Passion (emotion)
Passion (Greek πάσχω "to suffer, to be acted on"[1] and Late Latin (chiefly Christian[2]) passio "passion; suffering")[3] denotes strong and intractable or barely controllable emotion or inclination with respect to a particular person or thing.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) describes passions as "penchants, inclinations, desires and aversions carried to a certain degree of intensity, combined with an indistinct sensation of pleasure or pain, occasioned or accompanied by some irregular movement of the blood and animal spirits, are what we call passions.
They can be so strong as to inhibit all practice of personal freedom, a state in which the soul is in some sense rendered passive; whence the name passions.
[4] Diderot further breaks down pleasure and pain, which he sees as the guiding principles of passion, into four major categories: Modern pop-psychologies and employers tend to favor and even encourage the expression of a "passion"; previous generations sometimes expressed more nuanced viewpoints.
[5] The standard definition for emotion is a "Natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others".
[14] Antonio Damasio studied what ensued when something "severed ties between the lower centres of the emotional brain...and the thinking abilities of the neocortex".
Their influence is immense...[providing] a frame of reference – as opposed to Descartes' error...the Cartesian idea of a disembodied mind".
[18] A tension or dialectic between marriage and passion can be traced back in Western society at least as far as the Middle Ages, and the emergence of the cult of courtly love.
Denis de Rougemont has argued that 'since its origins in the twelfth century, passionate love was constituted in opposition to marriage'.
[23] When people genuinely enjoy their profession and are motivated by their passion, they tend to be more satisfied with their work and more psychologically healthy.
[citation needed] When managers or professionals are unsatisfied with their profession they tend to also be dissatisfied with their family relationships and to experience psychological distress.
When Canadian managers or professionals do a job to satisfy others, they tend to have lower levels of satisfaction and psychological health.
Burke & Fiksenbaum make a reference to Graves et al. (2006) when examining work enjoyment and inner pressures.
Burke & Fiksenbaum refer to Virick and Baruch (2007) when explaining how these two workaholism components affect life satisfaction.
Inner pressures of workaholism have characteristics such as persistence, rigidity, perfectionism, and heightened levels of job stress.
On a more positive note, individuals who enjoy their work will have higher levels of performance for several reasons.
Linstead & Brewis refer to Merriam-Webster to say that passion is an "intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction".
"A harmonious passion refers to a strong desire to engage in the activity that remains under the person's control.
This type of passion has a negative effect on a person where they could feel they need to engage in their hobby to continue, for example, interpersonal relationships, or "fit in" with the crowd.
To change the above example, if the girl has an obsessive passion towards volleyball and she is asked to play with her friends, she will likely say "yes" even though she needs to finish her project for the next day.
Christine Robinson makes the point in her article that, " ...knowledge of your innate motivation can help guide action toward what will be fulfilling.
In Margaret Drabble's The Realms of Gold, the hero flies hundreds of miles to reunite with the heroine, only to miss her by 24 hours – leaving the onlookers "wondering what grand passion could have brought him so far...a quixotic look about him, a look of harassed desperation".
[29] In Alberto Moravia's 1934, the revolutionary double-agent, faced with the girl he is betraying, "was seized by violent desire...he never took his eyes off my bosom...I believe those two dark spots at the end of my breasts were enough to make him forget tsarism, revolution, political faith, ideology, and betrayal".
