The Simple Trick That Can Help You Understand Your Emotions

Here’s the scene: You’re catching up with a friend over coffee when your elbow clips your cup, sending espresso all over her brand-new phone. You feel awful. You mop up the spill, apologize five times, and bolt—then avoid her for days, turning a ruined phone into a damaged friendship. 

The problem isn’t that you feel awful. It’s that awful doesn’t give you much to work with. It tells you the situation feels bad, but not why—or what to do about it.

Katie Hoemann, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, uses a version of this scenario to explain emotional granularity: the ability to make precise distinctions among all the emotions you’re experiencing in a particular situation. Instead of stopping at “awful,” you might recognize guilt about damaging the phone, embarrassment about causing a scene, and anxiety that your ticked-off friend isn’t going to forgive you.

Those distinctions don’t just describe the moment. They point to different responses. Guilt might push you to offer to replace the phone, embarrassment might explain why you want to disappear, and anxiety might prompt you to ask your friend whether your relationship is OK. Distinguishing among them gives you access to what Hoemann calls “situated scripts”—a clearer sense of what to do and say next.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a distinguished professor at Northeastern University, began documenting these differences in the 1990s. She compares emotional granularity to seeing color: One person might only notice red; another sees crimson, scarlet, burgundy, and maroon. Similarly, some people experience anger, sadness, and fear as different versions of bad, while others experience each one distinctly—and can make even finer distinctions among, say, anger, irritation, and frustration.

This isn’t simply a matter of collecting impressive new words. “The words are not the point,” Barrett says. It’s about developing a more precise understanding of what’s happening inside you, in this particular situation. The clearer that understanding becomes, she says, the better you can tailor your response.

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