Curated category
Emotions
- AnxietyAnxiety is not the same as fear, and that distinction turns out to matter enormously. Fear, as psychologist David Barlow describes it, is a response to…
- Guilt (emotion)Guilt is the moral emotion that arrives when a person believes they have crossed their own standards of conduct, or violated a shared moral rule, and that…
- SadnessSadness made Paul Ekman's shortlist. He named six basic emotions, and sadness sits among them alongside happiness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust.
- FearFear is an unpleasant subjective emotional state that arises when something feels dangerous or threatening. A person in its grip may hyperventilate, feel…
- HatredHatred is one of the most studied emotions in human history, and yet philosophers, psychologists, and legal scholars still cannot agree on what it…
- AngerEvery year, Gallup asks people in more than 140 countries a single blunt question: did you experience anger during a lot of the day yesterday?
- JealousyIn 1906, an American journal of psychology declared that the weight of quotable male authority held women to be more susceptible to jealousy.
- RomanceRomance names something that resists being named. The philosopher Arthur Lovejoy once wrote that "the word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that…
- CourageCourage, also called bravery, valour, or valor, is not the absence of fear. It is the willingness to act in spite of it.
- Trust (social science)Trust sits at the center of almost every human interaction, yet most people never stop to examine it. It is the belief that another person will do what is…
- HappinessHappiness is a word people use every day, yet philosophers and psychologists have argued over its meaning for centuries.
- EscapismEscapism names something almost everyone does, yet almost no one fully owns. The Oxford English Dictionary defined it as "the tendency to seek, or the…
- AngstAngst is a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or inner turmoil so fundamental to human experience that it crossed languages and centuries to become a word in…