Why only the Dutch know what an ‘inside joke’ looks like | Chantal van der List

Have you ever completed a task so beautifully that you feel incredible Yuan Bei Poetry? Or did you feel a huge rush PrussiaBecause you suddenly have the idea that everything will work out in your life? Maybe, maybe not, who’s to say? We seem to find it very difficult to experience feelings for which we have no words in our language.

Intrigued by these untranslatable emotional words, English psychologist Tim Lomas started an online group. He has now found more than a thousand.

Whoever indulges in this imagines himself in some kind of fairy-tale world with mysterious feelings like oompok: a feeling of heaviness, gloom and loneliness experienced by the indigenous people of Papua New Guinea when guests leave the house. or ilinuxwhich is a French word for the feeling when you have something precious and fragile in your hand, and you actually feel like breaking it.

or what about Spanish Torchlos, which is translated from German as “fear of closing doors”. Time passes, opportunities slip through your fingers, and you feel like you haven’t accomplished enough. For non-Dutch people, there is also a lot to experience in Lomas’s dictionary, with untranslatable words like inner pleasure, comfort and nothing.

However, we are generally not fully aware of our colorful inner world. Even the basic emotions of fear, happiness, sadness, and anger are difficult for some to identify. Shame really, because we are capable of experiencing very complex feelings. It only takes a little practice, such as for the connoisseur to learn to taste different wines. Once you master this, you will also know better what to do with those feelings. Knowing emotion words seems to help with this.

Canadian professor and neuropsychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett put it to the test. She asked people to keep an emotion diary and checked how often people said they had certain feelings. The more words people use to describe their feelings, the more they can handle those feelings.

These “feelings,” for example, detected glimmers of hope in moments of frustration, or noted that they also felt combative in the face of setbacks and managed to come up with new solutions. People who can do this well recover faster from stressful events and also drink less alcohol.

It’s time to significantly expand our sentiment palette. Why not invent new words? What feelings are you missing a word about?

Want to learn more about psychology and work? Read Chantal’s books Why Perfectionists Are Rarely Happy, 13 Advice Against Perfectionists (2021) and Our Wrong Thinking at Work (2018).