1 . Your emotion helps you make sense of the world. At the core of an emotion is a subjective experience of the valence of it — what emotion scientists call “affect” (情感). Generally speaking, affect is what we are most focused on. Do you have chocolate cake in front of you? That’s good! Do you see a spider on the table! That’s bad!
Your affective reactions tell you which experiences are desirable, and which aren’t, but the total emotional experience includes all you do and think. You can learn a lot by observing and describing them. You can also learn a lot by appreciating their secret life.
The problem is: the affective features of emotions tend to dominate. Our subjective valence of emotion is almost all we can see. When emotions are only about what is pleasant or unpleasant in subjective experience right now, the more important features of emotion disappear.
If you can slow down and expand; if you stop running or clinging (沉浸其中) and adopt a sense of curiosity, emotions become more subtle and different. When fear comes up, don’t walk away so that fear dissipates. Instead, stay. Allow yourself to feel the nervousness, the sweating, and everything else that comes along with it. It is one of the hardest things to do in life, but it’s also one of the most rewarding. If you run, you are telling basic parts of your brain, “I guess this threat really was real. I better stay away from it.” You are training yourself to fear, regardless of that situation. If you cling, you are saying, “Escape from this emotion is a threat”, and since it is not a happy experience, happiness slips through your hands like sand.
Note that you can not fool yourself. Just allow the full emotion. You will never enter into their secret life until you stop running or clinging. To control your life, you need to actively train your emotions to be your ally (同盟). Observe. Describe. Appreciate. Do that and you may find you have allies for healthy living that were there all along.
1. Why does the author mention “chocolate cake” and “spider” in paragraph 1?A.To explain the complex response of emotions. |
B.To show the subjective experience of emotions. |
C.To indicate the goodness and badness of the world. |
D.To emphasize the significance of emotions in life. |
A.The present feelings are less obvious. |
B.The subjective emotions are less powerful. |
C.The overall picture of emotions is easier to ignore. |
D.The observation and description of emotions are easier. |
A.Deepens. | B.Spreads. | C.Disappears. | D.Sticks. |
A.The secret of emotions. | B.The subjective experience. |
C.The importance of allies in life. | D.Magical functions of emotions. |
2 . One of the cores of emotional intelligence is self-regulation, an important skill in the workplace. Like any skill, mastery of emotional self-control requires intentionality and practice.
Pause to Mentally Distance
When you notice your typical physiological experiences associated with strong negative emotion, what should you do? Mentally step out of your immediate experience. Asking yourself any question, or imagining what you might look like to others right now, will do the trick. At that point, although still physiologically keyed up, you will be able to ask yourself, “What is the best course of action right now?” or “What advice would I give someone else who is in my shoes?”
Take Control of Your Self-Talk
We’re frequently unaware of how much self-chatter is going on in the background of our minds. Such self-talk might not be in fully articulated (铰接式的) words or phrases, but instead little flashes of thought. Becoming aware of your self-talk can be difficult. Why is this an important skill to develop?
Seek Support from Partners
Ask others you trust to help you recognize when your emotions seem to be getting the best of you.
Cultivate (培养) Curiosity
Our brains are wired to draw conclusions and form judgments at lightning speed, and those are frequently the cause of our negative emotions.
A.They are comfortable with all emotions |
B.Those judgments are not necessarily accurate |
C.Doing so provides you with choices as to how to act |
D.Explain your developmental goals and sincerely ask for help |
E.Stay focused on coming up with an answer and following through on it |
F.Because it is those background beliefs that fuel our emotional responses |
G.Here are four ways you can develop greater emotional self-management |
3 . The Science of Recreational Fear
From peek-a-boo to Halloween haunted houses, research shows that recreational fear can teach us to face scary situations. The “paradox of horror” is that being scared, under the right circumstances, can be fun.
Having fun with fear is an “extremely important tool for learning,” said Mathias Clasen, director of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark. “We learn something about the dangers of the world. We learn something about our own responses: What does it feel like to be afraid? How much fear can I take?”
Horror movies have gotten more popular. And in one survey of more than 1,000 Americans, conducted by Clasen, 55% described themselves as horror fans.
