Language, emotion, and the world around us: how we learn to feel, and know ourselves, also by the words we use. From the article:

Mindfulness meditation, meanwhile, should encourage you to observe and deconstruct those bodily signals: understanding the physical origins of the emotions can help you to regulate the feelings. “Many things that seem unrelated to emotion actually have a profound impact on how you feel, because of the porous boundary between the social and the physical,” [Lisa Feldman Barrett] says.

Barrett also emphasises the benefits of a good emotion vocabulary. As her work has shown, our emotion concepts are not hard-wired, but learnt – and some people have many more nuanced ways of reading their bodily signals and describing how they are making them feel in a particular context. Rather than simply describing yourself as happy, for instance, you may distinguish whether you are “blissful” or “inspired”; rather than just feeling “sad”, you might say you are “dejected” or “disappointed”….

Eventually, you may find that you are able to categorise a situation with wonderful precision. Barrett, for instance, lists “gezellig”, the Dutch “feeling of togetherness”, “age-otori” from Japanese, which apparently describes “the feeling of looking worse after a haircut” and “litost”, from Czech culture, which refers to “the torment over one’s misery combined with the desire for revenge”. As she puts it: “Each word is another invitation to construct your feelings in new ways.”

See related posts: on language learning and infant development and on language, inspiration, and moral awakening