How can early emergent individual differences in emotions shape our lives?

The emotions are at the very core of our identity. They organize who we are through three basic processes:

• they govern our systematic reactions to stimuli
• they govern the responses that we evoke in other people
• they select the situations and the contacts that we choose to enter into

In other terms, individual differences in emotions really shape what our life looks like because they drive three aspects of our daily life:

• the reactions that we have to different kinds of stimuli
• the responses that we evoke in other people
• the situations that we sistematically interpret and select ourselves into

(Carol Malatesta)