Understanding emotions, your own included

Two instruments bearing the same name can rank the same people in an almost different order. The distinction that explains it dates from the early 2000s.

Digital writing lost prosody and manufactured a substitute system in thirty years. It works, imperfectly, and it produces its own misunderstandings.

An innocuous remark triggers in you a disproportionate reaction, always the same, in the same circumstances. That is not an anomaly, it is ordinary learning.

A well-built self-description informs. It predicts neither a career, nor a relationship, nor a future reaction, and claiming otherwise is a methodological fault.

We read a voice more reliably than a face, and we trust it less. The available work suggests this hierarchy is the wrong way round.

Under the name of psychosocial skills, school curricula have taken up an object that had no place there thirty years ago. The available evaluations are encouraging and limited.

Fast heart, damp hands, short breath: the body produces roughly the same thing before good and bad news. What differs is what we make of it.

Anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise: the list is taught everywhere. Yet it has changed several times, including at its author's own hand.

One person's state alters the others', often without anyone noticing. The phenomenon has been measured since the 1990s.

Asserting yourself and losing your temper are two different things, and confusing them costs dearly at both ends of the scale.

Software announces the affective state of a customer, a driver or a candidate from a video. The European regulation adopted in 2024 prohibits part of these uses.

For some fifteen years, psychology has discovered that part of its most famous results does not reproduce. The field of emotions lost several classics to it.

The confidence with which we guess what someone is thinking has almost no relation to our accuracy. The paradigm that showed it dates from the 1990s.

The idea that a good decision is taken coolly is comfortable. Work on patients with frontal lesions suggests that without an affective state, one no longer decides at all.

No language has a complete vocabulary of affective states. What it names with a short word indicates what the society speaking it judges important.