Emotional means having to do with emotion, the feelings a person has that he usually shows by the expression on his face or the way his body behaves. Some examples of emotion include cheerfulness, boredom and fear.

Tone means the emotional state of a person. This can be over a very short or a very long period of time.

A scale is a series of steps or levels that are arranged in a sequence.

The Emotional Tone Scale shows all the emotions a person can experience at any time in his life.

The Tone Scale also tells you how a person can be expected to behave at any time. When a person is at a certain level on the Tone Scale, he behaves in a certain way. Therefore, by knowing what each level of the Tone Scale is, you can then predict how a person will behave.

There are only a few basic emotions on the Tone Scale. At the top, there is the emotion of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm means a feeling of excitement about something and eagerness to be involved in it. And just below that, you have a person who is just happy about whatever he is doing.

And then, just below that, you have an emotion where a person is holding himself back from being openly happy. You get the feeling when you observe this emotion that the person is just a little bit afraid to reach toward something. This level on the Tone Scale is called conservatism. Below conservatism, we find the tone level of contented. Contented means the person is sort of quietly happy. He is satisfied.

Below this level we get boredom. Boredom is where nothing is wrong, but nothing is happening. The person feels that the things he wants to do are just a little bit too hard for him to do and so he isn’t actually doing them. There is nothing dangerous present, but there is nothing exciting either. He is not running from anything and he is not going toward anything—he is just sort of sitting there in one spot not really doing anything. That’s boredom.

When you try to get a person who is bored to do something, he will be just a little unfriendly and irritated toward you. He goes a little bit down on the Tone Scale. So the next one below boredom is antagonism. Antagonism is a feeling of annoyance and irritation someone has, caused by other people moving closer to or communicating to him.

Below antagonism, the person’s emotion will turn into anger. A person who is angry can be threatened so much that he shows fear.

Fear—threatened or pushed too much—will become grief. Grief is the inability to escape from fear, a fearful object or the idea of losing something very important to you.

Grief, pushed or threatened too hard, becomes apathy—a complete lack of interest in or feeling for things in general, with the result that a person feels no emotion and has no energy.

Each one of these emotions has its own pattern of behavior.

Angry men do certain things. You can expect an angry man to break things. You can expect him to be dishonest. You can expect him to try to control people around him by shouting at them, ordering them, threatening to punish them or verbally abusing them. You know the pattern of an angry person.

You also know the pattern of a person who is afraid, such as a person who is afraid to tell the truth or a person who is afraid to face the real facts about what is happening or what he has done. Such a person will change facts instead of facing them. He will lie about what happened. He will avoid the truth because it is now very dangerous to him. For example, let’s say a person breaks into a home and is caught by the police. He is afraid of what will happen to him so he lies. He says he was walking past the house and saw the front door wide open so he just walked into the house to see if anybody was in trouble inside.

To someone living in fear, people or other living things in his area are dangerous to him to such a point that he is always afraid and has a definite way of behaving. He doesn’t dare make a direct attack on anything or anybody. He could never walk up to someone and tell the person that he did something wrong. He has to go tell Joe that Bill did something wrong and then make Joe go and tell Bill what he did wrong. This is called covert hostility. Covert means secret or hidden and hostility is when someone is being hostile, showing hatred toward someone. People who are afraid behave that way.

The person who is in grief can only be handled with the emotion of sympathy. Therefore he gets others around him to feel sorry for him and help him. He has to depend on them, one way or the other, for his own survival. He feels that he cannot survive unless he is in grief or sick.

The way a person in apathy behaves is to just pretend that he is dead. For example, a soldier goes into battle, bullets start flying everywhere. He can’t take it. He won’t fight and cannot run away, so he goes into apathy and he falls flat on his face and lies there stiff. Somebody could come along and kick him and think he was dead and move along to somebody else. The enemy bullets don’t hit him. He thinks he’s in good shape! By accepting the actual fact of death, he becomes “dead” and so dangerous things move away and leave him alone. Some people use this pattern as a way to survive in life: “If I’m just dead enough, nobody will bother me.”

If you really look around, you can find someone like this. It could be the person who sells papers down on the street corner. You can know a person who is in apathy by what he says. His conversation will be something like, “I’m not dangerous. I’m no threat to you. I’m no threat to life. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do anything. Therefore, you needn’t attack me. I’m dead.”

Suppose you had great news about a new project that you were excited about and you shared it with people on different levels of the Tone Scale. How would they react?

Someone in grief, for example, thinks he is very close to death and that it is all hopeless anyway. To him, there is no use going on and life is pretty much a painful experience anyway. He wants to just sit there and feel sorry for himself. That’s the way someone in grief acts. He will deal with everything in life this way, including your great news.

What about someone in fear? To him, his life is under continual threat. He will make unimportant anything you tell him that is exciting. And any time you’re enthusiastic (excited and highly interested) about something you are going to do and try to include him, he will make you unimportant and worthless as well.

If you went to a man who was very conservative and you said, “We’ve got this great big exciting project and we are going to do it this year,” the conservative person will start talking about slowing things down. He might say, “Well, have you thought about this a lot and have you planned this carefully?” And by the time you get through talking to this man, you wish you had never spoken to him. He has so many reasons you can’t be enthusiastic about this project, but he does not say he disagrees with it.

And then you come to someone who is high on the Tone Scale at the tone level of happiness. You tell him about the project and he says, “Great!” And you tell him it is going to be this and this and this and you’re going to do that and he says, “Wow!” And this man adds something to it. He makes it more of an exciting project. He’s the only one that you can talk to in this way.

In summary, when you know the scale of emotions, it is possible to know the way people will act and can see how they behave in life.

The only value something has is how useful it is and whether or not it works.

The Emotional Tone Scale is definitely useful and it certainly works.