Some scientists believe we have infinite emotions, so long as we can name them. melissadahl writes
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It feels like I know what a feeling is. Across the centuries, both ancient philosophers and modern psychologists have arrived at the same basic understanding that there are a limited number of discrete human emotions, preset by the human psyche. The Confucian text Liji lists seven feelings thought to be innate: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, hate, and desire.
This is an irritating, borderline unscientific view to many of Barrett’s colleagues. Scientists like precision. They like taxonomies like kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species and sorting each new discovery into its proper taxon. “It will surely be the case that our current emotion categories will be revised, and likely will need to be subdivided,” the authors of The Neuroscience of Emotion write in a critique of constructed-emotion theory.
It’s fear, as well as disgust, that gives me pause when considering constructed-emotion theory. If emotions are constructed, then why do so many of us construct the same one when we see a snake? There’s a famous patient known as SM who suffered damage to her amygdala due to a rare genetic condition; as a result, she feels no fear. Snakes don’t bother her, as researchers found out the hard way.
In December 2017, Barrett gave a TED Talk in which she argued that you have more control over your emotions than you think you do. The sheepish self-help-book reader in me is exhilarated by the word control. The notion that you can transform your emotions through words — I want to flag down random passersby and ask them if they’ve heard the good news. I want to tell them about the research in psychology that found that changing what you call a feeling can change the way you feel it.
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