I’m organizing an independent project called Stories of Emotional Granularity. Part research, part media production, this project is based on interviews with volunteers who share stories about experiences they have had with different sorts of emotions. Their stories will be shared in a podcast, and in the end will be included in a larger written work that surveys the breadth of human emotion. If you would like to participate in this project, click on the button here to begin a conversation.
Emotional Granularity
Talking about emotion is a tricky thing. Although emotions can be expressed through words, those words are just representations of subjective experiences. A word like “sad” can refer to many different emotions, such as grief, regret, or feeling like a loser. Often, we feel emotional sensations that don’t quite fit the words that are available to us, and we struggle to communicate those feelings to others.
Although language is an imperfect tool for describing emotion, it’s a tool worth developing. The more words we have to describe the emotions we feel, the more tools we have to describe our inner emotional experiences to others. An odd thing happens as we expand our emotional vocabulary: We become more aware of the subtle hues of our own inner experience. Becoming more self-aware, we are able to act in accordance with our specific motivations.
As we become able to identify more of our own emotions, and use specific language to communicate about them, we also gain more conceptual tools with which to interpret the emotional perspectives of other people. The stories we tell ourselves and share with others about why people behave the way they do become more nuanced and flexible. We become capable of imagining more alternative outcomes to difficult situations, because we have more ways of interpreting the emotional conflicts at their core.
emotional granularity is The ability to perceive and describe many distinct emotions.
Granularity refers to the degree to which we are able to perceive the details of the world around us. You can think of it as like the number of pixels on a television screen. If the screen is only capable of showing a picture through a small number of pixels, the picture appears blocky and coarse, and it’s sometimes difficult to understand. A television screen with a large number of pixels, however, is able to show smooth images in fine detail that are easy to interpret.
In this metaphor, each distinct emotion that we can identify is like a pixel, not in our literal vision, but in our mental model of ourselves and the world around us. The more we can differentiate between different emotions, the more pixels we have with which to build our mental models of reality. Of course, each emotion remains a subjective perception of reality, but the more of them we have to work with, the better chance we have of developing a nuanced and detailed of what’s going on within our own minds and in relationship to others.