How granular should our perception of emotion get? Sometimes, the distinctions between emotions are quite small. Yet, it’s the fine-grained perception of emotion that gives us the material with which to construct emotionally vivid lives.
Consider, as an example, the difference between feeling nonplussed and feeling dumbfounded.
To feel nonplussed is to feel, metaphorically, that one cannot move forward because the path ahead has become perplexing. More literally, it’s the feeling of not being able to take action because the available information is thoroughly confusing. It is an emotion of being brought to a standstill.
To feel dumbfounded, on the other hand, is to feel incapable of thinking of anything appropriate to say given the confounding nonsense of a situation. It is a feeling of being speechless in the face of a perplexity.
An example of feeling dumbfounded was presented to me by a friend the other day. I was writing an entry for this emotional granularity project about the feeling of being crestfallen. The WordPress blogging software that I was using showed a red alert about the headline for the article, which was simply titled “Crestfallen”.
The WordPress software warned me that my headline would not have good search engine optimization because:
- The headline needed more common words.
- The headline needed more uncommon words.
- The headline was not emotional enough.
I was both confused and amused by this automated advice. How could the headline need both common and uncommon words at the same time? Isn’t that just a way of saying that it needs more words? What’s more, how could a word like “crestfallen” be described as not emotional enough?
When a friend looked at this WordPress advice, she was confused too. She described herself as “dumbfounded”. She chose that word, not “nonplussed”. Why? Specifically, she didn’t know what to say. Action wasn’t at issue.
Then there’s the emotion of bewilderment, in which one’s perplexity takes on the distinct tone of feeling as if one has suddenly, inexplicably, arrived in a conceptual wilderness without any idea of how to get back to the reassuring straight lines of cognitive civilization.
To get even more granular, we could distinguish between the emotions of being dumbfounded and being dumbstruck. Whereas being dumbfounded feels merely perplexed into silence, being dumbstruck feels like being slapped in the face with the nonsense of a situation, then left standing there without the power of speech.
Maybe the difference seems minor to you. Couldn’t we just use the word confused?
Sure, we could do that, but we’d lose some of the richness and precision of the discussion in the process.
Besides, who are you to say that the distinction between these finely grained emotions isn’t real? Perhaps you can’t tell difference, but then, this isn’t all about you. Other people may feel these emotions in different ways. To them, it’s real.
Emotions are subjectively defined, not objective material for scientific measurement. Emotions aren’t neural networks that we’re born with. They grow as we grow, and they become real when we share them with others. There’s no single correct way to describe and organize our emotions, any more than there is a single correct way to feel.
