Emotional Granularity: Why I Recommend 'Atlas of the Heart.'

Dr Brené Brown's book. Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

Dear Readers, I highly recommend reading Atlas of the Heart to help you find the words to articulate what you feel. Often, the inability to articulate what’s going on inside us escalates the emotion itself.

Our ability to articulate our feelings can enable us to connect, ask for help, or figure out a solution. We may just be 'hangry' or experiencing a complex set of issues that need to be unpacked.

Emotional granularity can enable us to be more self-aware, better communicators and navigate forward.

Here is an excerpt from the book's introduction by Dr Brené Brown.

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Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience.

[These direct quotes are from the introduction of the book]

Language is our portal to meaning-making, connection, healing, learning, and self-awareness. Having access to the right words can open up entire universes. When we don’t have the language to talk about what we’re experiencing, our ability to make sense of what’s happening and share it with others is severely limited. Without accurate language, we struggle to get the help we need, we don’t always regulate or manage our emotions and experiences in a way that allows us to move through them productively, and our self-awareness is diminished. Language shows us that naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding and meaning.¹

Additionally, we have compelling research that shows that language does more than just communicate emotion, it can actually shape what we’re feeling. ² Our understanding of our own and others’ emotions is shaped by how we perceive, categorize, and describe emotional experiences—and these interpretations rely heavily on language.

Language speeds and strengthens connections in the brain when we are processing sensory information.³ But newer research shows that when our access to emotional language is blocked, our ability to interpret incoming emotional information is significantly diminished. Likewise, having the correct words to describe specific emotions makes us better able to identify those emotions in others, as well as to recognize and manage the emotional experiences when we feel them ourselves.

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.”⁴ 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.”⁵ In fact, research shows that the process of labeling emotional experience is related to greater emotion regulation and psychosocial well-being.⁶⁷

Atlas of the Heart explores

‘eighty-seven emotions and experiences that have been organized into groups. I say emotions and experiences because some of these are not emotions—they’re thoughts that lead to emotion.’

She goes on to outline the complexities of studying emotions:

The matter is complex because human emotions and experiences are studied from the perspective of philosophy, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and mental health (to name just a few disciplines), and research topics include studies of facial expression, physiology, brain imaging, genetics, personality traits, cross-cultural analysis, and more. Some researchers place all emotions into one of two categories—low arousal and high arousal—while others like to label them positive and negative. ⁸The approaches to understanding emotion are nearly endless.

I hope this inspires you to read the book. I’m sure you’ll find something inside it that resonates. It’s always reassuring when you can self-identify with what’s written. This wealth of evidence-based insights offered me a fresh perspective more food for thought.

Thank you, dear readers, for all your support. I hope you’ll subscribe if you haven’t already. I’d appreciate your support through a paid monthly or permanently discounted annual subscription if you can.

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1. Dr Brené Brown. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (p. xxi). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

2. Kristen A. Lindquist, Ajay B. Satpute, and Maria Gendron, “Does Language Do More than Communicate Emotion?” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24, no. 2 (2015):99–108. doi: 10.1177/0963721414553440.

3. Ibid

4. Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life (New York: Avery, 2016), 85.

5. Ibid

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Lisa A. Cavanaugh, Deborah J. MacInnis, and Allen M. Weiss, “Perceptual Dimensions Differentiate Emotions,” Cognition and Emotion 30, no. 8 (2016):1430–45. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2015.1070119.