Relationship between Emotions and Moods during Menstruation and Development of Behavioural and Personality Traits among Adolescent Girls

Abstract

Emotions and moods are great influencers of individuals’ attitude towards self and others. Development of attitude towards both - self and others is important. Many a times, we forget, that when we are exhibiting a negative attitude towards others, we are also simultaneously affecting our own selves also and the response comes in the form of varying degrees of feelings and thinking and the response driven out from there affecting decision making, behaviour, and this again impacting development of behavioural and personality traits which could possibly over a period of time could become our behaviour and personality. Emotions giving rise to feelings – positive and negative are always in a mix, not always negative or positive. Therefore, affect, emotions and moods are interrelated. Affect relates to broad range of feelings, including both emotions and moods, and emotions are intense, discrete and short-lived feeling experiences caused by specific events. Menstruation in this exploratory study refers to as generating varying degrees of feelings and moods. Mood swings that led to the culmination of linking menstruation with development of behavioural and personality traits and this paper brings out dozens of emotions – anger, contempt, enthusiasm, envy, fear, frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, disgust, happiness, hate, hope, jealousy joy, love, pride, surprise, sadness, bore, content and list can be added. A direct consequence of these emotions, if they continue and persist, and repetitively occur, may lead to development of varying types of behavioural processes eventually taking the shape of individuals behaviour and personality traits. This paper, based on the phenomenological research carried out qualitatively has unfolded realities about adolescent girls undergoing menstruation amidst several cultural dimensions to disclosures and / non-disclosure of the event, discovered representation of the menstrual event in a girl and / women cannot be represented on faces, but at the same time the consequential effect of continuing and persisting of various negative and positive emotions transform into various positive and negative traits depending on what kind of feelings – negative or positive that came up during menstruation as it recurs every month. The study proceeded with the menstrual stories of adolescent girls and unfolded from the story, various episodes, and discovering the behavioural processes that could have happened resulted in gradually development of behavioural and personality traits – negative, positive and also high potential, presented here in this paper.