71 articles
Affect (psychology)
Affect (psychology): the experienced feeling tone of mental states, spanning valence (pleasantness) and arousal. Umbrella term over emotion and mood; measured via PANAS and circumplex scales in affective science.
Alexithymia
Alexithymia: subclinical difficulty identifying and describing one's own emotions, coined by Sifneos in the 1970s, measured by the TAS-20, present in about 10% of people and roughly half of autistic individuals.
Anemoia
Anemoia, from John Koenig's Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, means nostalgia for a time one never experienced. Not a clinical term; studied as vicarious or historical nostalgia and linked to populism and vintage marketing.
Anger
Anger is a basic human emotion triggered by perceived offense or obstruction, distinct from hostility (attitude) and aggression (behavior); venting does not reduce it, while CBT and arousal-lowering strategies are effective treatments.
Anger management
Anger management, also called anger management therapy, is CBT-based treatment teaching relaxation, cognitive restructuring, and communication skills; arousal-decreasing activities work (g = -0.63) while venting does not.
Anhedonia
Anhedonia is the reduced ability to experience pleasure and a core symptom of major depressive disorder and schizophrenia. Coined by Ribot in 1896, it now spans anticipatory, consummatory, social, and physical reward deficits.
Apathy
Apathy is a neuropsychiatric syndrome marked by reduced will and initiative, lack of interest, and blunted emotion for at least 4 weeks, distinct from depression.
Aversion to happiness
Aversion to happiness, or fear of happiness (cherophobia), is avoidance of positive emotions from beliefs that happiness brings misfortune; measured by Gilbert and Joshanloo scales, strongly linked to depression, anxiety, and anhedonia.
Blue Monday (date)
Blue Monday is the supposed "most depressing day of the year," the third Monday of January, coined in 2005 by psychologist Cliff Arnall for a Sky Travel travel marketing campaign. It has no scientific basis and is rejected by mental health experts and charities.
Blushing
Blushing, or facial blushing, is the involuntary reddening of the face, ears, neck, and upper chest caused by embarrassment, shame, or perceived social scrutiny, and cannot be suppressed.
Boredom
Boredom is an aversive emotional state of wanting but being unable to engage in satisfying activities, distinct from apathy, anhedonia, and depression; tied to attention and meaning, measured by scales such as the Boredom Proneness Scale, and linked to depression, anger, and risk behaviors.
Broken heart
Broken heart (heartbreak, heartache): metaphor for intense emotional pain from loss or rejection; studied in social-pain neuroscience and embodied literally in takotsubo cardiomyopathy, broken heart syndrome.
Contempt
Contempt: a negative emotion of looking down on a person or group judged inferior, marked by distancing and derogation. Key facts: unilateral lip-curl expression, contested universality, Gottman's strongest divorce predictor, distinct from anger and disgust.
Crying
Crying: shedding tears with vocalization in response to emotional stimuli; emotional tears are uniquely human. Covers lacrimal-gland origin, Frey's disproven toxin theory, social-glue effects (d = 0.49), gender and cultural differences, and mood effects.
Cute aggression
Cute aggression, also called cuteness aggression, is the urge to squeeze, pinch, or bite extremely cute things without intent to harm, studied as a dimorphous emotion-regulation response first formalized by Aragón et al. in 2015.
Disgust
Disgust is a basic human emotion of revulsion and avoidance, classically defined as food-related revulsion at oral incorporation of offensive objects; it extends to moral disgust, shows insula-based neural markers, varies across cultures, and resists extinction in OCD.
Embarrassment
Embarrassment is a self-conscious emotion of awkwardness at threatened self-exposure, distinct from shame and guilt, marked by a distinct display and blush, ventrolateral prefrontal and amygdala activity, and appeasement and norm-protective social functions.
Emotion classification
Emotion classification: organizing emotional states via discrete models (Ekman's six basic emotions) or dimensional models (valence, arousal, dominance; Russell's circumplex), used in psychology and affective computing.
Emotion Regulation Questionnaire
The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) is a 10-item self-report questionnaire measuring habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, introduced by James J. Gross and Oliver P. John in 2003.
Emotional detachment
Emotional detachment, also called emotional numbing or blunting, is reduced emotional responsiveness. It appears in PTSD and dissociation, as an antidepressant side effect, and in avoidant attachment.
Emotional dysregulation
Emotional dysregulation, or emotion dysregulation, is difficulty managing emotions and reactions, appearing across ADHD, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, ASD, and DMDD; treated with CBT, DBT, ACT, and medication.
Emotional self-regulation
Emotional self-regulation: influencing which emotions arise and how they are experienced and expressed, per James Gross's process model. Covers reappraisal, suppression, rumination, cultural moderation, and meta-analytic links to psychopathology.
Envy
Envy is the painful emotion felt at another's good fortune, distinct from jealousy, occurring in benign and malicious forms, studied in social comparison, social media, workplace, and political philosophy contexts.
Equanimity
Equanimity is a balanced state of mind, also known as emotional stability, that responds evenly to all experiences. It originates in Buddhist thought and is studied in modern psychology.
Euphoria
Euphoria is an intensely elevated mood of happiness or well-being, from Greek euphoros (bearing well). A medical term since 1727, it marks mania and hypomania, drug effects, and dopamine-linked reward, distinct from ordinary happiness.
Facepalm
Facepalm: the hand-over-face gesture of embarrassment, dismay, or exasperation; an English word first recorded in 1996, famous through the Picard Star Trek meme and the Unicode 9.0 (2016) facepalming emoji.
Frisson
Frisson (French for shiver), also called aesthetic or musical chills, is a pleasurable psychophysiological response to music, films, poetry, and art, marked by spine chills, goosebumps, skin-conductance and heart-rate rises, and reward-circuit brain activity.
Frustration
Frustration, in psychology, is the thwarting of expected goal attainment and the emotional state it produces; central to the frustration-aggression hypothesis of Dollard et al. (1939), revised by Miller (1941) and Berkowitz (1989).
Going postal
Going postal: American slang for extreme, often violent workplace rage, from a series of USPS shootings beginning with Patrick Sherrill's 1986 Edmond, Oklahoma massacre that killed 14.
Gratitude
Gratitude: appreciation for a benefit received from another, studied as emotion, trait, and expression. Key facts: expressed-gratitude interventions show small effects (g=0.22 vs neutral, nonsignificant vs active controls); cross-cultural meta-analysis g=0.19.