Understanding emotions, your own included

Many conversations fail on one confusion: the listener thinks they are committing themselves, the speaker thinks they are being contradicted. These are two separable operations.

Much of what we attribute to our character, to the person facing us or to the situation in fact belongs to an earlier state with nothing to do with any of them.

Three brains stacked by evolution, the archaic, the emotional and the rational: the model is taught everywhere and was abandoned by neuroscience long ago.

The episode is frequent, and so is the discomfort it produces. What that discomfort reveals has less to do with tears than with a boundary that work has moved without saying so.

Understanding what the other is going through and feeling it with them are two distinct operations. One supports action, the other exhausts.

Those who show nothing are credited with feeling nothing. The physiological measurements often say the opposite.

A questionnaire observes nothing: it records a self-description. That bounds what can be concluded from it, and it does not make it useless.

What it is proper to show, to whom and where, is neither universal nor stable. Historians have traced its shifts since the Middle Ages.

An absence of reply contains no information about its cause. We produce one anyway, immediately, and almost always to our own disadvantage.

In some there is almost nothing; in others, an interval. That gap is not a moral quality, it is a characteristic of functioning whose two ends both serve a purpose.

Emotional intelligence would explain 80% of professional success, the intelligence quotient 20%. This split comes from no study.

Letting nothing show reduces what is seen, not what is felt. A series of experiments conducted from 1998 onwards measured what this operation costs.

In a growing share of jobs, producing an affective state is part of the task. A sociologist named this in 1983, and research has measured since then what it costs.

The abbreviation has circulated since 1995 and suggests the existence of a measure comparable to the intelligence quotient. No serious instrument produces anything of the kind.

The idea that six emotions can be read on every face in the world dominated for fifty years. A review published in 2019 showed that the correspondence is far looser.