Resources of Emotional Granularity
This week on Stories of Emotional Granularity, I want to do something a little bit different, but something I’ve been meaning to get to ever since the first season of the podcast last spring.
I want to share with you some of the resources I have used to identify some of the many emotions that I’ve listed on the podcast web site and begun to describe here on the podcast.
I have been working as a researcher of emotion for almost 30 years. I interview people at length about the emotions they feel in different contexts. I’ve never kept a strict count of all the interviews I’ve done, but I’m sure that they number in the thousands by now.
Back when I got started as a researcher, I worked under a psychologist who had come up with a list what he believed were a core set of universal human emotions. These weren’t at all like the short list of Basic Emotions Paul Ekman had come up with years before. My boss’s list of emotions included different emotions such as Approach-Avoidance Conflict and Vicarious Enjoyment and the Need for Control. There were something like twenty emotions on his list, which he had chosen not as a result of any scientific research, but simply as a product of the way he saw the world.
The more interviews I did, the more evident it became to me that his list did not adequately describe the range of emotional experiences that people have. It was then that I became interested in exploring the full diversity of emotion.
Direct research has been one great way to expand the range of emotions I’m aware of. I’m just one person, though, and I could never interview enough people to get anything close to a representative sample of the eight billion people on this planet and all their cultures.
The fortunate thing is that I’m not the only person who is curious about the diversity of emotion. There are others who have worked to document the many different kinds of subjective feelings people can experience.
One of the things that bothered me about the psychologist I worked with back in the 1990s was that he never gave credit to the other psychologists or researchers whose work provided the foundation of his ideas. He just pretended that it was all his idea. I don’t want to do the same thing with this podcast.
This episode of the podcast is about giving credit where credit is due.
When talking about sources of research in emotional granularity, the obvious person to start with is Lisa Feldman Barrett. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist and neuroscientist who teaches at Northeastern University where she is the Director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. She holds positions at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, where she Chief Science Officer at the Center for Law, Brain & Behavior. She is a former president of the Association of Psychological Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the founder of the journal Emotion Review and co-founder of the Society for Affective Science.
Lisa Feldman Barrett has been very busy for a long time. She has done and directed a great deal of scientific research into the nature of emotion, which is a very tricky thing to study scientifically. She has also written several books.
The most popular of her books is How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. It’s a powerful and substantial introduction to her intellectual perspective on emotion, which she describes as constructionist. The basic idea of emotional constructionism is that, although emotion is of course founded in the biology of our brains, individual emotions are not pre-packaged universal bundles of instinct that are hard-wired into our brains. Instead, emotional constructionism argues that emotions are constructed as an interpretation of biological sensation through a confluence of the influence of individual experience and shared social meaning.
It was Lisa Feldman Barrett who came up with the concept of emotional granularity. Around her work, a community of researchers has formed, so that she is far from alone from in articulating the idea and its impacts.
You may have noticed that emotional granularity is the core concept of this podcast. Nonetheless, I don’t count myself as within the community of researchers working to articulate Feldman Barrett’s concept of emotional granularity. My research into emotion is non-scientific, completely qualitative, and non-academic. Still, this podcast is inspired by her research, and deeply informed by it.
If you’re looking to understand the constructionist view of emotional development in more detail, you may want to pick up a copy of the Handbook of Emotions or The Psychological Construction of Emotion, both of which were edited by Feldman Barrett.
Emotional granularity is the degree to which a person perceives distinctions between emotions. This skill isn’t just an individual trait. It’s cultivated through the confluence of individual experience and social context. Coming from the social perspective of shared articulations of emotional meaning is Tiffany Watt Smith, researcher at the Centre for the History of the Emotions.
Tiffany Watt Smith is author of The Book of Human Emotions, which articulates the meaning and touches upon some of the history of 154 different words for specific emotional frames of mind. The book presents a good deal of the diversity of emotion beyond the simple, paint-by-numbers approach of the Theory of Basic Emotions. Nonetheless, it is an approachable book, with each emotion offered as a kind of mini-chapter of between one to three pages of casual musings on each feeling.
