The Art of Emotional Intelligence Part 2
PART2
Why You Should Expand Your Emotional Vocabulary
Emotional granularity, or the ability to precisely name a wide range of emotions, plays a critical role in psychological wellness. Here's how to cultivate it.
Psychology Today
BY KATRINA MCCOY, PH.D.
WE'VE ALL FELT IT-the nagging of an unpleasant emotion that is difficult to name or explain. Maybe you chalk it up to feeling "off" or "upset."
But finding more precise labels for our emotions can help us feel better-both in the moment and over the long term. This precise labeling of emotions is called emotional granularity.
The Benefits of Emotional Granularity
Emotional granularity is a skill, and researchers have demonstrated its important role in psychological well-being for decades. For example, a 2015 review of the research on emotional granularity found that folks who could differentiate their emotions while experiencing intense distress were less likely to engage in potentially harmful coping strategies, such as binge drinking, lashing out at others, and hurting themselves.
This means a person who describes feeling "angry," "dis-appointed," "sad," or "ashamed" in the context of, let's say, a conflict with a friend is likely to cope more effectively with those feelings than a person who uses vague descriptions, such as feeling "bad" or "upset."
Impressively, the benefits of emotional granularity extend beyond any specific moment of distress. That same 2015 review found that people who describe and label their emotions more specifically have less severe episodes of anxiety and depression.
How Emotional Granularity Works
How does using more specific language to describe unpleasant experiences reduce distress? A straightforward answer is this The more accurately we can describe our emotional experience and the context in which the experience is happening, the more information we have to decide what will help. Neuroscience even suggests that labeling our emotions can decrease activity in brain areas associated with negative emotions.
Yet a more nuanced answer requires us to take a step back and look at the components from which our emotions are made.
Start by answering a simple question: What are emotions?
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett succinctly sums up emotion as "your brain's creation of what your bodily sensations mean about what is going on around you in the world." Imagine this: Your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, and you're short of breath. If you are walking down a dark street alone at night, you might label your experience as fear. Now, imagine you are experiencing those same physical sensations while enjoying a candle-lit meal with a romantic interest. In that case, you might label the experience as attraction.
Thus, the same constellation of physiologic experiences organizes us around different actions depending on the context. In the first example, our fear functions to keep us safe and readies us to fight, flee, or freeze. In the second example, our attraction functions to focus our attention on our love interest, thus increasing our connectedness (and therefore regulation and well-being).
Importantly, our personal histories determine what predictions and needs we might have in any specific context.
Throughout our lives, we collect diverse emotional experiences, typically first labeled by our early caregivers, which help us categorize and form our emotion con-cepts-the diverse collection of physical
sensations, thoughts, and situations we learn to associate with a particular emotion.
Our concept of anger, for example, may include a flushed face, muscle tension, and being cut off in traffic. Our concept of anger may also have a racing heart, the urge to speak loudly, and thoughts of being taken for granted by a relationship partner.
These categorizations help us to navigate our physiology in the context of the specific situation, to figure out if we should take a breath and focus on a podcast—if, say, we were cut off in traf-fic-or use communication skills to improve our relationship if we're feeling taken for granted.
More precise language leads to more tailored responses ("mild annoyance" cues letting it go, whereas "outrage" cues advocating for change). Not only that, more precise language can allow us to incorporate details that create a different emotion category altogether. For example, if you home in to notice and describe hunger during a relational conflict, you may save yourself from experiencing anger.
How to Strengthen Emotional Granularity
Precisely labeling your emotional experiences, then, is likely to improve your quality of life. But how should you go about developing this skill? Experts recommend creating new emotion concepts and examining our existing concepts more closely.
In her book How Emotions Are Made, Feldman Barrett suggests that one of the easiest ways to build new emotion
More precise language can allow us to
incorporate details that create a different
emotional category altogether.
concepts is to learn new words. She also suggests we can add to our emotion concepts by being "collector(s) of experiences® through perspective-taking (e.g., reading books, watching mov-ies) and trying new things.
To start, explore the emotion words collected in the chart below. Find one or two words you don't typically use and ask yourself if they describe your recent experiences. Perhaps when you next notice that nagging, nameless emotion, you will skim this list of emotion words to find the ones that resonate.
Katrina McCoy, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, educator, consul-tant, and scholar with a private practice based in Westchester, New York.
Name That Feeling
Happy, sad, and angry are useful terms but aren't enough to describe the full range of our emotional experience. Explore this list to identify emotion words that better capture your feelings.
Name That Feeling
0%Anger
0%Rage
0%Indignation
0%Vengfulness
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