Emotion is not merely a private event that arises and dissolves within the mind. The moment it is expressed, it enters into a relationship and begins to function there. Its most basic function is to inform others of our internal state. Without such signaling, the people around us have no way of knowing whether to continue what they are doing or to stop. This piece examines how that informational function actually operates, and what is required for it to work as intended: an accurate diagnosis and an accurate expression of emotion.
1. Providing Information About One's Own State
1) Expression That Helps Correct Behavior: Signaling One's State to Regulate a Relationship
Developmental psychology offers a well-known experiment. Researchers built a glass-covered table designed to create the optical illusion of a sudden drop-off, then observed whether infants would crawl across it. To the infant's eye, the floor appeared to fall away, even though the glass beneath was perfectly solid and safe. The researchers wanted to know what infants would rely on to decide in the face of this ambiguous situation.
A mother stood at the far end of the table. When she displayed a fearful expression, the infants stopped and refused to cross. But when she displayed joy and interest instead, a large proportion of the infants ignored what their own senses were telling them and continued crawling toward her, even across the "deep" side.
The apparent drop-off was set at a height presumed to be ambiguous, and mothers stood at the far side of the apparatus displaying positive and negative facial expressions. This is the classic study demonstrating that by around twelve months of age, infants actively seek out and use a caregiver's facial expression to interpret an ambiguous situation. Developmental psychologists call this social referencing — the process by which infants seek information from others to clarify a situation and then use that information to guide their behavior.
What makes this experiment so striking is that the mother's expression did not convey a moral judgment about right or wrong. She was not teaching the infant, "That side is dangerous." She let her own internal state show on her face. And that piece of information alone was enough to regulate the infant's behavior.
This is precisely what emotional expression does within a relationship: when I express what I feel, the other person uses that information to decide, on their own, whether to continue or to stop. Conversely, if I express nothing, the other person has no basis for judgment and is likely to repeat the same behavior indefinitely.
A similar scene appears in the Gospels. People brought children to Jesus so that he might bless them, but the disciples turned them away. Jesus responded with anger.
"And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:13–14)
At first glance, it seems disproportionate for the ordinarily compassionate Jesus to grow angry over something so small. A gentle correction would surely have sufficed. But suppose he had offered a quiet word of instruction instead.
In all likelihood, the disciples would have turned away children again in the very next village.
Jesus's anger was not a vehicle for moral judgment about the disciples' behavior; it was information about the state that behavior produced in him. Having received that information, the disciples finally had grounds to correct their own behavior — grounds a calm explanation alone would not have supplied.
2) Expression That Seeks Emotional Support: Sharing Pain and Receiving Comfort
The second reason we express emotion is to receive emotional support. Human emotion does not simply sit quietly within the mind; it behaves more like something restless, searching for a place to settle. Until that place is found, a person passes through an unsettled stretch of time.
But once the emotion is expressed and met with the other person's empathy, it finally finds somewhere to rest. That is what comfort is.
Even Jesus, facing the cross, felt overwhelming distress — and rather than bear it alone, he expressed it to his disciples.
"Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me." (Matthew 26:38)
This scene shows that expressing emotion is not fundamentally a matter of strength or weakness. It is a wholly natural way of communicating within a relationship, undertaken to receive comfort. Pain that goes unexpressed drifts without ever finding a place to settle; pain that is expressed finds rest within another person's empathy.
2. Diagnosing Emotion for the Sake of Communication
For emotional expression to regulate another's behavior or to secure emotional support, it must be conveyed to the other person with precision. An emotion that is distorted or vaguely communicated will fail to produce the response one hoped for. Precise communication requires two steps. First, I must accurately diagnose what I am actually feeling. Second, I must put that diagnosis into precise language.
1) The Resolution of Emotion: From Vague to Vivid
There are times when we do not clearly know our own emotions. In such moments, we cannot convey them clearly to anyone else, either. Imagine being harshly criticized by a superior in front of several colleagues and junior staff. A wave of negative feeling follows.
There is a need to communicate this to the superior — yet words like "I felt awful," "I was flustered," "that was ridiculous," or "I was annoyed" fail to capture the feeling with any precision. The word that best fits this situation is probably "humiliated."
The moment an emotion is given its precise name, the mind often settles in a way that feels almost surprising. This is no accident. Psychologists refer to this as affect labeling — the act of naming one's emotional state, which a substantial body of research has shown to help regulate that very state. An emotion becomes vivid the instant it finds the name that fits it exactly, and that vividness is where regulation begins.