Even babies like being a little spooked (惊的). Peek-a-boo is “an infant jump scare,” Clasen said.
After this rush, many people experience an uplifted mood. One study examined how 262 adults felt before and after they entered an extreme haunted house.
A.So why do we like it? |
B.Fifty percent of people said they felt better after the visit. |
C.And recreational fear, as it is rightly named, could benefit us, too. |
D.Playing with fear helps us learn what our body does under pressure. |
E.Horror, though, is not the only genre of what people find scary fun, he said. |
F.We define recreational fear broadly as a mixed emotional experience of fear and enjoyment. |
G.Classic childhood games of tag and hide-and-seek are just like the real scenes of predator vs. prey. |
4 . Perhaps you’ve stopped doing what you want because you’re afraid of what others think of you. You feel that you must do what they expect and that you must meet their expectations, otherwise you’ll lose their approval.
Think about yourself, about what you really like and are interested in. You must lead your life independently.
By surrounding yourself with people who think like you, you’ll realize that you don’t feel judged. Then, you’ll start doing what you really want.
To overcome your fear of what others think and of their non-approval, you should start talking about your plans, For instance, you might want to tell a handful of friends about your wishes and dreams.
It’s unavoidable that not everything will be plain sailing, and you’ll find obstacles along your way.
A.There is no need to think about what you want. |
B.You don’t have to change your circle of friends. |
C.Your life belongs to you, as well as your actions. |
D.By talking to them, you’ll be able to organize your plans and ideas. |
E.If this is the case, it’s time to start working on your self-esteem (自尊). |
F.You must do what you want without being affected by what others think. |
G.However, you must trust in yourself and seek the necessary strength to move forward. |
I like staying overnight at my Gramma’s house — that is, until Gramma starts telling me how wonderful my cousin Maya is. Then it’s Maya this and Maya that until I don’t ever want to hear another word about her.
That’s why I wasn’t too excited when Gramma called me on the phone to “come on over and bring your pajamas.” When I got there, it was worse than I’d expected. There, in Grandpa’s big leather rocker, sat Maya, all dressed up and formal-looking and wearing fancy shoes as if she’d just been to a party.
“Surprise, Kristen!” Gramma said. “Your cousin Maya and her parents have traveled in from the East Coast on business. Maya gets to stay with us this afternoon.” Gramma chattered away about how excited she’d been for this surprise get-together, and how cousins ought to get to know each other better.
I hung my baseball cap in the closet and set my backpack by the stairway, all the time smiling and nodding as if I’d been waiting forever for this chance to spend an afternoon with Maya. Grandpa’s chair squawked (咯咯叫) as Maya rocked back and forth. It’s the chair I like best in the house, the one I usually sit in. I sat down on the sofa across from her.
Shortly, Gramma went off to the kitchen to “see about some lunch,” she’d said. That left me stuck in the living room with rocking Maya.
She was still small but taller than I’d remembered her from her last visit four years ago. She was good at small talk, though, and was chatting away about how nice it was to see me again. But I could tell that she didn’t really think so. The last time she was here, we’d had hours of fun together building caves out of Gramma’s sofa pillows.
After that, I’d heard about her only through Gramma’s tales. Maya taking piano lessons. Maya learning math. Maya, Maya, Maya. Now Maya was here, looking great with the latest haircut and a fancy dress.
注意:1. 续写词数应为150左右;
2. 请按如下格式在答题卡的相应位置作答。
Glancing down at my jeans and my old sneakers, I wished I hadn’t come.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________“How do you know all these things about me?” I asked.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________6 . Winter goes and summer comes. The tides
And how will I master these emotions so that each day will be
With this new knowledge I will make
A.advance | B.disappear | C.exist | D.fall |
A.native | B.colleague | C.supporter | D.part |
A.jokes | B.secrets | C.experiences | D.awards |
A.break in | B.wake up | C.take off | D.give out |
A.constantly | B.temporarily | C.casually | D.elegantly |
A.appear | B.blow | C.fade | D.spread |
A.anxious | B.natural | C.additional | D.productive |
A.sow | B.grow | C.separate | D.shelter |
A.fold | B.follow | C.carry | D.load |
A.react | B.review | C.recite | D.repeat |
A.obtains | B.regards | C.allows | D.observes |
A.chosen | B.seized | C.received | D.witnessed |
A.self-awareness | B.self-control | C.self-esteem | D.self-pity |
A.behind the scene | B.on the bottom line | C.at the end of the rope | D.out of sight |
A.insignificant | B.improper | C.impolite | D.unconscious |
A.concrete | B.inadequate | C.abstract | D.unmatched |
A.use | B.fun | C.sure | D.sense |
A.view | B.meeting | C.experiment | D.idiom |
A.limited | B.reserved | C.prepared | D.afraid |
A.salesman | B.player | C.architect | D.designer |
7 . How We Talk about Fear Matters
Lately, there seems to be plenty to fear in the world. How we talk about what we fear might offer clues to how we perceive that emotion socially and culturally.
