THE BOOK OF HUMAN EMOTIONS: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust

Excerpt from the book...

"Some emotions really do wash the world in a single colour, like the terror felt as the car skids, or the euphoria of falling in love. Others, like clouds, are harder to grasp. Plan a surprise for a loved one and you might feel anticipation crinkled with glee and creased at the edges with a faint terror – what if they hate it? Storm off during an argument and it might be hard to tell the precise moment at which your indignation ends and your clammy self-loathing begins. There are some emotions which are so quiet that they slip past before we’ve even had a chance to spot them, like that momentary sense of comfort which makes your hand reach out for a familiar brand at the supermarket. And then there are those that brood on the horizon, the ones we hurry away from, fearing they will burst upon us: the jealousy which makes our fingers itch to search a loved one’s pockets, or the shame that can goad us into self-destruction.

Sometimes it feels more like we belong to our emotions, than they to us."

Tiffany Watt Smith is the author of The Book of Human Emotions, which tells the stories of 154 feelings from around the world. It has been published in 9 countries so far. She is currently a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, and she was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and London. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, the BBC News Magazine and The New Scientist. In 2014, she was named a BBC New Generation Thinker. In her previous career, she was a theatre director.