Read Me Like a Book—Emotional Granularity and Magnolia Parks

Every so often, I go down a rabbit hole about profiling. I have a vested interest in psychology that peppers my reading taste, and a temptation to intellectualize everything before feeling it.

As a kid, I devoured Sherlock Holmes and Brittany Cavallaro’s A Study in Charlotte. I love both Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s academic research and her plucky  The Naturals  series (about teen profilers working for the FBI.) I longed to be a child prodigy.

In adulthood, I’m always on the hunt for the neuroscience book that will unlock complete control and understanding for me in all domains. Tempting.

Thanks for reading Words Like Silver! Subscribe for free to support my work.

Subscribe Now

placeholder

I frequently say the best writers capture the universal within the specific through “precise human details.” As a soon-to-be debut author, I’ve determined that a lot of my writing strengths depend on emotional granularity. My richest details have come from swaths of phone notes and observations jotted down over the years. I credit my studio art background for some of this, but I crave effortlessness here: that I could read someone at a glance.

What moves you? What makes you feel connected to someone? How much can you figure out from a distance versus in the thick of friendships and relationships? Is analysis a form of detachment too? In stories, how much should you show vs. tell to create a specific emotional effect? I’ve considered how action drives thought rather than the reverse. During [redacted book process], I frequently reminded myself that fear and excitement are “the same feeling” within the nervous system.

Reading Faces in ‘The Conditions of Will'

Most recently, I read two books that oddly complemented each other on this plane: Jessa Hasting’s The Conditions of Will and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made. The former—the latest installment from the popular Magnolia Parks universe—focuses on a London socialite returning to her family home in South Carolina for her father’s funeral, reuniting with her family after they scorned her years ago for igniting a scandal.

There’s a lot to unpack around Jessa Hastings’s work, and it’s polarizing to many readers; I love that it captures a high-low relational messiness you can read for the drama or for an uncanny knack at depicting contradictory, internally circular characters. Neurotic or refreshing—sometimes both.

One hook of The Conditions of Will struck me: Georgia is supposed to be a genius in reading faces. Her psychological insight sneaks into every perception or insight. Frankly, she’s a little defensively manipulative in that regard too, which is contradictory to her insistence that she needs complete truth and honesty from others at all times. But she catches every microexpression, calculates the physical distance and orientation between others in a room, and tallies their swallows, blinks, tones.

“‘It’s my head! It doesn’t turn off! How am I supposed to just turn it off?'”

I’m not studied like Georgia, and we don’t have nearly the same backstory. My version is not nearly as intense. But as she says in the book, her awareness or temptation to guess is difficult to turn off. It’s based into her perspective, and I found the depiction so satisfying—and interesting, in light of the psych book I read in tandem. Am I always narrativizing in a room, or observing?

“The truth is we leave the clues of us everywhere, in ways we know and in ways we don’t…’It’s why everyone’s always banging on about vibes,’ I go on. ‘That’s not some hippy-dippy new whatever we’ve just discovered—it’s people picking up on the tiny inexplicable things that they see without knowing that they see it.’”

But Actually—Perceivable Emotion Could Be a Myth

How Emotions Are Made calls Georgia’s skill implausible, citing studies in which our traditional views of emotional signaling—open-mouthed for surprise, furrowed brows for frustrated, muscle twitches, etc,.—are incorrect. Lisa Feldman Barrett repeatedly insists that “variation is the norm,” to the extent the phrase appears on what seems like every page. Population thinking is more useful in studying emotion, meaning that there are average gestures that appear across expressions of feelings because we’re social creatures—but they’re not innate, and they’re not givens either.

As one of my favorite writing craft books, The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr, points out, we’re usually wrong when guessing others’ motivations and feelings, which is a common driver behind fictional conflicts. That inaccuracy skews even higher for those we know well, because as You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy emphasizes, we tune out those we “know” even more than strangers because we often predict what they’ll say next rather than fully listening.

How Emotions Are Made makes the case that all instances of emotions are just predictions based on what’s happening inside our bodies (interoception), what context we’re in, and what behavior or action would serve us best within that instance.

In opposition, the traditional classical view of emotion claims that each broad feeling—sadness, joy, frustration, etc,.—has an essentialist fingerprint of emotion, and thus we have universal gestures associated. Surely we can understand others if we know what to look for. A baby smiles because they’re happy. If you just pay enough attention, you can tell what people feel—and what they’re not telling you—which is why you can feel the need to walk on eggshells when the energy shifts in a room.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, in this book, aims to discredit this theory in favor of a constructionist lens: that there is no neuroscientific proof that certain areas of the brain control emotion (like that the amygdala controls fear, or that Broca’s area is crucial to language.)

In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that you are basically always experiencing affect (the sensation of feeling at all), which includes your perception of valence (whether something feels pleasant vs. unpleasant) and arousal (the level of intensity of what you’re feeling.) Whatever feeling arises also depends on your interoception (how your body feels.) The rising temperature, flushed cheeks, and slight dizziness she interpreted as attraction on a date could have just easily been felt as the flu she developed later that evening. How do you separate out the two? Sorted interpretation based on context + concept.

All emotions feel automatic because we produce them so quickly, but are in fact socially learned and applied based on these rapidfire predictions. This theory complements what we know about dopamine being about prediction error, and goes nicely with my personal fascination with aesthetics, contexts, salience, and unconscious influences. Perspectivism, baby. Rationality’s a myth to me and so I adored this take, but ya girl did just read Nietzsche—and Georgia cites him too.

