The history of human emotions | Tiffany Watt Smith

190,509 views ・ 2018-01-31

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:12
I would like to begin with a little experiment.
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In a moment, I'm going to ask if you would close your eyes
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and see if you can work out
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what emotions you're feeling right now.
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Now, you're not going to tell anyone or anything.
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The idea is to see how easy or perhaps hard you find it
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to pinpoint exactly what you're feeling.
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And I thought I'd give you 10 seconds to do this.
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OK?
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Right, let's start.
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OK, that's it, time's up.
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How did it go?
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You were probably feeling a little bit under pressure,
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maybe suspicious of the person next to you.
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Did they definitely have their eyes closed?
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Perhaps you felt some strange, distant worry
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about that email you sent this morning
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or excitement about something you've got planned for this evening.
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Maybe you felt that exhilaration that comes when we get together
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in big groups of people like this;
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the Welsh called it "hwyl,"
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from the word for boat sails.
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Or maybe you felt all of these things.
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There are some emotions which wash the world in a single color,
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like the terror felt as a car skids.
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But more often, our emotions crowd and jostle together
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until it is actually quite hard to tell them apart.
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Some slide past so quickly you'd hardly even notice them,
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like the nostalgia that will make you reach out
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to grab a familiar brand in the supermarket.
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And then there are others that we hurry away from,
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fearing that they'll burst on us,
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like the jealousy that causes you to search a loved one's pockets.
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And of course, there are some emotions which are so peculiar,
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you might not even know what to call them.
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Perhaps sitting there, you had a little tingle of a desire
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for an emotion one eminent French sociologist called "ilinx,"
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the delirium that comes with minor acts of chaos.
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For example, if you stood up right now and emptied the contents of your bag
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all over the floor.
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Perhaps you experienced one of those odd, untranslatable emotions
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for which there's no obvious English equivalent.
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You might have felt the feeling the Dutch called "gezelligheid,"
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being cozy and warm inside with friends when it's cold and damp outside.
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Maybe if you were really lucky,
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you felt this:
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"basorexia,"
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a sudden urge to kiss someone.
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(Laughter)
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We live in an age
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when knowledge of emotions is an extremely important commodity,
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where emotions are used to explain many things,
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exploited by our politicians,
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manipulated by algorithms.
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Emotional intelligence, which is the skill of being able to recognize and name
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your own emotions and those of other people,
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is considered so important, that this is taught in our schools and businesses
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and encouraged by our health services.
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But despite all of this,
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I sometimes wonder
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if the way we think about emotions is becoming impoverished.
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Sometimes, we're not even that clear what an emotion even is.
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You've probably heard the theory
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that our entire emotional lives can be boiled down
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to a handful of basic emotions.
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This idea is actually about 2,000 years old,
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but in our own time,
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some evolutionary psychologists have suggested that these six emotions --
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happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise --
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are expressed by everyone across the globe in exactly the same way,
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and therefore represent the building blocks
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of our entire emotional lives.
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Well, if you look at an emotion like this,
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then it looks like a simple reflex:
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it's triggered by an external predicament,
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it's hardwired,
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it's there to protect us from harm.
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So you see a bear, your heart rate quickens,
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your pupils dilate, you feel frightened, you run very, very fast.
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The problem with this picture is,
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it doesn't entirely capture what an emotion is.
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Of course, the physiology is extremely important,
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but it's not the only reason why we feel the way we do
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at any given moment.
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What if I was to tell you that in the 12th century,
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some troubadours didn't see yawning
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as caused by tiredness or boredom like we do today,
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but thought it a symbol of the deepest love?
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Or that in that same period, brave men -- knights --
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commonly fainted out of dismay?
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What if I was to tell you
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that some early Christians who lived in the desert
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believed that flying demons who mainly came out at lunchtime
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could infect them with an emotion they called "accidie,"
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a kind of lethargy that was sometimes so intense
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it could even kill them?
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Or that boredom, as we know and love it today,
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was first really only felt by the Victorians,
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in response to new ideas about leisure time and self-improvement?
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What if we were to think again
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about those odd, untranslatable words for emotions
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and wonder whether some cultures might feel an emotion more intensely
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just because they've bothered to name and talk about it,
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like the Russian "toska,"
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a feeling of maddening dissatisfaction
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said to blow in from the great plains.
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The most recent developments in cognitive science show
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that emotions are not simple reflexes,
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but immensely complex, elastic systems
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that respond both to the biologies that we've inherited
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and to the cultures that we live in now.
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They are cognitive phenomena.
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They're shaped not just by our bodies, but by our thoughts,
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our concepts, our language.
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The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett has become very interested
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in this dynamic relationship between words and emotions.
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She argues that when we learn a new word for an emotion,
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new feelings are sure to follow.
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As a historian, I've long suspected that as language changes,
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our emotions do, too.
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When we look to the past, it's easy to see that emotions have changed,
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sometimes very dramatically,
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in response to new cultural expectations and religious beliefs,
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new ideas about gender, ethnicity and age,
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even in response to new political and economic ideologies.
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There is a historicity to emotions
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that we are only recently starting to understand.
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So I agree absolutely that it does us good to learn new words for emotions,
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but I think we need to go further.
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I think to be truly emotionally intelligent,
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we need to understand where those words have come from,
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and what ideas about how we ought to live and behave
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they are smuggling along with them.
