


The Japanese word amae, as Smith defines it, means “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. Yet there is something very nice, in an indulgent kind of way, about letting someone else handle things for you every once in a while. But fair warning: Once you are introduced to the feeling, you may find yourself feeling it more often.Īmae: To be an adult, particularly in a nation like the United States, is to be self-sufficient. The People Who Store Their Emotions in Their Fingertipsīelow you can find a brief list of ten more extremely precise words for emotions. 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 another’s offer of help because of the bother it would cause them.” Related Stories The odd thing about writing a book about discrete 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 now you know the name? Either way, Smith tells Science of Us that, while writing her book, she found herself batting away offers of help from others because she didn’t want to put them out. “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 down and named it. “It’s a long-held idea that if you put a name to a feeling, it can help that feeling become less overwhelming,” she said.

It’s a roundup of 154 words from around the world that you could call an exploration of “emotional granularity,” as it provides language for some very specific emotions you likely never knew you had. It’s exactly that - the subjective experience of emotions - that Smith explores in her charming new book, The Book of Human Emotions. “It’s now a physical thing - you can see a location of it in the brain.” And yet, of course, that’s not all an emotion is calling the amygdala the “fear center” of the brain offers little help in understanding what it means to be afraid. “It’s this idea that what we mean by ‘emotion’ has evolved,” Smith tells Science of Us. This is an intriguing trend for academics like Tiffany Watt Smith, a research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. 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, disgust, envy, fear, happiness, lust, pride, sadness, and shame. The scientists behind the latest brain-imaging studies say they can now pinpoint with precision where these feelings are located within our heads. Use of vague or ambiguous euphemisms (e.g.In recent years, neuroscience has introduced a new way of thinking about our emotions. Some weasel words may also have the effect of softening the force of a potentially loaded or otherwise controversial statement through some form of understatement, for example using detensifiers such as "somewhat" or "in most respects". Weasel words can imply meaning far beyond the claim actually being made. To tergiversate is synonymous with the use of weasel words to avoid making an outright assertion. : a word used in order to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or positionĪ weasel word (also, anonymous authority) is an informal term for words and phrases aimed at creating an impression that a specific and/or meaningful statement has been made, when only a vague or ambiguous claim has been communicated, enabling the specific meaning to be denied if the statement is challenged.
