In this episode, Rebeca Arbona discusses the power in a name, and dadirri, the Ngangikurungkurr word for deep listening that comes as a result of patient, silent waiting, is explored by Jonas Altman, Betti Rooted Lionheart, Eric Christiansen, and Miriam Bekkouche.

Defined literally, a mask is something designed for a person to wear over their face, covering the face itself with something else. A mask obscures the face of the person who wears it, but also reveals a personality of its own. So, to feel unmasked is to feel as if one performance of identity has been removed, making it possible for others to observe something of the self that had been hidden from view.

Of course, not all the masks people wear can be tied on with a piece of string. People wear figurative masks as well, making deliberate choices to present themselves in a manner that seems authentic, but doesn’t match what they’re feeling on the inside.

Alyssa Kearney, Audrey Holocher, and Josie Gibson discuss their experiences of the emotion of yugen, an emotional concept that arose out of the art and philosophy of China and Japan.

Generative AI models such as ChatGPT are celebrated as superior sentient beings when they produce bad imitations of basic human work. At the same time, complex human consciousness is dismissed as flat. What are the consequences of this lopsided cultural interpretation of technology, and what are the implications for the emotion of curiosity?

Feeling curious means being willing to try to understand what’s happening in unfamiliar places with people who have other perspectives. This episode features insights about the emotion of curiosity from Dr. Michelle Maidenberg, Dr. Melissa Green, Adam Baruh, Kristen Donnelly, Chesline Pierre-Paul, and Bhavik Joshi.

Compersion is a pleasant feeling that a person can experience when their lover takes another lover. Sometimes compersion is defined more expansively than that, as a feeling of pleasure that arises from the pleasure of another person. In practice, however, the word compersion was coined in the context of a polyamorous community, and is used almost exclusively by people who are in polyamorous relationships or to describe such relationships. The emotion of compersion is personal. It’s not just a matter of abstract ideology. It’s like friendship, in that someone can believe in the value of friendship in general, and yet not want to be friends with everybody. The fact that someone in a polyamorous relationship is willing to feel compersion doesn’t mean that they will feel it in every circumstance, any more than a person looking for love is going to fall in love with anyone they happen to meet.

Podcast guests in this episode are Lior Locher, Audrey Holocher, Pinelopi Margeti, and Jaime McNeil