Science of Feelings

Byline: Jesse Holt

Physics students today have been experimenting with a rather unorthodox form of science, the science of their own emotions. 11th graders in Dr. Miller’s class are currently taking lessons about different feelings, their side effects, and which ones they themselves experience.

The first of the two lessons consists of Dr. Miller talking about some core emotions, then asking students to rate their mood on both pleasantness and energy on a scale of negative five to positive five, which produced some interesting trends. For example, despite almost twenty responses from the 1A class, only two students in the entire class had both positive pleasantness and energy.

The second day had students reviewing various scenarios and figuring out what emotion(s) the subject experienced. However, the scenarios also taught students that the perceived emotion in a given situation changes depending on the context. For example, a student who stomps out of a classroom after getting a bad grade on a test might seem plainly angry, but if you knew that the student had been previously been getting bad grades and done everything they could to improve only to get another bad grade, the student may now seem exasperated or frustrated with themself.

While these lessons are only loosely related to physics, they show a lot of  unique aspects of human behavior and how people read emotions that these students may have otherwise never realized.