The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust

"This is a fantastic book by Tiffany Watt Smith. Some of these emotion concepts – and therefore these emotion categories – exist in modern Western culture today, but don’t mean the same thing as they did in the past. Some of the words are for concepts that exist in other cultures, but are not translatable into English with a single word, so it requires conceptual combination – your brain has to combine the concepts that you know, so that you can understand these concepts in other cultures. The book is chock full of fantastic examples showing that emotions are not universal, and how they’re not even static historically in time. This is important to understand, because the more emotions you have in your vocabulary that you can make, the more resilient and emotionally intelligent you’ll be, and the better able you’ll be to communicate across cultures and even across time – for example, when reading a novel from the 19th century. It’s just a great example of variation in emotion categories and concepts that runs against the common sense belief, the classical belief, that we only have a handful of very basic universal emotions. Oh absolutely. Partly what you’re doing when you go to a therapist – I used to be a therapist a long time ago – is that you are relearning how to make sense of your physical sensations. That might mean learning new emotion concepts, expanding your emotion vocabulary, so that you can be more resilient, and more I think it’s important to understand that knowing more emotion concepts, and expanding your emotion vocabulary, doesn’t just improve your ability to communicate about emotion, it actually improves your ability to make precise emotions, and this has direct health benefits. We’ve published a number of studies and recently a review paper, showing that knowing more emotion concepts, having a broader emotional vocabulary – what we call emotional granularity – actually has beneficial health and mental health outcomes, even when you’re being more granular about negative emotion. In fact, there’s research coming out of the emotional intelligence lab from Yale University, showing that when you expand children’s emotion vocabulary you don’t just improve their emotional lives – their ability to regulate negative emotion – you also improve their social regulation, their behaviour with their peers, and even in certain cases their academic performance. I describe these findings in my book and explain the neuroscience behind them. One of my very favourite things in Tiffany Watt Smith’s book is her discussion of how 16th-century English self-help books talked of sadness as a way to optimise resilience and health. I just find particularly amusing given what I call the ‘tyranny of happiness’ in Western culture right now. People believe that all great things in life are achieved, all meaning in life is achieved, through happiness, but at a different time in our history, sadness was thought to be a way of cultivating a meaningful life, and in a way that impacted your health. “My Russian friend said that when she came to the United States she’d never smiled so much in her life” I have a Russian friend who said that when she came to the United States she’d never smiled so much in her entire life. She said her cheeks hurt for a year! Her Russian grandmother has this view of life which is: no sensible person would be happy all the time, or even try to be happy all the time. I just thought that was fantastic."