Words for What We Feel: Wittgenstein and the Psychology of Emotional Granularity

“I am doing fine,” a completely adequate answer to a question which has been asked far too many times, but have you ever taken the time to consider how you actually felt? It is clearly not our intention to deceive by giving this reply, yet for some unknown reason we decide to go for this shortcut, even though it doesn’t really tell the truth.

We usually use only a limited number of words to describe our day-to-day lives, such as good, bad, fine, or tired. Although we are proficient in a hundred technical terms connected with our work, we are completely unable to express our own feelings. It then becomes a question of whether this inability to describe our own feelings is simply an annoyance or instead a mechanism that has an effect on our everyday lives.

The Philosopher’s Boundary

Ludwig Wittgenstein offered the most accurate description of the issue in 1922; in his work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he stated a proposition which has since been quoted and distorted “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1922, proposition 5.6). Wittgenstein belonged to the realm of logic and showed no interest in discussing feelings.

 His focus was on what could be meaningfully stated, and his conclusion was extremely clear in that beyond a certain point language fails and ceases to be of any use; rather, any further attempt to express oneself at that point is pointless.

That proposition, on account of its accessibility, soon left its original context. When it is applied to the realm of emotion, the proposition becomes rather disturbing. 

If your vocabulary stops you from being able to describe the different shades of emotion, does that really mean that you do not feel as deeply? Is there a direct link between the vocabulary used for emotions and the depth of one’s emotions? 

Throughout most of the 20th century these questions remained unanswered since there was no means of measuring them. This has now changed.

The Psychologist’s Measurement

Psychology today has a term for the phenomenon which Wittgenstein was discussing. That term is now called emotional granulation or emotional differentiation.

Researchers keep on measuring people’s feelings over days or weeks and look at how their reports change. A person with low granularity rates all their negative emotions in batches (when sadness increases, so do anger, anxiety, and stress), as if they were all controlled by one switch. A person with high granularity, on the other hand, displays a different pattern, their anger can rise while their sadness remains unchanged, since for them these are truly separate experiences rather than just different aspects of a single emotion called “bad.”

The results are by no means insignificant. Kashdan, Barrett, and McKnight (2015) found that individuals who are able to differentiate their negative emotions are less likely to resort to harmful coping mechanisms when distressed, react less strongly to social rejection, and suffer less anxiety. Most importantly, the authors regard differentiation as a skill, not a trait.

The person who can distinguish between feeling let down and feeling disrespected is not just more articulate rather they seem to be better defended.

Why Naming Does Anything At All

The mechanism is at least interesting, since merely identifying a problem does not imply that it can be solved. How then, does the classification of feelings result in their resolution?

Lieberman and his colleagues in 2007 carried out a study in which participants were asked to attach emotion words to disturbing images. 

This labelling of the emotion led to decreased activity in the amygdala, a region which is at the heart of the threat response, and at the same time caused activity to increase in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Since the two areas of the brain showed opposite changes, it can be said that the act of naming a feeling functions somewhat like a brake.

Torre and Lieberman (2018) later claimed that this phenomenon, which they refer to as affect labelling, functions as a kind of intrinsic emotion regulation. What makes it special is that no sense of regulation is experienced when it is occurring. 

Reappraisal, which involves deliberately reframing a situation, requires obvious effort, while labelling a feeling requires no such effort, yet it is still effective.

This complicates the general advice of thinking positively: these participants responded positively to precision rather than optimism.

Constructed, Not Discovered

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion provides an explanation, and it is more radical than it at first seems because she claims that emotions are not something that the brain discovers when they are dormant but instead that the brain constructs them based on the context, the environment, and the range of experiences it has had.

If it is true, then this shows why the process of labelling has an effect, since the labelling is not retroactive but instead forms the emotions themselves, in that case, Wittgenstein’s statement changes from being merely a metaphor to becoming something that is more like a mechanism.

It is also clear for this reason why emotional vocabularies vary so greatly from one culture to another.

Lomas (2016) collected 216 terms from the world’s languages which have no single-word equivalent in English and grouped them under categories such as feelings, relationships, and character. 

Indian languages have richness in this respect. Abhimaan is a clear case in point, it is a state involving hurt pride and affection. It is the particular sulk which is only possible in the case of someone you love. 

It is still an open question whether an English speaker can experience these same emotions, but according to Barrett, such questions at least constitute a coherent possibility.

Where the Argument Breaks Down

It is necessary to acknowledge how simple it is for this idea to be overstated.

The strong version of linguistic determinism, which holds that language directly determines thought, has for decades been challenged. There are feelings that people are unable to name.

The relationship between cause and effect is even more difficult to determine than the research summaries indicate.

Individuals who have a high level of emotional granularity might be better regulated since they are good at naming emotions, or it could be that they are good at naming emotions because they were already well regulated and have had more experience in paying attention to themselves.

The Honest Position

It is unlikely that language has an effect on our feelings, but it does influence the things we notice, the actions we take, and the things we tell other people.

Wittgenstein does not consider this to be a minor inheritance, he draws a boundary and tells us not to go beyond it, while the psychology proposes something more gentle, in that the more we attempt to name things, the further the boundary shifts and the more we are able to grow in this world.

The next time “fine” spontaneously comes to the front, it might be worth taking the three seconds to resist and seek out a more accurate word, not because the term will certainly dispel the feeling but because the act of doing so is already pointing towards something new.

References (APA 7)

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x

Lomas, T. (2016). Towards a positive cross-cultural lexicography: Enriching our emotional landscape through 216 “untranslatable” words pertaining to well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 11(5), 546–558. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2015.1127993

Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073917742706

Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus logico-philosophicus (C. K. Ogden, Trans.). Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.