Wabi-Sabi and many other emotions not well known by name

Are there emotions other than the commonly discussed ones? This article by BBC presents many others. Most of them have names in other languages, and I did not recognize any of these names. I did, however, recognize many of the feelings described in the article. Hence, the title of the article, "The Untranslatable Emotions," doesn't quite work for me, because I do recognize many of these emotions. Here are a few examples presented, and there are many others I enjoyed reading about in the article:

Natsukashii (Japanese) – a nostalgic longing for the past, with happiness for the fond memory, yet sadness that it is no longer Wabi-sabi (Japanese) – a “dark, desolate sublimity” centred on transience and imperfection in beauty Saudade (Portuguese) – a melancholic longing or nostalgia for a person, place or thing that is far away either spatially or in time – a vague, dreaming wistfulness for phenomena that may not even exist Sehnsucht (German) – “life-longings”, an intense desire for alternative states and realisations of life, even if they are unattainable

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Who are you? Strangers can get a good idea based on a few dozen of your Facebook “likes.”

Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method to size up who a person based on their FB activity. If you would like to get a small taste for what companies can do with Big Data, follow this link to Kosinski's own website (found in the above article). I did this, and I was impressed. Based on 60 of your FB "likes," a company can get a impressive read on who you are. This is not just a parlor trick. This type of analytics can swing a tight presidential election.

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Sneaking reliable evidence past flawed world views

When solid evidence conflicts with a world view, some people often reject the evidence rather than the flawed world view. In Scientific American's "How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail," Michael Shermer (a former fundamentalist Christian) suggests the following approaches to persuading such people:

If corrective facts only make matters worse, what can we do to convince people of the error of their beliefs? From my experience, 1. keep emotions out of the exchange, 2. discuss, don't attack (no ad hominem and no ad Hitlerum), 3. listen carefully and try to articulate the other position accurately, 4. show respect, 5. acknowledge that you understand why someone might hold that opinion, and 6. try to show how changing facts does not necessarily mean changing worldviews. These strategies may not always work to change people's minds, but now that the nation has just been put through a political fact-check wringer, they may help reduce unnecessary divisiveness.
The rejection of facts is often caused by either or both of two human tendencies: 1. Cognitive Dissonance: the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously.
Psychologist Leon Festinger and his co-authors described what happened to a UFO cult when the mother ship failed to arrive at the appointed time. Instead of admitting error, “members of the group sought frantically to convince the world of their beliefs,” and they made “a series of desperate attempts to erase their rankling dissonance by making prediction after prediction in the hope that one would come true.” Festinger called this cognitive dissonance, or the uncomfortable tension that comes from holding two conflicting thoughts simultaneously.
2. Backfire Effect: Corrections actually increase misperceptions.
Why? “Because it threatens their worldview or self-concept.” For example, subjects were given fake newspaper articles that confirmed widespread misconceptions, such as that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. When subjects were then given a corrective article that WMD were never found, liberals who opposed the war accepted the new article and rejected the old, whereas conservatives who supported the war did the opposite ... and more: they reported being even more convinced there were WMD after the correction, arguing that this only proved that Saddam Hussein hid or destroyed them.

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About Narcissistic politicians

How should one describe a person who is pathologically narcissistic? Psychologist Joe Navarro offers this on Narcissists:

They all have or had an over-abundant belief that they were special, that they and they alone had the answers to problems, and that they had to be revered. They demanded perfect loyalty from followers, they overvalued themselves and devalued those around them, they were intolerant of criticism, and above all they did not like being questioned or challenged. And yet, in spite of these less than charming traits, they had no trouble attracting those who were willing to overlook these features. These personality traits stand out as the first warning to those who would associate with them, but there are many others. Here is a collection of traits that I have collected over the years about cult leaders that give us hints as to their psychopathology. This list is not all-inclusive nor is it the final word on the subject; it is merely my personal collection based on my studies and interviews that I conducted in my previous career. If you know of a cult leader who has many of these traits there is a high probability that they are hurting those around them emotionally, psychologically, physically, spiritually, or financially. And of course this does not take into account the hurt that their loved ones will also experience.

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ALAIN de BOTTON: We marry the wrong person because we fail to focus on excellence in resolving conflict

Alain de Botton has written an extremely insightful article at the NYT on why we marry the wrong person. What do we traditionally look for: During a perfectly romantic date, we propose marriage as an attempt to bottle up romance forever. Or we act Machiavellian, seeking to find someone for strategic advantages. There's nothing bad about any of this, but it leaves out a critically important area of concern. Alain de Botton urges that we not overlook that we are all dysfunctional, and that dysfunction often is left unexplored until after the vows are uttered.

We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?” Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.
For instance, we tend to seek those things that traditionally make us happy, but many of those things are things from our dysfunctional childhoods:

What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

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