It occurred to me this past weekend that I have lost traction on my emotions. I went to see Captain Phillips. It was a packed cinema and you could sense the tension and anxiety in the audience: I could sense it, but I couldn’t experience it myself. It wasn’t a flattening exactly, more a lack of understanding about how emotions position me within my environment. I have a clear memory of how I have reacted to things in the past, but I can’t seem to apply this memory to equivalent events and moments in the present. Throughout the years, I have had to struggle and battle against an abundance of emotion that often spills out, disproportionately and dangerously, into my life. Somewhere over the past three years (a time punctuated by severe mental health crises) my emotional roadmap for applying appropriate emotions has been lost. Perhaps I need to start from scratch and reconnect with emotion. The trouble is I don’t really know how or whether this is too simple a solution. Bipolar disorder is the consummate conman: it tells you that your feelings are right and wrong, or broken or insufficient, and it leaves no room to put the brakes on or to rev up the engine when the world gets dark and forbidding.

Today I sat in on a lecture about research into the emotion diversity of Facebook users. Specifically, this was observed through the use of animated emoticons. The lecturer showed us the sixteen animated emoticons available to download Finch Stickers on Facebook. The aim of the study was to look at the social function of emotion “to enrich the iconic language with which we communicate at Facebook and through social media in general, to make it more precise, nuanced and aesthetic” (see Keltner, 2013) The research looked at Finch emoticon usage data from 183 countries, collected over a period of 28 consecutive days, amounting to a total of 148,466,378 emoticons. None of the emoticons had labels so the user had to choose from their own frame of reference. This perhaps leaves aside the semantics of emotional understanding by trying to keep it confined to sixteen separate emoticons. Unsurprisingly, the study revealed that emotion diversity was dependent on suppression or expression: suppression being an obvious indicator of unhappiness. Expressing emotions typically leading to greater happiness. This seemed intuitively obvious, but when I tried to reflect on my own emotional diversity I wondered whether having battled with my bipolar symptoms for such a long time had scrambled the feed between environment and reaction. Living with bipolar disorder is often an exercise in expressing and suppressing emotions and a lot of us cannot strike the right balance.

As the lecture progressed, we moved on to examining and evaluating the individual emoticons. The central question was whether we could guess what emoticons were used across the 183 countries used in the study. The most frequently used emoticon was ‘love’ (a simple content smile with some floating love hearts above it). The emoticon for ‘awe’ was the least used. I looked at the emoticons as they appeared on the screen and I became somewhat whimsical as I remembered using similar emoticons and the witty emoti-play that I often have with my friends, so excited that we had a whole slew of ridiculous faces to send each other. But did I ever use emotions like that in the real world? Absolutely not. I don’t trust my emotions and have become extremely frightened about showing emotions of any sort lest they be misinterpreted. I would definitely never show my love for someone because love for me is something akin to safety, but I am not entirely sure that that is actually ‘love’ as implied by the emoticon. Feeling unsafe is the most recognizable of emotional states. I know when I feel unsafe, but I cannot always explain why or how – I simply feel out of control. ‘Awe’ I get: when I’m manic I am generally in awe of lots of things (often very random), frequently myself. I am awesome, just me: whatever to anyone else! Breaking these emoticons up is difficult because the context to my enthusiasms and hypomanias is often very confused. Examining emoticon usage alone is not sufficient a language to explore the degree to which one is emotionally variant, let alone whether individual variance is pathological.

Another recent study into emotion diversity looked at the dynamics and variability of positive emotion. The results showed that ‘positive emotion variability plays an important and incremental role in psychological health above and beyond overall levels of happiness, and that too much variability might be maladaptive’ (Gruber, Kogan, Quoidbach & Mauss, 2013) . This is interesting primarily because it challenges the stereotypical notions that maladaptiveness is linked to negative emotion variability alone. The research showed that positive emotion serves an adaptive function (ibid, p.4).  The data did not show ‘any evidence for an association between negative variability (measured as the mean across 11 items: irritable, sad, distressed, angry, ashamed, worried, nervous, guilty, hopeless, anxious, hostile) and well-being’ (ibid, p.4). The research used 11 items (stated above) to measure emotion variability, whereas the UC Berkeley emoticon study used 16 animated emoticons. Between these two studies it is clear that emotion variability, both intraindividually and socially, is linked to a complex conceptual network of emotions. It would be interesting to conduct a bilateral study of emotion variability using both self-rating and emoticons (used together or as two strands separate strands of the research).

It would be even more interesting to approach emotion diversity in this way with participants who have a mental illness (symptomatic and in remission). I think this would provide a fascinating insight into how people with mental illnesses create their own emotional landscape. Using emoticons and scales might be a far more useful diagnostic tool than the limiting nature of a twenty minute conversation with one’s psychiatrist. Perhaps this would allow people to reflect more carefully on what their triggers might be and help them (us) to develop a deeper sense of what strategies might help them have a better sense of control. By comparing results with “normal” people it might allow those with a mental illness to feel less ‘other’ and in turn show “normal” people that we aren’t quite so different from one another (*cough* Thorpe Park). In essence, giving us the tools to become more emotionally intelligent and allowing us to reconnect with a self perceived to have been lost in the fire.