Attachment emotions in an organization are immensely important. An organization is composed of multiple wings or departments. Lots of people are working there. For effectiveness and productivity, it is vital to foster joy/excitement or love/trust among the employees. The collective attitude of employees in an organization becomes the attitude of the organization itself. Moreover, attachment emotions are at the center of nurturing creativity and imagination which ensures new thoughts enter a company space. A trust-based company is able to attract the people in the industry and retain the best ones as well. But one critical point is that the attachment emotions must be relevant to the mission, vision, activities, objective and collective achievement of a company.

When the Leaders are Attached to Their People

From running a family to conducting a nation-state, we need leadership skills. In a word, every single human needs this essential skill to lead a great life. Wonderful things start to happen when leaders are connected to their fellows and foster attachment emotions in every sphere of their dealings. The team becomes the most resilient one. People's creativity and imagination constantly help to bring the highest output. But it must be remembered that if an overall company environment nurses survival emotions, it is tough for emotionally attached leaders to grow and stay for long.

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