Understanding emotions, your own included

Some people receive confidences without having asked for them. The role is useful, it is rarely reciprocal, and it is never counted.

Some people know on entering that something has happened. That perception is real, it is useful, and it says nothing about the cause.

A remark goes unnoticed by one person and stays with another for three days. What differs is not sensitivity in general, but what the sentence touches.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.