I wonder how you are feeling today – what emotion(s) you are primarily experiencing. If I’m honest, I can’t identify how I’m feeling. I’ve just returned from a lush week at the beach and should feel rested, bubbly, and invigorated. But instead, there is a shakiness, a tension, a fluster – that I can’t pinpoint.
I googled human emotion, in an effort to help me identify what was going on inside, and found a fascinating study conducted in 2017 which listed 27 categories of emotion we experience as human beings. Cowen and Keltner reviewed 276,696 human responses to 2,185 short videos. These videos included a “pig falling out of a moving truck, a cat giving a dog a massage, an attacking lion, a man with a spider in his mouth, a mushroom cloud, sexual acts, and an awkward handshake”. There were fancy, mathematical ways to record the responses to the videos, which were then studied and categorised into 27 emotions. They found that multiple emotions could be experienced simultaneously. Just as a single cake has many ingredients, there are several emotional responses to a given situation. These were the 27 emotional categories they found were:
· Admiration
· Adoration
· Aesthetic Appreciation
· Amusement
· Anxiety
· Awe
· Awkwardness
· Boredom
· Calmness
· Confusion
· Craving
· Disgust
· Empathetic pain
· Entrancement
· Envy
· Excitement
· Fear
· Horror
· Interest
· Joy
· Nostalgia
· Romance
· Sadness
· Satisfaction
· Sexual desire
· Sympathy
· Triumph
Interestingly, you won’t find emotions listed such as anger and happiness. Apparent emotions, such as anger, often mask the real emotion. If you claim to feel angry, you might actually be feeling envious or fearful.
Why is it important that we analyse ourselves to figure out how we are feeling? I read a helpful article written for children and adults on five reasons why identifying emotion is vital for our well-being. I’ve summarised the reasons below.
1. Understanding the reasons behind your emotion will help you listen to your body’s warning signals and change accordingly. If you are feeling anxious about going to work every day, perhaps your body is indicating to you that you need to change your work environment, have a discussion with your boss, or quit entirely.
2. You will feel more in control once you identify an emotion. If you don’t understand WHY you feel a certain way, you feel powerless to change the emotion. Once you identify an emotion, you can control your circumstances to continue that feeling, or change it.
3. Negative emotions can lead to negative thoughts. When our emotions are overwhelming us, we can’t think logically. But once we identify what’s going on inside us, we can practice positive thought patterns.
4. Learning to communicate our emotions opens us up to help from the people around us. We aren’t lone islands. We need people to support us, especially when we feel weak.
5. We become better friends when we understand our emotions. As we “get” what’s going on inside of us, we can recognise emotions in others and respond appropriately.
Teachers and parents spend years trying to teach children about emotional expression. But adults also need to learn to identify emotions without feeling ashamed.
Isn’t it true that often we feel uncomfortable with certain feelings? Possibly ashamed of them? Perhaps we were taught that some feelings are “good” and others are “bad”. We veered away from understanding sexual arousal because it was not allowed. Or we ignored cravings because we were told they would only lead to addiction. But we needn’t feel shame. Humans are emotional beings that display a varied range of feelings. We often run from emotions, rather than sitting in them long enough to feel them and create a plan for either keeping or changing them.
All this research this morning has helped me identify what’s going on inside of me. I am feeling fearful of failure. Envious of people succeeding. Probably a bit sad that I feel those things! I don’t WANT to feel these feelings so will have to have a little think about positive thinking and practical steps to feel otherwise.
Hope you are able to have a little time to evaluate what is going on inside of you today. Perhaps take some time to ask yourself: What feelings am I experiencing right now? Which are most prominent? When did the feeling begin? What is triggering this feeling? Is there any way I can change my environment to keep or rid this feeling?
Please get in touch if you want to discuss this further or have any further reading for me on the topic!
Enjoyed the article, Lauren! Burying or ignoring emotions is never helpful. Analyzing and then dealing with them is so much better. Just FYI, you should try posting this on Medium -- these are the kinds of the articles they seem to like. If you do, just make sure you read the curation guidelines so you format it properly.
This was very interesting. I really liked the idea that understanding our emotions is almost required in the training of a child. But as adults we lose that sense of urgency to understand ourselves. And the idea that we may possibly be ashamed of our feelings. Definitely going to be pondering this for a while. Thank you, Lauren! Well done!