This was an interesting little personal expedition for me. Here is a site that chose 40 photographs depicting a range of emotions.
I just scrolled though them and had several distinct reactions. First off, I felt the pictures were a little contrived. They’re all beautiful photographs designed to elicit reactions. However, I noticed about halfway through the set that my heart rate was elevated and I was breathing kind of quickly – even anticipating what might come next. It was as though my body had taken over from my mind and had something to say about what it was seeing. It was powerful that even when I was feeling skeptical in my mind, I still had an intense reaction in my body!
The other thought I had while looking these over was about the importance of context. Similar to the exercise where you look at a picture of a face, think you grasp the emotion there, and then see successive pictures zooming out that give you more of the story, these pictures demonstrate that context changes everything. The lesson here isn’t that there’s one correct interpretation of emotion, or that if we have enough information about the situation we will all come to agreement on the emotion, but rather that we will always all see and feel different things even in the same situation. There’s no right answer to what an emotion is, just our answer. And our ability to recognize that and describe that feeling to ourselves in order to harness it’s power.
Alex Russell
