Once you understand what you are feeling, then you can better address and learn from those more accurately described emotions. franckreporter / Getty Images. These cues might involve emotional expression through body language, such as various facial expressions connected with the particular emotions we are experiencing..

“Empathy.” “People skills.” “Catching vibes.” Social intelligence, or the ability to recognize other people’s emotions—and to use this intel to navigate relationships—has been called many things. This page helps you to recognise and understand your own emotions, and explains why they are sometimes so strong. Have you ever wondered why some people do the things they do? Whatever the result, I think you'll find at the end of the day you understand yourself a bit better, which in turn will make it easier for you to understand others. But we can learn to read them better with some practice. People who are good at understanding others are usually good listeners. How can you help your child develop this important skill?

One of the complicating factors in learning to read the emotions of other people is that we’ve been taught from a young age to conceal all emotions. Our ability to view situations objectively and thus to understand ourselves and other people depends on balancing and integrating the head and heart.

It offers some practical ideas about how you can manage your own emotions so that you can use and harness them, but are not governed entirely by them. For each photo, choose the word that best describes what you think the person depicted is thinking or feeling. Once you’ve started to go beneath the surface, it may be helpful to examine your communication patterns around how you react when someone opens up to you about something ugly, scary, painful, or serious. If you fool yourself into believing the surface story, you’re missing invaluable data. It Improves With Listening. Try to understand why the characters feel the way they do. To understand the way that you can control your emotions, we first have to take a slight detour through the early history of psychology. To find out how well you read the emotions of others, take the Well quiz, which is based on an assessment tool developed by University of Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen. After an outline of the theoretical background of emotions, we briefly discuss the importance of prior experiences and context information for the recognition of emotions. If you want to understand others, you need to get beneath the surface and start understanding emotions. Empathetic preschoolers form solid friendships with their peers.