'Decoding Emotions and Experiences'
'Decoding Emotions and Experiences'
Emotional Granularity. Enablers from Dr. Susan David and Dr Brené Brown.
Carer Mentor Summary:
Two renowned researchers, Dr Susan David and Dr Brené Brown, offer articulate insights and tools to help us decode our emotions and experiences. This way, we can identify what we are feeling, hypothesise why we feel the way we feel, and consider potential responses. We can create more thinking space to make mindful, informed choices and prime our readiness potential. As Dr Brené Brown says, ‘Naming an experience doesn't give the experience more power it gives us the power of understanding, meaning and choice.’
Personal reflection:
Even the most empathetic people, your partner, friends, or family, are on the outside and so can’t feel exactly what we’re feeling inside. We all share the struggle of wanting others to understand how we’re feeling, but we find it difficult to articulate these feelings to others. Deciphering ourselves and sharing our humanity with others is a lifelong quest that keeps changing as we evolve. How can we translate ourselves so that others can understand us better?
In another article, 'Wholehearted living: Avoid Toxic Positivity and Rethink Our Beliefs Around Emotions,' I shared the work of Adam Grant and Susan David, who push us to rethink our relationship with our emotions.
Dr. Susan David’s book Emotional Agility quotes that there are seven basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, surprise, contempt, and disgust.12
‘… there are seven basic emotions … Emotions researchers actively debate the number of core emotions, with six to fifteen commonly cited. By any of these accounts, the so-called ‘negative’ emotions outnumber those labelled as ‘positive’. This basic emotions perspective is grounded in the theory that an irreducible number of key emotions is shared across cultures and species and have universal triggers (Ekman, 1999). This perspective can be contrasted with a ‘constructivist’ one (Barrett, 2015), which suggests that emotions do not have definable boundaries between them, but, rather, that we actively construct our emotional experience based on the context.’
David, Susan. Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change and Thrive in Work and Life (pp. 248-249). Penguin Books Ltd.
Emotional Granularity: Digging deeper into what we feel.
1. Dr. Susan David
Read more about Emotional Granularity on Susan David’s website.
What are you feeling?
Go beyond the obvious umbrella term to identify exactly what you’re feeling.
When we label our emotions accurately, we are more able to discern the precise cause of our feelings. And what scientists call the readiness potential in our brain is activated, allowing us to take concrete steps forward.
But not just any steps—the right steps for us. Because our emotions are data.
Susan David, Ph.D. is one of the world’s leading management thinkers and an award-winning Harvard Medical School psychologist. Her TED Talk on the topic of emotional agility has been seen by more than 10 million people. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal and often appears on national radio and television. #1 Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author. Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award Winner. Harvard Business Review Management Idea of the Year. Cofounder of the Institute of Coaching (a Harvard Medical School/McLean affiliate).
2. Dr Brené Brown. Mapping and decoding emotions and experiences.
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Description
In her latest book, five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Dr Brené Brown, writes, "If we want to find the way back to ourselves and each other, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories, and to be stewards of the stories that we hear. This is the framework for meaningful connection."
In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through 87 of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and lays out an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances - a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heart-breaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection.
Over the past two decades, Brown's extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as Brown's singular skills as a researcher/storyteller, to lay out an invaluable, research-based framework that shows us that naming an experience doesn't give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning and choice.
Brown shares, "I want this to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves. Even when we have no idea where we are."
Brown, Brené. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (p. xxiii). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Brené discusses eighty-seven emotions and experiences organized into groups. She writes ‘emotions and experiences’ because some are not emotions—they are thoughts that lead to emotion.
An excerpt highlighting the need for emotional granularity.
“Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity. In the words of Harvard psychologist Susan David, “Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.” 3 David explains that if we don’t have a sufficient emotional vocabulary, it is difficult to communicate our needs and to get the support that we need from others. But those who are able to distinguish between a range of various emotions “do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence than those who see everything in black and white.” In fact, research shows that the process of labeling emotional experience is related to greater emotion regulation and psychosocial well-being. 45
Brown, Brené. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (p. xxii). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
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Other Emotional Agility Articles:
Ekman P. (1999). “Basic emotions,” in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, eds Dalgleish T., Power M. J. (New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons Ltd; ), 45–60. [Google Scholar]
Barrett LF. The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Jan 1;12(1):1-23. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsw154. Erratum in: Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2017 Nov 1;12(11):1833. PMID: 27798257; PMCID: PMC5390700.
Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (New York: Avery, 2016), 85.
Lisa Feldman Barrett, James Gross, Tamlin Conner Christensen, and Michael Benvenuto, “Knowing What You’re Feeling and Knowing What to Do About It: Mapping the Relation between Emotion Differentiation and Emotion Regulation,” Cognition and Emotion 15, no. 6 (2001):713–24. doi: 10.1080/02699930143000239.
Yasemin Erbas, Eva Ceulemans, Madeline Lee Pe, Peter Koval, and Peter Kuppens, “Negative Emotion Differentiation: Its Personality and Well-being Correlates and a Comparison of Different Assessment Methods,” Cognition and Emotion 28, no. 7 (2014):1196–1213. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2013.875890.
Thank you for sharing this wisdom, Victoria.
I love the idea that drilling down into our own feelings and understanding their root causes will help us find pathways to relief and resolution. Yes!