Get the root of fear.
Figure out the emotional meaning of fear.
Whether emotions are viewed positively or negatively varies from culture to culture.
Find out a fearful pattern.
In looking at such patterns across the major language families, researchers found that the word “fear” was often associated with anxiety, envy and grief in Indo-European languages. But in Austronesian languages, “fear” more often was associated with surprise.
How we talk about fear changes how we react to it. When we talk about what frightens us, it may be useful to disrupt associated meanings. In addition, how our language categorizes an emotion seems to impact whether we perceive those emotions negatively or positively.
In conclusion, fear is something that can be changed by cultural and linguistic experience.
A.Talk more about fears |
B.Change our perception of fear |
C.The word fear has a long history in English |
D.There seemed a fearful pattern across the major language families |
E.This is based on what people have learned to associate with emotion words |
F.It opens the door to potential ways to change how we talk about and react to it |
G.This makes speakers of the latter languages associate this emotion with a less negative sense |
8 . Have you ever bought a new car and started noticing the exact color and model of car everywhere? Has that type of car just become popular in your city? Were they there before? Or are you just going crazy?
You’re not going crazy. The reason you are now just noticing them is what psychologists call “priming”. Basically, the cars were always there. You just didn’t recognize them consciously. However, when that certain model of car becomes part of your conscious thinking, you start “automatically” recognizing all of the other cars that are the same, because you are already “primed” to do so.
The priming effect takes many forms. In one study, students were asked to walk around a room for 5 minutes at a rate of 30 steps per minute, which was about one-third their normal pace. After this brief experience, the participants were much quicker to recognize words related to old age, such as forgetful, old, and lonely. Reciprocal priming effects tend to produce a coherent reaction: if you are primed to think of old age, you would tend to act old, and acting old would reinforce the thought of old age. This research shows that the way we think influences the way we act, and the way we act influences the way we think.
A similar conclusion was reached by the American psychologist William James a century ago, but he emphasized the effect on feeling. “Actions seem to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the path to cheerfulness, should our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there.”
So, that’s it. If you want to be happy, just sit up and act happy. Based on these scientific findings, we can adopt certain priming effects to help make ourselves consistently happier.
One thing we have in common is our ability to think, and thus feel. Pleasant thoughts have been proven to produce the chemicals that make us feel happy, particularly thoughts and feelings of gratitude. When we purposefully go through and think about the things we’re grateful for and deliberately feel as much gratitude as we can, we are flooding our mind with the “happy chemicals”. Furthermore, by consciously thinking, feeling and expressing gratitude, we will not only be happier in the moment, we will be “primed” to recognize the things in our life to appreciate. Each time this happens, the “happy chemicals” will be produced. Do this every day and we will become consistently happier. This makes up for the momentary happiness we gain from eating chocolate or buying new clothes. More than that, combining thoughts of gratitude with happy acts like smiling and laughing will have a supplementary positive effect on our state of mind.
