10 Extremely Precise Words for Emotions You Didn't Fifty-fifty Know You Had

In recent years, neuroscience has introduced a new manner of thinking about our emotions. The scientists behind the latest brain-imaging studies say they can now pinpoint with precision where these feelings are located within our heads. In 2013, for instance, a team of psychologists published a study in which they claimed that they had found neural correlates for nine very distinct human emotions: anger, cloy, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness, and shame.

This is an intriguing trend for academics similar Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Middle for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. "It's this idea that what we mean by 'emotion' has evolved," Smith tells Scientific discipline of Us. "It's now a physical thing — you can encounter a location of it in the brain." And still, of course, that's not all an emotion is; calling the amygdala the "fright middle" of the brain offers little help in understanding what it means to exist afraid.

It's exactly that — the subjective experience of emotions — that Smith explores in her charming new book, The Book of Man Emotions. Information technology's a roundup of 154 words from around the world that y'all could telephone call an exploration of "emotional granularity," as information technology provides language for some very specific emotions you likely never knew you had. "It'due south a long-held idea that if you put a name to a feeling, it can help that feeling go less overwhelming," she said. "All sorts of stuff that's swirling around and feeling painful can start to feel a bit more manageable," once you've pinned the feeling downwards and named information technology.

The odd thing about writing a book about detached emotions you never knew existed is that you start to experience them — or is it that you were already experiencing them, and it's just that at present y'all know the proper name? Either fashion, Smith tells Science of Us that, while writing her book, she found herself batting away offers of help from others considering she didn't want to put them out. That is, she was feeling greng jai, a Thai term (that's sometimes spelled kreng jai in translation) for "the feeling of being reluctant to accept some other's offer of help considering of the bother information technology would cause them."

Below you tin find a brief listing of x more extremely precise words for emotions. But fair warning: Once you are introduced to the feeling, y'all may find yourself feeling information technology more than ofttimes.

Amae: To be an developed, particularly in a nation like the U.s.a., is to be self-sufficient. Yet at that place is something very prissy, in an indulgent kind of way, about letting someone else handle things for you every once in a while. The Japanese discussion amae, as Smith defines information technology, ways "leaning on another person's goodwill," a feeling of deep trust that allows a relationship — with your partner, with your parent, even with yourself — to flourish. Or, equally the Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi has put information technology, it's "an emotion that takes the other person'southward love for granted." It's a kittenish kind of dear, in other words, every bit evidenced by an alternate translation of the word: "behaving like a spoiled child."

L'appel du vide: You're waiting for the train when an inexplicable thought flashes into your heed: What if you jumped off the platform? Or mayhap you're driving up some precarious mountain laissez passer, when you feel strangely moved to wiggle your steering wheel to the right and canvass clear off the road. American psychologists in 2012 published a paper in which this feeling was dubbed the "loftier place phenomenon" (and their study suggested, by the way, that its presence does not necessarily signal suicidal ideation), simply the French term for the phenomenon is much more attracting, as French words so oftentimes are: l'appel du vide, or "the call of the void." Every bit the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once observed, the emotion is then unsettling because of the way it "creates an unnerving, shaky sensation of not being able to trust one'south own instincts." It's a reminder, so, to perhaps not ever let your emotions dominion your behavior.

Awumbuk: It's a funny thing virtually firm guests. While they're in your home and you're tripping over the extra shoes and suitcases that are suddenly littered about your living room, you start dreaming about how squeamish it volition exist when they leave. Notwithstanding, afterward they do, your identify often feels too empty. To the Baining people of Papua New Guinea, Smith writes, this feeling is so prevalent that it gets a proper name all to itself: awumbuk, or the feeling of "emptiness after visitors depart." At that place is, luckily, a style of ridding the dwelling of this rather melancholy feeling: Smith writes that "once their guests accept left, the Baining fill a bowl with water and go out it overnight to absorb the festering air. The next twenty-four hour period, the family unit rises very early and ceremonially flings the water into the trees, whereupon ordinary life resumes." That'south 1 manner to do it.

