Emotions, Concepts And The Discovery Of Liget

A new season of Invisibilia is out, and its first episode deals with how our concepts shape our emotions, as opposed to the long-held view that emotions are things that we are born with.

We’re introduced to the case of a woman who lost her daughter in a car accident, and who was then sued by the driver of the car they collided with. The driver was physically unharmed, but emotionally and psychologically he was destroyed. He considered himself a killer, he couldn’t get over the fact that he failed to do what his father had taught him to do - protect and control everything, no matter what happens. His emotions washed over him and he found himself incapable of going to work for months. He said the accident had caused him severe emotional distress. The court agreed with him, and that case changed the way people understand emotions.

As a follow-up to that case study, we meet a scientist who is challenging everything we know about what emotions are and how they work. She says that we do actually have more control over our emotions than we think, because concepts shape emotions, and concepts we can change. This new way of thinking about emotions brings about control and responsibility, and, as it is pointed out, “control is fun, but responsibility is much much much less fun”. Now, I know this whole thing may sound a bit like something along the lines of the self-improvement, you’re-the-only-one-responsible-for-anything-happening-to-you craze. But I think we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the fact that concepts come to us from the outside, and that what they sometimes dictate in terms of emotional response is not the healthiest way of dealing with a situation.

The second part of the show is dedicated to an anthropologist who spent several years with a tribe in the Philippines and set out to “map the territory of the tribe’s emotional world”. For all his efforts, he discovered a new emotion, and, unfortunately, he got to experience it too.