Another person who has assembled descriptions of many emotional concepts is Tim Lomas. Lomas is a researcher at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. He has published many books that identify a variety of subjective frames of mind. Among these are Translating Happiness: A cross cultural lexicon of well-being and The Happiness Dictionary. Many of the terms that Lomas includes are not themselves emotions, but are emotionally-adjacent, such as mensch, the Yiddish word for an all-around good person.
For a much more specific range of emotional diversity there’s a podcast I just discovered called Climate Change and Happiness, which you can find on Apple Podcasts. Episode after episode, the podcast features people having discussions about the emotions that are provoked by the literally Earth-changing climate crisis. A recent episode featured Herb Simmens, author of A Climate Vocabulary of the Future, which lists different feelings people have about their relationship with the crumbling biosphere.
For a much more eccentric exploration of the possibilities of emotional expression, I recommend a book by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd called the Deeper Meaning of Liff: A dictionary of things there aren’t any words for yet. Adams and Lloyd use unusual place names from around the world as terms for things that are familiar, yet not specifically addressed in the English language. Among these are many emotional neologisms, including:
Glasgow: An emotion provoked by walking through a space in which everyone else is fifteen years younger than you
Guernsey: The feeling one gets from discovering a plastic compartment in a refrigerator in which things are growing
Lambarene: An improvement of mood that comes from putting pajamas on
Luffness: The hearty feeling that comes from walking on the moors in rubber boots with cold ears
Swanibost: The specific feeling of exhaustion that comes at the end of an entire day spent having income taxes explained to you
These are not emotional terms that have been taken up into popular usage, and yet, they do express actual feelings that people have, specific emotions that are distinct from others. They identify spaces for the potential development of authentic new emotion concepts. When even a small group of people begin to use a nonsense word to refer to something that they can all identify, the term quickly gains genuine authenticity.
The words we have for emotions don’t begin to represent the diversity of actual emotional experience we go through. Our minds have much more complexity than what even the most sophisticated brain imaging technology is capable of representing.
Last year, a team of neuroscientists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science completed a report on a six-year-old ongoing project to survey the diversity of types of brain cells by measuring the specific genes that are activated in different cells. The research has only taken a partial sample of different brain tissues, but already has identified 3,300 different types of brain cells.
Popular imagination has considered our brains to be just a collection of neurons, with an immense number of cells linked through an even higher number of connections. This new study, however, indicates that the complexity of our brains, and the consciousness for which they are a platform, have yet another level of complexity on top of that.
When people say that we have just a few basic emotions that are “hard wired”, they’re relying on flawed research from the previous century. Neuroscientists are nowhere close to a complete, coherent understanding of how our brains work, and how conscious experience emerges from that biology. What scientists have discovered so far is amazing, but there’s a huge amount about our minds that nobody understands. Digital businesses that come to us with simple models of human emotion should not be regarded as credible.
That said, I want to recommend that you try out an app How We Feel for the next couple of weeks, because in a couple of weeks from now, I’m going to devote an episode to evaluating just what the app is up to. It’s available on your smartphone’s app store, and it’s a free service, at least for now, as it was developed by a non-profit organization. The app claims to be able to help people develop their awareness of the diversity of their emotional lives. To what extent does the app actually accomplish this?
This isn’t a paid advertisement, by the way. I don’t include advertisements in this podcast because I want to maintain its emotional authenticity. What I talk about in this podcast is what I’m interested in, period. I’m genuinely curious about the conceptual framework of the How We Feel app, because it goes far beyond the constrictive and outdated Theory of Basic Emotions that has dominated digital measurements of emotion so far.
How We Feel was recently recommended to me by a colleague at work, and I’m trying it out for a few weeks right now. If you check it out over the next few weeks, you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about when I review it in two weeks from now.
Between now and then, I’m going to take a sharp turn in an unexpected direction. I thought I would be doing an episode on a Czech emotion that blends sadness and happiness into something nuanced and all its own. My life has been a bit helter skelter recently, though, and so instead I want to discuss a German emotion instead, one that I’ve been trying, and failing, to grasp for years now. Next week’s episode will be about the troubled emotion of Sehnsucht.
Until then, thanks for listening.