A Study of Feelings: Turning Adjectives into Nouns

I’m a stereotypical male: I don’t like to talk about feelings. Actually, that’s not entirely true. When designing apps and services, I often think about how others are feeling and what actions they will take because of their feelings. I’m just averse to talking about my own feelings. I get all self-conscious and feel like I’m shrinking into the wall when the spotlight is shone on me.

So, when

Sandra Yvonne

asked me about what feelings were passing through me when I commented in her recent Quiet Contemplations, of course my natural instincts were to think about feelings in the abstract:

Can we turn adjectives (like feelings) into a variety of nouns? And then start quantifying them?

I feel this is the scientific way and it has worked very well for surface feelings. When I say “I’m hot” (in the original, prosaic sense!), you may say, “of course, it’s 90 degrees out there”. That’s because we now know how to translate the feeling of being hot, to the concept (noun) of heat and temperature. And for temperature, we’ve even learned to quantify in terms of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Kelvin. By being able to measure temperature, we have a model of why we feel hot.

Of course, this is much harder with more complex feelings. In another comment thread, this time with

Chris Wong

in his note about Opportunity Costs, I ask if we can quantify joy (which like happiness is already a noun!). Our intuition was that we can’t quantify joy and Chris added that in trying to quantify we may actually detract away from the joy experienced (like in a Heisenberg/observer effect fashion).

But it kept bugging me that to use joy as the value to gauge the opportunity cost of various choices, we would need to quantify joy or at least force rank the choices. If I’m deciding between snow-shoeing and skiing, they are both joyful activities to me. But the exhilaration I experience in skiing may outweigh the bliss of snow-shoeing.

This kind of cerebral analysis can definitely be joy-sucking and perhaps that is why they call Economics the dismal science. However, I think this reductionistic, quantitative approach has led us to many scientific advances. Can it shine the way for something as ethereal as feelings?

Am I barking up the wrong tree? As my lunch buddy says, “if it brings you joy, bark away”