Brabant: In 1984, author Douglas Adams and TV comedy producer John Lloyd paired upward to publish a volume chosen The Deeper Meaning of Liff: A Lexicon of Things In that location Aren't Whatsoever Words for Notwithstanding–But There Ought to Be. Smith apparently agreed with these two on at least this: that at that place should be a word for the fun of pushing someone's buttons, to meet how much you can tease them until they snap. Adams and Lloyd divers the word every bit the feeling yous become when you are "very much inclined to see how far you can push someone." (To my mind, an alternating definition might be "having a younger brother or younger sis.")

Depaysement: People practise some out-of-character things in strange countries. They strike upwardly conversations with strangers in bars, fifty-fifty if they would never do the same back abode. They wear unflattering hats. There'southward something about being a stranger in a strange land that's equal parts exhilarating and disorienting, and this messy mix of feelings is what the French word depaysement — literally, decountrification, or beingness without a country — means to capture. Information technology's "the feeling of being an outsider," and though getting lost because you tin't quite read the street signs as well as you lot maybe thought you lot could can be unsettling, the feeling of existence somewhere else but every bit often "swirls us upwards into a kind of giddiness, but ever felt when far away from abode."

Ilinx: There exists a GIF of a fluffy white cat that speaks direct to my soul. In it, the cat is perched atop a desk, and every bit its human places various objects about its paws — a lighter, a glasses case, a wallet — it pushes each item off the desk and onto the flooring. Yous might say the fauna is expressing ilinx, a French word for "the 'strange excitement' of wanton destruction," as Smith describes information technology, borrowing her phrasing from sociologist Roger Caillois. "Callois traced ilinx dorsum to the practices of ancient mystics who by whirling and dancing hoped to induce rapturous trance states and glimpse alternative realities," Smith writes. "Today, even succumbing to the urge to create a minor chaos by kicking over the function recycling bin should give you a mild hit."

Kaukokaipuu: People of, say, Irish descent who have never actually been to the country of their ancestry may notwithstanding experience an unexpected ache for it, every bit if they miss it — a strange, contradictory sort of feeling, as you can't really miss someplace you lot've never been. Simply the Finnish recognize that the emotion exists, and they gave it a name: kaukokaipuu, a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never visited. Information technology can also hateful a kind of highly specified version of wanderlust, a "craving for a distant state" — dreaming from your desk about some far-off identify like New Zealand, or the Hawaiian Islands, or Machu Picchu, with an intensity that feels almost like homesickness.

Malu: You'd like to think you are a person of average conversational and social skills, and yet this all evaporates the moment you observe yourself sharing an lift with the CEO of your visitor. The Dusun Baguk people of Republic of indonesia know how y'all feel. Specifically, Smith writes that they would call this feeling malu, "the sudden experience of feeling constricted, junior and awkward around people of higher status." Instead of this being something to be embarrassed nigh, however, Smith's inquiry has shown that in this detail culture it's considered an entirely appropriate response; it'south fifty-fifty a sign of good manners. Something to recollect the side by side time your mind goes blank when your boss asks you a question: You are only being polite.

Pronoia: At one point in J.D. Salinger's Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, Seymour Drinking glass muses about himself, "Oh, God, if I'thousand annihilation by a clinical name, I'm a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I doubtable people of plotting to make me happy." About three decades later, sociologist Fred Goldner came up with a name for this: pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of the fear that you are at the center of some diabolical lot, pronoia, equally Smith describes it, is the "strange, creeping feeling that everyone'due south out to assistance you lot." And, hey, just because you're pronoid doesn't mean they're not out to help you.

Torschlusspanik: Life is passing you past. The deadline's approaching. The train'south a-comin'. Literally translated from German, torschlusspanik means "gate-endmost panic," a word to summarize that fretful awareness of fourth dimension running out. Information technology may serve you well, when experiencing this panicky emotion, to hesitate before assuasive it to spur you lot toward impulsivity, and call to mind the German idiom Torschlusspanik ist ein schlechter Ratgeber — that is, "Torschlusspanik is a bad adviser."

10 Words for Emotions You Didn't Fifty-fifty Know You Had