Understanding emotions, your own included

The formula is a judgement disguised as an observation. What it designates covers at least three different things, two of which are not quantities.

Between someone who distinguishes four shades of annoyance and someone who distinguishes only one, the difference can be measured. It has a name: emotional granularity.

The formula is the default answer to a question that is not one. It is neither a lie nor information, and replacing it is not always desirable.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Knowing that something is wrong without being able to say what is neither rare nor a sign of a problem. It is a way of functioning, documented since the 1970s.