Understanding emotions, your own included

We are genuinely moved by characters we know perfectly well never existed. The problem has a name, and it is not solved.

Trauma, toxic, coercive control, mental load: terms from the clinic now circulate in ordinary conversation. The gain is real, and so is the cost.

It is judged out of place almost everywhere, and yet it was long a recognised instrument of political and judicial life. What has changed is not the emotion.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.