A wide vocabulary is good for your mental health
Image: in the public domain
There are dozens of ways to describe feeling angry. When you read the news these days, do you say that you're vexed, livid or ropeable? Merely miffed or incandescent with rage? Or are you more of a HULK MAD, HULK SMASH kind of communicator? It turns out that it could matter a lot.
An increasing body of research suggests that 'emotional granularity' – the ability to name discrete, finely differentiated emotional states – makes it easier to manage them. People with 'high granularity' are less likely to become aggressive or drown their sorrows in booze, for example.
Despite how it often feels, emotions are not an automatic reaction to the horrors of the world. Your body’s first response is physiological – raised heart rate, sensory alertness, and so on. Physically, your body can’t tell the difference between a winning lottery ticket and an escaped tiger. Your brain uses cues from your environment and past to construct an emotional response – fear, anger, excitement – which gives you information on how to act: run, fight, call your mum.
This means people with a wider emotional vocabulary aren't just better at describing how they feel – they actually feel a wider range of emotions. Giving your brain the vocabulary to talk about various emotional states allows it to construct those states in response to physiological arousal.
We’ve all seen someone acting furious when a situation only called for irritated. Being able to differentiate the emotions you're feeling allows you to tailor your reactions to the precise situation, and so respond in much more appropriate, constructive ways.
The English language has hundreds of words to describe various shades of emotion, but if that's not enough for you, you could steal a few words from other languages, like German's Weltschmerz, which refers to the pain you feel when you compare the world as it is to the world as it could, or should be. Japanese gives us mottainai, a sense of shame and sadness in response to wastefulness.
If that still doesn't quite nail it, you could try the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, an art project by John Koenig, who captures emotions we often struggle to talk about by inventing words for them.
I like vemodalen, the frustration of taking a photo of something amazing, like the Taj Mahal, knowing thousands of identical photos already exist, and ellipsism, sadness that you'll never be able to know how history will turn out.
