Naming a feeling turns the volume down
Researchers in California put people in a brain scanner and showed them angry and frightened faces. When the volunteers simply picked a word for the emotion they were looking at, activity dropped in the amygdala, the part of the brain that handles threat, and rose in the region used for deliberate thinking.
The finding has a name — affect labelling — and it is the reason every nursery has a feelings chart on the wall. A child who manages to say I am ANGRY has already taken some of the heat out of it. Saying nothing and biting someone does not have the same effect.
The difference between worried and nervous is real information
Some people carve their feelings finely and others work with a blunt instrument. Psychologists call the difference emotional granularity, and the ones who use precise words tend to cope better, because a problem you can name accurately is a problem you can do something about.
WORRIED, NERVOUS and SCARED are not three words for one feeling. Worried is about something that might happen later. Nervous comes with a body attached, just before the thing. Scared is happening now. CROSS, GRUMPY and ANGRY split the same way, by size and by how long they last. Giving a child all three is giving them three different problems to solve.
Where do you feel it?
A Finnish research team asked around seven hundred people to colour in a blank body outline showing where they felt each emotion. The maps that came back were strikingly consistent, across languages and across cultures.
Anger lit up the chest and the hands. Fear concentrated in the chest. Sadness drained the arms and legs and left a heavy middle. Happiness and LOVE lit up almost the entire figure. Where do you feel it in your body is a question that works on children who have gone quiet, because pointing is easier than explaining, and the answer is usually the stomach.
Feelings other languages have and English does not
German has Schadenfreude, the small guilty pleasure of watching someone else's plan go wrong. Portuguese has saudade, a fond ache for something loved and gone. Japanese has amae, the comfortable feeling of leaning on somebody who lets you.
None of these is exotic. English speakers feel all three regularly and have to use a sentence where another language uses a word. It is a useful thing to mention to a child who insists there is no word for how they feel: they may well be right, and describing it anyway is the entire skill.
Everything in the grid is allowed
The sunny half is well represented — HAPPY, CHEERFUL, EXCITED, PROUD, CALM, BRAVE, SILLY and LOVE — but so is the other one, with SAD, ANGRY, SCARED, WORRIED, NERVOUS, UPSET, CROSS, GRUMPY, BORED, TIRED and SHY all in there somewhere.
That balance is deliberate. Uncomfortable feelings are not faults to be fixed before anyone notices; they arrive, they say something about what is happening, and they pass. BORED in particular gets an unfairly bad press — it is very often the feeling that arrives immediately before a child invents something.