1. Which of the following is an example of the priming effect?A.Walking much faster after attending a lecture about old age. |
B.Donating money to the poor after seeing pictures of cute cats. |
C.Learning about various types of cars after purchasing the first car. |
D.Completing SO_P as SOUP rather than SOAP after seeing the word EAT. |
A.Related. | B.Two-way. | C.Well-rounded. | D.Opposite. |
A.Eating or shopping leads to consistent feelings of happiness. |
B.Our will has greater control over emotions than over actions. |
C.Happy chemicals make us think about the things we’re grateful for. |
D.Practicing gratitude frequently prepares us for long-term happiness. |
A.Prime Yourself to Be Happier |
B.Share Happiness to Enhance Wellbeing |
C.Why Gratitude Is Important in Psychology |
D.How Happy Chemicals Affect People’s Thoughts |
9 . I was cleaning out a cupboard the other day when I made an amazing discovery. Inside I
Yet there it was, resting under a lot of paper to be recycled. I might have
I’m in the middle of reading another book
I find it fascinating to think that this could happen; that after more than fifty years my father could
A.locked | B.found | C.placed | D.hid |
A.notes | B.reviews | C.chapters | D.references |
A.regret | B.relief | C.satisfaction | D.amazement |
A.long | B.fun | C.popular | D.romantic |
A.support | B.knowledge | C.approval | D.reach |
A.life | B.writing | C.reflection | D.education |
A.cleared away | B.passed down | C.counted on | D.handed out |
A.bothered | B.caught | C.shaken | D.disturbed |
A.or | B.so | C.but | D.for |
A.easy | B.quick | C.rough | D.clear |
A.briefly | B.closely | C.happily | D.calmly |
A.honor | B.comment | C.reward | D.attention |
A.design | B.anticipate | C.evaluate | D.record |
A.touch | B.raise | C.help | D.protect |
A.peaceful | B.successful | C.interesting | D.smooth |
10 . Finland was known as a rather quiet country. Since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation (国家品牌代表团) has been looking for a national brand that would make some noise to market the country as a world-famous tourist destination. In 2010, the Delegation issued a “Country Brand Report,” which highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland’s famous educational system. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. “Silence is a resource,” it said.
Silence first appeared in scientific research as a control or baseline, against which scientists compare the effects of noise or music. Researchers have mainly studied it by accident, as physician Luciano Bernardi did in his study of the physiological (生理学) effects of music. “We didn’t think about the effect of silence,” he said. Bernardi observed two dozen test subjects while they listened to six musical tracks. He found that the impacts of music could be read directly in the bloodstream, via changes in blood pressure, carbon dioxide, and circulation in the brain. “During almost all sorts of music, there was a physiological change with a condition of arousal (兴奋),” he explained.
This effect made sense, given that active listening requires attention. But the more striking finding appeared between musical tracks. Bernardi and his colleagues discovered that randomly added stretches of silence also had a great effect, but in the opposite direction. In fact, two-minute silent pauses proved far more relaxing than either “relaxing” music or a longer silence played before the experiment started. The blank pauses that Bernardi had considered irrelevant, in other words, became the most interesting object of study. Silence seemed to be heightened by contrasts, maybe because it gave test subjects a release from careful attention. “Perhaps the arousal is something that concentrates the mind in one direction, so that when there is nothing more arousing, then you have deeper relaxation,” he said.
This finding is reinforced by neurological (神经系统的) research. Relevant research shows when our brains rest quietly, they integrate external and internal information into “a conscious (意识的) workspace.” Freedom from noise and goal-directed tasks, it appears, unites the quiet without and within, allowing our conscious workspace to do its thing to discover where we fit in.
Noora Vikman, a consultant on silence for Finland’s marketers, knows silence well. Living in a remote and quiet place in Finland, she discovers thoughts and feelings that aren’t detectable in her busy daily life. “If you want to know yourself, you have to be with yourself, and discuss with yourself, and be able to talk with yourself.”
1. Why does the author mention the Country Brand Report in Paragraph 1?A.To present how Finland viewed silence. |
B.To highlight the need of noise in Finland. |
C.To explain why Finland issued the brands. |
D.To indicate the authority of the Delegation. |
A.It challenged the calming effect of music. |
B.It emphasized the role of silence between sounds. |
C.It illustrated the loss of attentiveness after silence. |
D.It stated brains’ information processing in the quiet. |
A.doubtful | B.supportive | C.disapproving | D.unconcerned |
A.Silence: A Limited Resource | B.Silence: A Misunderstood Tool |
C.Silence: The Unexpected Power | D.Silence: The Value by Contrasts |