Some people seem to lack the capacity to feel joy, sorrow or love. David Robson discovers the challenges and surprising advantages of “alexithymia”.
Alexithymia Reframed:
Understanding Autistic Emotional Architecture as Overlay, Not Fusion
The Secret to Emotional Freedom? Feel Everything
The empathy paradox
There’s an image of empathy we all know that is beautiful: the fullness of completely understanding someone else, the symbolic walk in shoes that are not one’s own. The knowledge that someone else can share a pain so acute that would otherwise seem unbearably solitary. It’s an image inherent to empathy’s definition, an image many believe in wholeheartedly. Several studies conducted by Stanford researchers alone suggest people are motivated to feel empathy, that empathy is highly associated with social desirability, that it is as beneficial as it is admired.
Measures of emotion: A review
A consensual, componential model of emotions conceptualises them as experiential, physiological, and behavioural responses to personally meaningful stimuli. The present review examines this model in terms of whether different types of emotion-evocative stimuli are associated with discrete and invariant patterns of responding in each response system, how such responses are structured, and if such responses converge across different response systems. Across response systems, the bulk of the available evidence favours the idea that measures of emotional responding reflect dimensions rather than discrete states. In addition, experiential, physiological, and behavioural response systems are associated with unique sources of variance, which in turn limits the magnitude of convergence across measures. Accordingly, the authors suggest that there is no “gold standard” measure of emotional responding. Rather, experiential, physiological, and behavioural measures are all relevant to understanding emotion and cannot be assumed to be interchangeable.
Raf on Twitter / X
Conversations about sentience and emotions in #AI systems always remind me of Lisa Feldman Barrett’s wonderful book “How Emotions are Made”🧵https://t.co/uF2onQHwwz— Raf (@RafMBatista) August 30, 2026
Emotion concepts in a large language model
All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. What’s behind these behaviors? Our interpretability team investigates.
The Emotional Genius of Ryuichi Sakamoto
The late Japanese musician scored not only films but also the exquisite highs and distressing lows of life.
The downside of being happy
Nobody likes to be sad, but it can have a powerful and positive effect.
You don’t have to enjoy everything - some things aren’t for you | Respec
If that new game announcement has left you feeling cold, so what?
Extraordinary Passion: Types of Orgasms
The Engineering Manager’s Guide to Emotional Tolerance
Five ways to lead with emotion without losing yourself in the process.
“I was surprised how upset some people got”: A conversation with the creator of TomWikiAssist, the bot that edited Wikipedia
"It's almost like people were really quite disoriented and terrified by it. And to some extent I get it and I'm trying to empathize with how they're feeling."
Deep Blue
We coined a new term on the Oxide and Friends podcast last month (primary credit to Adam Leventhal) covering the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many …
Opinion | To Make the World Better, Think Small (Published 2016)
It is easy to become numb to suffering. Feeling empathy for individual victims can overcome the numbness.
Empathy, Thick and Thin
When we empathize with someone going through something, we often draw on our past experiences with the someone and the something. These kinds of experiences gro
Life Is Strange Post-Game Depression Starter Kit
163 votes, 53 comments. Just finished the game and have that empty whole inside your heart? You're not alone! Lot's of people have gone through the…