

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. While in some cases nearly identical to event, incident suggests an occurrence of brief duration or secondary importance.Ī minor wartime incident When might occurrence be a better fit than event?Īlthough the words occurrence and event have much in common, occurrence may apply to a happening without intent, volition, or plan.In recent years, neuroscience has introduced a new way of thinking about our emotions. However, episode stresses the distinctiveness or apartness of an incident.Ī brief romantic episode in a life devoted to work When is incident a more appropriate choice than event? In some situations, the words episode and event are roughly equivalent. Specifically, circumstance implies a specific detail attending an action or event as part of its setting or background.Ĭouldn't recall the exact circumstances When would episode be a good substitute for event? The words circumstance and event are synonyms, but do differ in nuance. The events following the assassination When can circumstance be used instead of event? While all these words mean "something that happens or takes place," event usually implies an occurrence of some importance and frequently one having antecedent cause. Some common synonyms of event are circumstance, episode, incident, and occurrence. Frequently Asked Questions About event How is the word event distinct from other similar nouns?
