 Feelings, like water, can be as strong as a tidal wave, or as gentle as a ripple. Like the waves on the ocean, they rise and fall, and can swamp you if you're not careful. A skilled sailor can use the tides to go anywhere they want, whereas a bungler is doomed to follow where the waves lead them. To help us all sail true, here are 10 more psychological facts about human feelings. 1. Emotional Signals Irving Goffman, a trailblazing social scientist, distinguished two types of emotional signals, intentional and unintentional. He called these two types of signals given and given off, which serve as forms of communication. Goffman named his theory after the drama that actors perform on stage, where they try to portray the character's emotions and hide their own. Even the best actors have trouble with this. An example of a given sign may be that loud laugh you make at your boss's joke. A given off sign would be your eyes unintentionally squinting in annoyance at his bad sense of humor. Really, he's making jokes about the Jersey Shore in 2019. 2. Prototypical Emotional Experiences vs. General Emotional Effect Imagine running away from a bear. Pretty scary, huh? Now take away the bear. Suddenly, you're just running across country race. Emotion scientists have recently begun to make a distinction between prototypical emotions that are directed at a definite thing, for example fear, and emotions that aren't directly at anything in particular, such as a feeling of general well-being. Anxiety is a notorious form of undirected emotional effect. People who have anxiety often can't name exactly what they are anxious about, but scientists hope that by distinguishing between these categories of emotion, we can come up with better therapies. 3. Feeling Good and Feeling Enthusiastic Benedict Curdie, a Harvard psychologist, believes that all images can be related on two levels, how good they make you feel, and how enthusiastic they make you feel. In technical terms, the good feeling is called valence, and the enthusiastic feeling is called arousal. Knowing this helps us figure out whether we're feeling, say, pleasantly tired, which is low arousal, but high valence, or lazy, which is low arousal and low valence. In one case, you should put your feet up, while in the other, you should get back to work. Some more examples. A picture of two swans makes people feel good, but not all that enthusiastic, whereas a picture of fireworks makes people feel about as good, but a lot more enthusiastic. Where do pictures of kittens fall? Both very good and very enthusiastic. Of course, the internet already knew that. 4. The Emotional Life of Punctuation Compare these two text messages. I'm done. Or, I'm done. They feel different, right? One is the beginning of a breakup text, and the other is someone celebrating the end of exams. Psychologists believe that punctuation in text messages can replace nonverbal cues used in conversations. While texting became popular, some people worried that it would lead to us forgetting how to relate to each other. It turns out that text messaging isn't the end of the world. However, while we can communicate some emotions over text, it may be best to save important conversations for in-person, because in-person conversations have much more nonverbal signs. 5. Emotional Vocabulary Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist on a mission. She wants to help people use less medication, fight less frequently, and feel better overall. How? By increasing the size of their emotional vocabulary. According to her, someone who can distinguish between feeling righteous indignation and feeling lousy is better equipped to respond to those feelings in a skillful way. People who use large vocabularies of words for emotions visit the doctor less, and are less likely to lash out when they've been offended. Who knew that the path to happiness begins in reading the dictionary? 6. Emotional Amplification Yesterday, Bob missed his bus and was late to work. Scientists believe that the emotions he felt about that depend on a process called emotional amplification. If it's easy to imagine a good outcome, such as making it to work on time, he would be really annoyed when something bad happened. But if it's hard to imagine things going well, he wouldn't be too bothered at a bad outcome. The next time you get annoyed about something, you can console yourself that you were on the right track. If you were completely hopeless, you wouldn't get annoyed in the first place, so maybe his friends should tell him that they admire him for trying so hard to be punctual. 7. The Amygdala Johnny's storm from the Fantastic Four is the human torch, but did you know that you're the human fire alarm? Well, in a way you are. Each of our brains has a region called the amygdala. This area becomes active when we feel strong emotions. Scientists use the word salient to refer to these very strong emotions. In psychology, salience refers to any perception that stands out from the rest. Some emotions, like fear and anger, are naturally very salient, so they make our amygdala light up. I guess we all have a bit of spidey sense. 8. Emotions and Decision Making Psychologists are starting to discover that our decision making process is intimately wrapped up in our emotions, in both good and bad ways. Even decisions that seem cut and dry, such as, I'll bet $20 on black at the roulette table, are highly charged with feeling. Our emotions serve as guides. Those nagging feelings of, this is too risky, or, I don't feel sure about this, are worth listening to. While early generations of scholars believed that emotions always interfered negatively with decision making, we now know that they can sometimes help. But, just to be safe, if you're feeling emotional, maybe it's a good idea to stay away from the craps table. 9. Emotional Appeals in Political Campaigns Politicians aren't known for being the most honest people, but there does seem to be a method to their madness. Researchers studying the 2004 US presidential election found that political ads generally followed a set pattern. Early in the campaign, ads focused on invoking pride. Near the end of the campaign, ads focused on provoking fear. The message seems to be, if you want someone to go with you for the long haul, appeal to their pride, and if you want them to take action, appeal to their sense of self-preservation. 10. Display Rules Have you ever told someone a joke and been met with a stony face? And when you ask them why they didn't find it funny, they say, I actually find it hilarious. Cultural psychologists study something called emotional display rules. Different cultures have different norms about expressing emotions. In some cultures, emotions are expressed very obviously. We refer to these cultures as ones that amplify emotions, whereas in others, they are not expressed at all, even when they're strongly felt. These cultures are said to negate emotions. When you're speaking to someone from another culture, it's wise to give them the benefit of the doubt. A comedian has to know their audience. This has been 10 more psychological facts about human feelings. Some people feel gloomy about the future, and say that technology is making us lose our touch with our creative, emotional sides. But as we learned, emotions are far from absent. They are with us by instinct, are present with us whenever we make decisions, and even show up in scans of our brains. There's a quote which says that emotions should be owned, felt, then allowed to leave. I can think of no better advice.