Grammar of emotions

How often have you felt lost in the translation of your own emotions or those of the other people around you? Learning and understanding the language of emotions is just like learning any other language - either your native or a foreign one. You always start as a basic user to eventually become an eloquent speaker. If, however, you sense that strong desire to become a linguist of emotions, you should go a bit deeper into their grammatical structure in order to interpret them skillfully in practice.

It all starts with the sound, and that’s the phonetics of emotions. With the first sounds in our lives, we begin to identify what feels good and what feels bad. The clear, soft sounds are soothing and give us a sense of security and coziness; whereas the muffled or high pitch sounds cause panic, anxiety and fear. While experiencing these first sounds, we learn the alphabet of emotions and develop the ability to recognise whether they sound in harmony or not.

Learning the lexicology of emotions is that stage of our development when we have already built a significant emotional vocabulary and have a clear idea of what we feel and how it feels. We can make a difference between the denotation and the connotations of the emotions, i.e. being angry may also mean that you are worried, hurt or frightened. Interpreting the multiple meaning of feelings and emotions is a sign of your emotional maturity.

The morphology of emotions, explains their complex structure and how they have been formed. We can be excited and at the same time a little bit scared – it’s just like adding a suffix or prefix to a leading, root emotion which already forms a completely new one. Some feelings can bear a sense of the past like “regret” and “remorse” while others can be future oriented like being optimistic or enthusiastic. Furthermore, we can identify emotions that keep us active or passive for quite some time.

The syntax of emotions will teach you how to read and understand a whole emotional sentence or even a message. You will be able to identify who or what is the reason to have provoked a given emotion, both simple and complex one and what could be the possible reactions and feelings that might further occur. Additionally, you will be aware of whether these reasons originate within yourself or they are due to other sources.

Understanding the language of your emotions and that of the others may look as a significant challenge to master, but it’s always worth doing it. Knowing yourself is basically knowing and understanding your own feelings and emotions, and to skillfully manage them is already a sign of a high emotional intelligence.