The constructionist view is a thoughtful one with lots of room to make the most of what you feel; for example, she suggests you can regulate yourself better by learning foreign words, because other terms literally produce other feelings. Cultures don’t feel the same emotions, necessarily (although she acknowledges how difficult this is to test.) Some other cultures don’t even define emotions as experiences that happen to someone individually, but rather as transactions between people i.e. anger requires two participants or else it doesn’t exist. The more specific you are, the more your brain is able to generate accurate—and helpful—predictions that match what you think you feel to what you need to get to the next thing.

There's an app for this, if you need.

Which is why she advocates for emotional granularity. Multiple studies support that being precise can change what you actually feel. You can change your perception of emotion by naming or scaffolding sensations differently.

I think I'm probably leaning towards constructionist emotion because I feel plenty, but also like the agency in being able to talk yourself into or out of anything. "Name it and claim it" is a phrase we have in lifestyle and trending journalism in regards to what goes viral, and this is a similar strategy. If you can describe it, you can control it—or at least the behaviors or habits that then spiral from whatever you feel. (That's the writer in me talking.)

Two Excellent, Related Conversations on Deck

I've had two good conversations with friends about similar topics lately:

• First, a guy friend who worries that girls he dates are always trying to "figure him out." Basically, how annoying he finds it when somebody else tries to tell him what he's feeling, or that he doesn't know himself. A bunch of books talk about this anyway: how most problems in getting to know people are when you don't let someone constantly reintroduce themselves to you, or define their own self-concept. I might have my guesses, but I sure as hell don't assume they're correct.
• Second, a guy friend reading negotiation books for work and finding himself enacting similar tricks in person—wondering where the line of manipulation is.

I generally enjoy that I'm a person who stumbles into these types of conversations, especially when the two people in question are guys I don't talk to or catch up with all that often. I like that we can immediately have a "good" conversation that's not surface level—but could go surface level too. You can be curious, or geek out with me any time, and I love when I make the connection with people around me that we're mulling over similar topics.

So What Can You Control or Predict?

There’s a whole conversation baked in here too about nature vs. nurture (always relevant to my upbringing as an identical twin), the variability of show not tell within fiction, whether you can meaningfully label anyone aside from you (I lean no), and even whether psychological awareness itself is manipulative.

Georgia has no qualms about mirroring others to make them like her, which is often something we do unconsciously when we talk to those we’d love to like us. Does the consciousness of the action change it at all?

“People with a classical view mindset think of emotional intellignence as ‘detecting’ other peoples’ emotions ‘accurately’ or experiencing happiness and avoiding sadness ‘at the right time.’...[but] Happiness and Sadness are each populations of diverse instances. Therefore, emotional intelligence (EI) is about getting your brain to construct the most useful instance of the most useful emotion concept in a given situation.”

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s suggestions for becoming emotionally healthier—or more aware—are deeply tangible, and I do appreciate them. Some relate to what we know already from other psych books I love.

• Get outside.
• Do things with your hands.
• Physical touch matters.
• Take trips.
• Read books.

And perhaps most surprisingly:

• Learn new words.

According to her, you can more readily teach yourself good feelings and reclassify the bad ones by diversifying your vocab and paying attention to your physical states. Because different languages have different emotion or tone words (and I already know I’m a little freak about tone words and repetition in my writing), you can actually “invent” or construct new emotions for yourself that you viscerally feel. I haven’t read it, but I thought of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is frequently referenced by Amanda Montell. (Except perhaps you do not want sorrows.)

I thought immediately of Mark Twain despising adverbs, and studies about how using more specific textural words scratches readers’ brains more evocatively than vague reasons. This sounds like the scientific backing related to why and how readers feel—because who doesn’t love the sensation when a good book describes an emotion you were never able to put into words before? Precision, precision, precision, but no universality.

For now, I’m just thinking about profiling within the book specifically. Is trying to "read" someone just guessing, and shifting the social agreement towards you in the process? That’s why leading questions are a thing, and also is another point in favor of self-fulfilling prophecy in regards to relationships. Reading—and treating others—generously is probably the right call. Everyone’s probably familiar with how you feel more warmly towards someone who likes you, or has experienced the unsettling dislike of someone because you think they don’t like you. There’s a lot of power in that.

Back to Georgia and Her Degree

Creator: Cliff Lipson | Credit: CBS.

Georgia has a lot of reasons for wanting to be able to read others. Her backstory especially makes it understandable; PTSD tends to hike up hypervigilance. I’m Definitely going to review these two books separately, but wanted to draw the instant parallel from the book:

“More than anything, I just like knowing why people are the way people are, and I see a high value in being able to predict what comes next. I just want the truth at all costs. That’s not very breezy though. I’d like to be breezy, I think. But I’m too clever to be breezy.”

I get it. It’s tempting to try to know and emotionally profile as things are happening, even though—unlike Georgia—I’m deeply aware that I am only ever guessing (and probably wrong.) We all do it to some extent, but never perfectly. Her predictions always get her to the next useful action, so they’re true enough, but understanding others objectively might be more of a fantasy than we’d like to believe.

My fondness for books about profilers and prodigies won’t go away, but the grain of salt there is ultimately a positive because there’s so much agency embedded in feeling without defaulting to emotional suppression.

Want to know someone? Ask them and try to believe what they tell you.

A Reading List for Both Takes

Fictional facial reading / The Conditions of Will by Jessa Hastings

Profiling and persuasion / Cues by Vanessa Van Edwards

Con artists and unconscious influences / The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova

Constant misinterpretations / You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy

The constructionist emotional bible / How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett

Teenage profiler mystery / The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

A fabulous Sherlock retelling / A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro

The original / The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Bonus: Kate Murphy’s coming out with a book on synchrony, Why We Click, in 2026 that I can’t wait to read.