This vividness, in turn, depends on the range of emotional vocabulary available to us. English is said to contain roughly 2,600 words for emotion; Korean, roughly 400. The more language we have to capture our inner states, the more finely we can experience and express them.
There is a familiar joke that teenagers have only two emotional words: "annoyed" and "awesome." A vast range of nuanced feeling gets flattened into these two categories, simply because they lack the language to name the shades in between. As a result, their emotional experience itself becomes correspondingly simplified.
Maturity, by contrast, is a process of the emotional scale becoming finer-grained. The concept of emotional granularity, developed by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, shows that the degree to which we can distinguish a diffuse feeling using specific, differentiated language is closely tied to emotional maturity. The more precise the language we find, the higher the resolution of the emotion becomes.
In the Old Testament, Elijah, fleeing from Jezebel, described his state to God in remarkably specific terms.
"...he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers... I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away." (1 Kings 19:4, 10)
Packed into this brief confession are despair, a sense of inferiority, isolation, and a raw, primal fear for survival. Elijah did not simply say, "This is hard." By unpacking his state piece by piece into concrete language, he was diagnosing, for himself, an emotion he had not yet fully understood.
2) The Components of Emotion: From Compound Emotion to Basic Emotion
The second key to accurate diagnosis is understanding the basic components from which an emotion is built. Psychologist Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions proposes that the wide range of feelings we experience arises from combinations of a small number of basic emotions.
Much as primary colors combine to produce countless hues, a handful of basic emotions blend to form second- and third-order compound emotions. Despair, for instance, can be understood as a compound of two basic emotions: fear and sadness.
This framework offers a practical tool for diagnosis. When we trace a complex, ambiguous feeling back to the basic emotions that compose it, we come much closer to understanding its true roots.
Scripture offers a scene in which two emotions appear together at once — the women who witnessed the risen Jesus.
"And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you. And they departed quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy; and did run to bring his disciples word." (Matthew 28:7–8)
Fear and joy — two distinct emotions — coexist within the same people at the same moment. When we find ourselves unable to sum up a feeling in a single word, it is often because several basic emotions are present at once. Only when we can separate out those components do we begin to arrive at an answer to the question, "Why do I feel this way right now?"
3) Facing Emotion Honestly: From Surface Emotion to Underlying Emotion
The third requirement is the ability to read past another person's surface emotion to the genuine feeling beneath it — and, just as important, to make sure that what I express on the surface does not contradict what I truly feel inside.
Consider a mother waiting up for a daughter who has not come home and has not called, late into the night.
Underneath, the mother's dominant feeling is worry. Meanwhile, the daughter, unable to answer her phone and coming home later than expected, carries a feeling of guilt. Yet the instant the front door opens, these two inner states collide and transform into their opposites. I
nstead of relief, the mother's first reaction is anger; instead of an apology, the daughter's reflex is irritation. Worry and guilt — the genuine feelings underneath — turn, on the surface, into a clash of anger against anger.
This example shows that expressing emotion well requires more than choosing precise language.
It also requires checking whether that language actually matches what is happening inside. If we fail to notice that the worry, the hurt, or the fear lying beneath our surface anger, and simply express the anger, the other person responds only to that surface — and the deeper feeling we actually wanted to convey never gets through at all.
Conclusion
Emotion is a signal that informs others of our inner state. When that signal is transmitted accurately, the other person gains grounds to adjust their behavior, and I gain a place to be comforted. But for the signal to function properly, it must first be diagnosed accurately within us.
That is why it matters to translate vague feelings into precise language, to break compound emotion down into its basic components, and to face the genuine feeling underlying a surface reaction honestly.
A verse from Paul's letter to the church in Corinth captures all of this in a single line.
"For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you." (2 Corinthians 2:4)
Paul did not hide his distress. But the purpose of expressing it was not to burden others with grief — it was to make his love known with precision. This is exactly where emotional expression should aim. Emotion is not a weakness to be concealed; it is information that must be honestly diagnosed and accurately conveyed if a relationship is to thrive.
Note: The visual cliff experiment referenced above is drawn from Sorce, J. F., Emde, R. N., Campos, J. J., & Klinnert, M. D. (1985). Maternal emotional signaling: Its effect on the visual cliff behavior of 1-year-olds. Developmental Psychology, 21(1), 195–200.