Name: 【TED】Tiffany Watt Smith: The history of human emotions (The history of human emotions | Tiffany Watt Smith)
Uploaded: 2018-01-31T15:36:05.000Z
Duration: 14 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I would like to begin with a little experiment.

In a moment, I'm going to ask if you would close your eyes

Now, you're not going to tell anyone or anything.

The idea is to see how easy or perhaps hard you find it

And I thought I'd give you 10 seconds to do this.

You were probably feeling a little bit under pressure,

maybe suspicious of the person next to you.

Did they definitely have their eyes closed?

Perhaps you felt some strange, distant worry

or excitement about something you've got planned for this evening.

Maybe you felt that exhilaration that comes when we get together

There are some emotions which wash the world in a single color,

But more often, our emotions crowd and jostle together

until it is actually quite hard to tell them apart.

Some slide past so quickly you'd hardly even notice them,

like the nostalgia that will make you reach out

to grab a familiar brand in the supermarket.

And then there are others that we hurry away from,

like the jealousy that causes you to search a loved one's pockets.

And of course, there are some emotions which are so peculiar,

you might not even know what to call them.

Perhaps sitting there, you had a little tingle of a desire

for an emotion one eminent French sociologist called "ilinx,"

the delirium that comes with minor acts of chaos.

For example, if you stood up right now and emptied the contents of your bag

Perhaps you experienced one of those odd, untranslatable emotions

for which there's no obvious English equivalent.

You might have felt the feeling the Dutch called "gezelligheid,"

being cozy and warm inside with friends when it's cold and damp outside.

when knowledge of emotions is an extremely important commodity,

where emotions are used to explain many things,

Emotional intelligence, which is the skill of being able to recognize and name

your own emotions and those of other people,

is considered so important, that this is taught in our schools and businesses

if the way we think about emotions is becoming impoverished.

Sometimes, we're not even that clear what an emotion even is.

that our entire emotional lives can be boiled down

This idea is actually about 2,000 years old,

some evolutionary psychologists have suggested that these six emotions --

happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise --

are expressed by everyone across the globe in exactly the same way,

and therefore represent the building blocks

Well, if you look at an emotion like this,

it's triggered by an external predicament,

So you see a bear, your heart rate quickens,

your pupils dilate, you feel frightened, you run very, very fast.

it doesn't entirely capture what an emotion is.

Of course, the physiology is extremely important,

but it's not the only reason why we feel the way we do

What if I was to tell you that in the 12th century,

as caused by tiredness or boredom like we do today,

but thought it a symbol of the deepest love?

Or that in that same period, brave men -- knights --

that some early Christians who lived in the desert

believed that flying demons who mainly came out at lunchtime

could infect them with an emotion they called "accidie,"

a kind of lethargy that was sometimes so intense

Or that boredom, as we know and love it today,

was first really only felt by the Victorians,

in response to new ideas about leisure time and self-improvement?

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【TED】Tiffany Watt Smith: The history of human emotions (The history of human emotions | Tiffany Watt Smith)

cognitive

extremely

period

realize