Emotional granularity – Vocabulary for mental health?

This paper presents a linguistic/semiotic critique of the notion of emotional granularity in the context of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion. (Barrett 2017a) Barrett claims that emotional granularity, the usage of refined emotion vocabulary, has positive effects on coping and health.

Barrett’s denial of basic emotions like fear or anger and her rejection of ethological perspectives put her theory out of sync with other recent approaches such as Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience (e.g. Panksepp 2004) or Adolph’s Neuroscience of Emotions (Adolphs 2018). Although the idea of constructed emotion seemingly resonates with constructivist points of view, this paper challenges Barrett’s assumption that coping strategies depend on specific lexemes (i.e. emotional granularity) to construct and describe emotions.

Barrett ignores relevant concepts in linguistics and semiotics and relies on convenient lab experiments and quantifiable results. Barrett’s conjectures about more ‘refined’ emotion vocabulary evoke problematic deficit theories long discredited by linguists (e.g. Labov 1970). Her recommendations for developing emotional granularity for the more ‘accurate’ description of emotions perpetuate assumptions about social background and vocabulary that extend 1960s deficit theories about education to elitist assumptions about class and mental health.

By presenting emotional granularity as an antidote to alexithymia, Barrett contributes to an increasingly popular research agenda in psychology. Thure von Uexküll’s (1979) early criticism of alexithymia (in the context of psychosomatic medicine) provides the foundational (bio)semiotic concepts (derived from Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory) that expose Barrett’s problematic research methods (e.g. random images without context eliciting multiple choice vocabulary) and nomenclatural approach to emotion words.

Discourse analysis and corpus linguistics offer neutral and unbiased descriptive approaches to how people express their emotions in different registers, styles, contexts, and genres. Meaning is not in the lexeme but exists in the embeddedness of a speaker in their subjective now with their lived past and potential future that are absent from the artificial lab experiments Barrett’s emotional granularity conjecture is based on.