““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.” In experiments, people high in granularity use a range of adjectives in reporting their experiments, while also describing the intensity of things like anger, embarrassment, guilt, and regret. People low in granularity will use angry, sad, or afraid to capture unpleasant things and excited, happy, or calm to describe pleasant things. The benefits of granularity go beyond being well-spoken, Barrett says: The greater your granularity, the “more precisely” you can experience your self and your world.
In her research, Barrett has discovered an unintuitive finding about the brain: She says that the emotional granularity isn’t just a result of people being able to identify their feelings. Rather, the brain, outside of your conscious awareness, “constructs” your emotional states, drawing, in a very real way, on your vocabulary of emotional concepts. “This is why emotional granularity can have such influence on your well-being and health,” she says. “It gives your brain more precise tools for handling the myriad challenges that life throws at you.””
“Maybe the granularity is part of the reason that foreign words for feelings are so powerful. Knowing that hygge is Danish for candlelit deep-winter coziness seems to stave off seasonal affective disorder, and that shinrin yoku is Japanese for “wilderness bathing” makes it easier to get up early on a Saturday to go romp around the woods. It’s amazing what happens when you can put it into words.”
(via tinsnip)