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Let me tell you a story.
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It begins in a garret in the late 17th century,
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in the Swiss university town of Basel.
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Inside, there's a dedicated student living some 60 miles away from home.
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He stops turning up to his lectures,
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and his friends come to visit and they find him dejected and feverish,
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having heart palpitations,
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strange sores breaking out on his body.
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Doctors are called,
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and they think it's so serious that prayers are said for him
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in the local church.
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And it's only when they're preparing to return this young man home
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so that he can die,
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that they realize what's going on,
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because once they lift him onto the stretcher,
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his breathing becomes less labored.
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And by the time he's got to the gates of his hometown,
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he's almost entirely recovered.
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And that's when they realize
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that he's been suffering from a very powerful form of homesickness.
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It's so powerful, that it might have killed him.
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Well, in 1688, a young doctor, Johannes Hofer,
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heard of this case and others like it
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and christened the illness "nostalgia."
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The diagnosis quickly caught on in medical circles around Europe.
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The English actually thought they were probably immune
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because of all the travel they did in the empire and so on.
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But soon there were cases cropping up in Britain, too.
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The last person to die from nostalgia
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was an American soldier fighting during the First World War in France.
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How is it possible that you could die from nostalgia
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less than a hundred years ago?
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But today, not only does the word mean something different --
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a sickening for a lost time rather than a lost place --
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but homesickness itself is seen as less serious,
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sort of downgraded from something you could die from
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to something you're mainly worried your kid might be suffering from
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at a sleepover.
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This change seems to have happened in the early 20th century.
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But why?
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Was it the invention of telephones or the expansion of the railways?
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Was it perhaps the coming of modernity,
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with its celebration of restlessness and travel and progress
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that made sickening for the familiar
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seem rather unambitious?
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You and I inherit that massive transformation in values,
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and it's one reason why we might not feel homesickness today
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as acutely as we used to.
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It's important to understand
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that these large historical changes influence our emotions
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partly because they affect how we feel about how we feel.
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Today, we celebrate happiness.
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Happiness is supposed to make us better workers
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and parents and partners;
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it's supposed to make us live longer.
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In the 16th century,
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sadness was thought to do most of those things.
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It's even possible to read self-help books from that period
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which try to encourage sadness in readers
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by giving them lists of reasons to be disappointed.
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(Laughter)
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These self-help authors thought you could cultivate sadness as a skill,
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since being expert in it would make you more resilient
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when something bad did happen to you, as invariably it would.
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I think we could learn from this today.
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Feel sad today, and you might feel impatient, even a little ashamed.
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Feel sad in the 16th century, and you might feel a little bit smug.
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Of course, our emotions don't just change across time,
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they also change from place to place.
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The Baining people of Papua New Guinea speak of "awumbuk,"
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a feeling of lethargy that descends when a houseguest finally leaves.
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(Laughter)
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Now, you or I might feel relief,
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but in Baining culture,
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departing guests are thought to shed a sort of heaviness
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so they can travel more easily,
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and this heaviness infects the air and causes this awumbuk.
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And so what they do is leave a bowl of water out overnight
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to absorb this air,
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and then very early the next morning, they wake up and have a ceremony
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and throw the water away.
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Now, here's a good example
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of spiritual practices and geographical realities combining
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to bring a distinct emotion into life
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and make it disappear again.
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One of my favorite emotions is a Japanese word, "amae."
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Amae is a very common word in Japan,
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but it is actually quite hard to translate.
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It means something like the pleasure that you get
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when you're able to temporarily hand over responsibility for your life
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to someone else.
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(Laughter)
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Now, anthropologists suggest
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that one reason why this word might have been named and celebrated
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in Japan
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is because of that country's traditionally collectivist culture,
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whereas the feeling of dependency
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may be more fraught amongst English speakers,
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who have learned to value self-sufficiency and individualism.
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This might be a little simplistic,
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but it is tantalizing.
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What might our emotional languages tell us not just about what we feel,
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but about what we value most?
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Most people who tell us to pay attention to our well-being
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talk of the importance of naming our emotions.
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But these names aren't neutral labels.
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They are freighted with our culture's values and expectations,
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and they transmit ideas about who we think we are.
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Learning new and unusual words for emotions will help attune us
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to the more finely grained aspects of our inner lives.
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But more than this, I think these words are worth caring about,
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because they remind us how powerful the connection is
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between what we think
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and how we end up feeling.
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True emotional intelligence requires that we understand
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the social, the political, the cultural forces
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that have shaped what we've come to believe about our emotions
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and understand how happiness or hatred or love or anger
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might still be changing now.
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Because if we want to measure our emotions
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and teach them in our schools
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and listen as our politicians tell us how important they are,
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then it is a good idea that we understand
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where the assumptions we have about them
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have come from,
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and whether they still truly speak to us now.
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I want to end with an emotion I often feel
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when I'm working as a historian.
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It's a French word, "dépaysement."
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It evokes the giddy disorientation that you feel in an unfamiliar place.
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One of my favorite parts of being a historian
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is when something I've completely taken for granted,
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some very familiar part of my life,
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is suddenly made strange again.
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Dépaysement is unsettling,
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but it's exciting, too.
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And I hope you might be having just a little glimpse of it right now.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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