Lazyteacher

Re: The Onion

Did you know you have 412 emotions? Simon Baron Cohen (Not this guy) and his crack team of researchers narrowed down the entire range of human feeling to 412 discrete emotions. In Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open, the pop sci author does a whirlinwind tour of brain science from the point of view of, well, a dude such as himself trying to understand himself. He explores emotion, memory, personality, and brain scans to shed light on what’s going on in our heads that we might not be able to quite access with our conscious mind.

The research on 412 emotions–meant to assist autistics who need to study human emotion like I need to study Spanish–reminded me of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics where he shows how to draw differing emotion-feeling faces by combining simple emotions.

Other researchers such as Robert Plutchik cobbled together cute little charts that dissect emotions. For instance, he explains that optimism = love + joy (apparently not madness + full belly) or that love = joy + acceptance (isn’t that contradictory? didn’t you need joy to have love? Is optimism just love with a lot more joy?).

Anyway, why would this matter for writing teachers? Sometimes I imagine that I’m half-Asperger’s (though my score on the Autism Quotient is actually ok) and emotions aren’t always easy for me to decode. It might be interesting to have students use one of these half-mathematical emotional theories to pre-write for creative writing. For instance, you could plan on writing a story about remorse and you would plan to dramatize how and why your main character would feel both sadness and disgust; writers would need to create separate ways of showing how those two emotions are manifested. The sadness might be shown by doodling cartoons of a favorite puppy over and over again and the disgust might come through in a telephone conversation with a friend where the main character constantly puts herself down.

Hopefully, the kids will come up with better examples than that.