We all harbor secrets. Some are big and bad; some are small and trivial. Researchers have parsed which truths to tell and which not to.

Posted October 30, 2021 | Reviewed by Vanessa Lancaster

My father – long-departed but still much-loved – was a gloomy fellow. Blaming it on his Swedish ancestry, he was both brooding and anxious and prone to declamations about the hopelessness of the human predicament. When others tried to cheer him up, he would resist their incursions. Feelings and temperament, or so he claimed, are private matters. Nothing changes their course.

Today, most people would recognize my father’s issues as manifestations of anxiety and depression. They would suggest psychotherapy and medication (both of which he opposed). They would stress that other people have the same feelings and, with support, move on to happier lives.

Although we know others have feelings like ours, we harbor the sense that our psychological stirrings are very much our own. Pleasure – and more insistently, pain – are forms of awareness we know intimately; others can only empathize. Anxieties keep us awake at night while our partner sleeps. We seethe with anger, cringe with fear, and rebound with disgust. Others, perhaps confronting the same circumstances, react differently. The psyche, it seems, is a territory we inhabit alone.

It should give us comfort to know that our feelings – sensations, emotions, attitudes, moods, and patterns of temperament – have biological underpinnings and thus are aspects of the human condition. That shared physical heritage was the theme of an 1872 book by Charles Darwin on the evolution of emotions.

More than a century later, Paul Ekman and his colleagues demonstrated through cross-cultural research that certain emotions seem to be “basic” or hard-wired in people. Those universal feelings include anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness, and sadness. Many other emotions are combinations or adumbrations of those patterns. The psyche may be solitary confinement, but others have similar accommodations.

A fundamental reality that shapes our feelings and gives them expression is that reality is culture, the social heritage of a society. We humans do not simply “feel” or “have feelings.” We comprehend those feelings with ideas. We learn to feel and to share those feelings in publicly comprehensible ways. Consider below five aspects of that process.

Affects, as scientists call them, are not just stirrings of the body that ready people for action. Most of those urges and surges, complaints and encouragements, have names. Therapists distinguish emotions; some list more than 300 English terms. There are also foreign words – think of angst, ennui, or schadenfreude – we call on when English fails. The point is that most people learn to name their feelings and to communicate these to others.

Anyone who nurtures a small child participates in this process. To manage their feelings, children need to know what they feel and what to do about that condition. In that light, a good portion of maturation becomes an exercise in self-control. Some emotional outbursts require immediate correction. Time out is an opportunity to reflect and restore equilibrium.

For adults, too, feelings like anger, fear, sadness, and lust require monitoring. It is less the existence of these than their intensity that is problematic. Culture helps us understand what is excessive, dangerous, and otherwise inappropriate.

To recall Freud’s famous argument, pent-up or repressed emotions may become difficulties of their sort. That point made, most of us know that suppressing feelings, or at least not revealing them fully to others, has its uses. So does misidentifying internal conditions. Who of us has not said we are “just tired” (instead of angry, cranky, or bored) to avoid a confrontation with someone? We tell friends that we “love” their new outfit or that we found the book they gave us very “interesting” when the reality is quite different. Few of us are slaves to the truth.

Credit Freud also with the idea that we try to find socially acceptable outlets (“sublimation”) for some of our rawer impulses. One purpose is sports and games, artistic and musical creativity, and the fiction of books, movies, television, and websites. Work out your frustrations here, or so culture instructs, instead of in the more consequential world of co-workers, friends, and family.

Like young children who learn to use their “inside” and “outside” voices, we all adapt our behaviors – and our feelings – to situations. Bedrooms and boardrooms, workshops, and playgrounds are different terrains. Capable of wearing many hats, we all know there are times for steely resolve, kindly indulgence, flights-of-fancy, and deep compassion. Settings like weddings, funerals, patriotic assemblies, and school examinations do not just permit certain kinds of emotions; they mandate them.

It is also the case that we actively seek specific settings for the purpose of experiencing and expressing distinctive emotions. Those “emotional destinations,” as I call them, include all manner of situations: amusement parks, movies of every type, sporting events, parties, family reunions, and musical concerts among them.

Our ambition in attending those events is to have a “good time,” or at least a time of a certain sort. More than that, those situations help us learn how to have a good time and, in the process, to become sophisticated participants for later ventures. Each occasion offers lessons in the etiquette of expression: when and how much to cheer, cry, scream, laugh, and so forth.

Just as we expect different things from different situations, so we have different standards for types of people. Although gender roles continue to shift, society allows men to harbor and express a “rougher” set of manners and their related emotions. Being grouchy, withdrawn, irreverent, angry, and openly aggressive are practices a man can get away with. However much they share these feelings, women usually learn to manage their expression or endure social criticism.

Similarly, society allows little children their emotional outbursts. At some point, those children learn to stop these displays and attend instead to the emotional outbursts of their parents. For example, some minority groups teach their members that self-centeredness, isolation, and greed are bad qualities; being a worthy person means helping others and possessing considerate attitudes. By contrast, the majority may escape these strictures. In short, race, class, gender, age, and sexual orientation influence emotional expression just as they do other domains of living.

Note also that we learn a range of “safe targets” for emotional displays. A child may lash out at a younger sibling but not at an older or stronger one; a parent, teacher, or coach is usually off-limits. Most of us direct our romantic interests to appropriate categories of people. We listen respectfully to some people and not to others. Worse, we may accept society’s condemnation of wide categories of people as disreputable, lazy, and dangerous. Status-regarding creatures, we mark, assess, and treat people differently. Our emotions express those comprehensions.

As described above, emotions express “the awareness of self in circumstance,” the ongoing assessment of our standing in the world and what our prospects may be. It is inevitable that these standings should shift, sometimes significantly. The ups and downs of emotions follow that course.

What culture provides is an arsenal of public understandings to guide those private assessments. We learn that certain people have a right to feel and act in certain ways in certain situations. That set of persons includes ourselves, who we understand to be a person of a certain type. We feel entitled to a certain kind of treatment by others; we judge others by the standards we apply to them. When things proceed as expected, we feel comforted; when they violate those standards, we react quite differently.

These personal standards usually align with society's standards as a whole, or at least of groups we respect. Culture permits and emboldens some expressions just as it denies or softens others. Righteous anger or sorrow is quite different from its confused and solitary form. Emotion has a public as well as private life.

Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. London: Oxford University Press.

Ekman, P. and R. Davidson, Eds. (1994). The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Henricks, T. (2012). Selves, Societies, and Emotions: Understanding the Pathways of Experience. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Thomas Henricks, Ph.D., is Danieley Professor of Sociology and Distinguished University Professor at Elon University.

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We all harbor secrets. Some are big and bad; some are small and trivial. Researchers have parsed which truths to tell and which not to.