Category: mind

Emotional Granularity: The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

This morning I came across John Koenig’s Ted Talk “The Conquest of New Words” and it has really got me thinking. “Each of us is undefined, in a way, and the world is becoming ever more undefined,” says John, “And so, I think a lot of the structures that we look to to try to contain ourselves look like this. Both in the sense of ‘pound’ and ‘hashtag.’ It’s trying to box ourselves in certain ways and … to look for certain entries and certain categories and say, ‘Yes, that’s me.'”

John suggests that we often forget that all words are made up and that life is now so complicated and chaotic that we often get too caught up in the models that we’ve imposed on this world that we live in. And that’s why John has created The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows—a dictionary of neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term—so that we could get more in line with how the world actually is.

In this dictionary, there are over 8,000 types of sorrow. In other words, there are over 8,000 reasons why someone would shed a tear. Of course, you might not be able to immediately identify a situation where everyone is talking but nobody is listening as “anecdoche,” but to an extent, we can still improve our emotional granularity.

I’d like to invite you to do an exercise with me. Think of a time when you felt angry or sad, and describe it in greater detail. After you have done this exercise, you might realize that you have the potential to possess higher emotional granularity in you, even if you can’t remember the 8,000 terms for obscure sorrows 🙂

Emotional Granularity: Expanding your “Emotion Vocabulary”

For a long time, we have been using the term “emotional intelligence” to refer to how well we can recognize the emotions of ourselves and others, but it turns out that emotional intelligence is not actually a type of intelligence. Any intelligent being would be able to understand many emotions. When you get stuck in a traffic jam, you realize that you are angry. So emotions are more like a natural product of intelligence — this is the reason why humans have so many complex emotions :O

This term might play a part in popularizing the belief that we are able to “control” our emotions. Ever seen a kid being told to stop crying? Or maybe perhaps you’ve experienced like this first-hand. Either way, the belief that supports this logic has never held up to rigorous testing and therefore telling anyone to stop crying will never actually make them stop crying.

I really like what Lisa Feldman Barrett’s view on emotions. If you have “finely tuned feelings,” writes psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett in the New York Times, you’re exhibiting “emotional granularity,” defined in a review as the “adaptive value of putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity.” And just like like how musicians would hear not only the music but also chords and timbre, we can train ourselves to have higher emotional granularity.

And perhaps that’s all that we need to do about our emotions, since controlling them turns out to be a myth. After all, not thinking about a pink elephant will make you think of one. So instead of saying no to the “bad emotions,” I have personally had a lot of success just welcoming them into my lives.

As for how I learned to welcome all the good and the bad emotions into my lives, that’s another blog post for another time. Be sure to follow my blog 🙂