Mains Practice Questions

Approach

• In the introduction, write in brief about the emotion and their effects.
• Discuss the undesirable negative emotions that public servants should refrain from.
• Conclude suitably giving some measures to manage negative emotions.

Introduction

Emotions are biologically-based psychological states, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioural responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, creativity.

In 1972, Paul Eckman suggested that there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout human cultures: fear, disgust, anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness.

Body

Negative emotions public servants should manage

• Manage Negative emotions: Animosity, attachment, aversion, selfishness, arrogance, jealousy, greed, hypocrisy, malice and similar emotions should never drive public servants’ actions.
  
  • While doing his duties, he should ensure that our mind remains serene and composed.
• They should not be obsessed with anxieties about success or failure, happiness or misery, victory or defeat, profit or loss and glory or humiliation which actions may bring about.
• Public servants should not get unduly buoyed up by success or overly depressed by failure. They should learn to take such things in their stride.
• Human beings, by their very nature, tend to be selfish. But public servants should sublimate selfish propensities by directing them towards service to man and society.
• Religious Intolerance: They should not be motivated by religious fundamentalism and favour a particular religion but should be religiously tolerant.
• Do not feel dejected by failures: Anyone should not opt out of the challenges of personal and social life. They should not fall into escapism or seek false anodynes. Ideas like divine will or destiny should not be used as pretexts for inaction.
  
  • Men cannot know divine will. They have to perform their duty without thinking about other matters.

Conclusion

Emotions can be managed through practice and inculcating the ability of emotional intelligence. It is the ability to identify one’s own emotions and those of others, harness and apply them to tasks, and to regulate and manage them.