Verbally labeling an emotion is much like applying a digital technology (language) to an analog signal (emotion and emotional experience).
An analog signal is a continuous signal with infinite resolution. A digital signal is a discontinuous signal, with finite resolution.
Language is an abstraction of reality–it uses a variety of discrete symbols to represent a variety of analog stimuli. A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, and I imagine that’s because it would take thousands of words to describe the intricacy of such a picture. Each word can capture certain nuances, but even a thousand words cannot capture every single essence.
So if language insufficiently captures our world, why should we value it? Human beings take shortcuts all the time to better understand the world around us. The amount of information that our senses capture every second is absurd and we couldn’t possibly handle it all without processing.
To capture external events, nowadays we can take a picture and try to convey a (small) portion of that sensory information directly to someone else. However, with internal events (feelings), this is still outside of photographic reach.
Many scientific studies and business endeavors aim to label our internal, emotional states, but many of them try to do so quantitatively. For example, how happy are you on a scale from 1-10? In this moment, how angry are you on a scale of 1-7? I don’t know about you, but I struggle to accurately put a number on my state of happiness.
Other efforts emphasize that humans only have six basic emotions, which are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. However, others argue that we don’t have basic emotions.
Regardless of whether we only feel six basic emotions or not, we have a plethora of words to differentiate feelings. Furthermore, some languages have words that describe certain states while other languages completely lack those words (e.g., Schadenfreude).
Language has evolved to be the best approximation that we humans have for understanding the internal experience of another human. In English, how many words are there to illustrate the different shades of happiness? Of anger? Of surprise? Too many for me to count.
Nonverbal communication (e.g., tone, body language, facial expression) is a powerful tool for conveying our internal states. However, in a society where we communicate so frequently through distance mediums (e.g., email, text messages, status messages), we have to rely more and more on the power of verbal language to transfer our meaning.
It is ironic that in a world with so much digital technology, we disregard the power of the oldest digital technology available to humans: language.