Emotions Concept Map at #iac24
Emotions are complex, and concept mapping can help us understand complex things
At last night’s poster session at the 2024 IA Conference in Seattle, WA, USA, I presented my poster about making a concept map to help me understand emotions as described in Brené Brown’s book, Atlas of the Heart. I am so grateful to everyone who stopped by to chat—I so enjoyed our dialogue. Below is the complete text of the poster, linearized.
(Meantime, if you aren’t a subscriber to Finding Out, consider signing up! The next issue comes out in a week, and will be reflections on the process making and presenting this poster.)
“I was having an emotion, and I hate that.”
—SecUnit, in Martha Wells’ Exit Strategy: The Murderbot Diaries
Parts of me definitely bemoan the inconvenience of experiencing emotions.
In her series The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells brilliantly uses (science) fiction to show how humans (and non-humans) experience emotions.
Just like SecUnit, many of us can identify when we’re having “an emotion,” but that doesn’t mean we can name what it is.
Taxonomy of the Heart
In surveys Brené Brown and her team conducted over five years, they found that participants could, on average, identify only three emotions: happy, sad, and angry.
Atlas of the Heart, her 2021 book, on the other hand, describes 87 emotions and experiences that humans may encounter in their life. The emotions in the book are based on research conducted both by Brown’s team and by others in the scientific community.
Emotion(al) Connections
As I began to read the book, I was amazed at the number and depth of realizations I had about my own experiences. But as I read the stories, research, and definitions of emotions covered in Atlas, they started to blur together.
Nearly every section of Brown’s book describes the featured emotion in relation to another emotion. For example, prioritizing happiness, it turns out, can sometimes get in the way of experiencing joy.
The link type that has stuck with me the most is a Buddhist concept translated as “near enemy.” These emotions may seem to be the same, and yet evoke opposite responses in the people experiencing them.
Whatever the type, the links between emotions often felt more meaningful and graspable to me than definitions and stories alone. Pretty soon, I pulled out my iPad and started diagramming.
Working through the Process
Concept maps start out messy, and get tidier as you work with them. Here are two early versions of this map, first with notecards and then in drawing software.
“...a concept map is never finished.”
—Joseph D. Novak, The Theory Underlying Concept Maps
and How to Construct and Use Them
When I began diagramming the emotions in Brown’s book, one model immediately flowed from my brain to my hand: Concept mapping.
Making the Connections
To start making a concept map, we write out (usually) a noun and then connect it to another noun with a line or an arrow. Along the line or arrow, we write how the two nouns connect.
Personally, I like the nouns and connections to read as a sentence:
Pity ← are near enemies → Compassion
As you add more nouns and connections, what you’re sorting out will first become murkier, and then, as you expand and revise the map, it will become clearer.
Origin of Concept Mapping
While I had encountered concept mapping in my adventures as an information architect, I have been delighted to learn that this diagramming style can be traced back to folks studying epistemology—the study of knowledge.
Joseph D. Novak and his team designed concept maps “to follow and understand changes in children’s knowledge of science” in 1972, and continued to develop them throughout his career.
His work was connected to the constructivism movement, which argues that knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, but instead is co-created by a person’s prior knowledge and their observations.
Concept Maps in our Work
Both Dan Brown and Abby Covert include concept maps in their books about diagramming for IAs and beyond. Each book describes its author’s perspective on when to use this diagramming tool, and I agree with them, and they with Novak:
Creating a concept map creates its value.
Novak even states that to be useful, these maps must be updated whenever our understanding expands.
Either way, the map itself isn’t very useful if we didn’t create it ourselves. Instead, by going through the process, we learn what we know, and we discover what we still need to sort out.
Many Ways of Knowing
While the terms and links found in Atlas have been meaningful to me, I remind myself of a saying in the activist community: There are many ways of knowing.
The emotions and experiences highlighted by Brown and her team are a result of Western science. The scientific method is one way of knowing.
And there are other ways of knowing, including those from native cultures, belief traditions, and our own lived experiences.
As I continue to expand my understanding of the feelings of myself and the people around me, I will incorporate what I learn from many sources.
Works Cited
Brown, Brené. Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience. First ed., New York, NY, USA, Random House Publishing Group, 2021.
Brown, Daniel M. Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning. New Riders, 2011.
Covert, Abby. Stuck? Diagrams Help. Day Moon Sky, 2022. Abby Covert, abbycovert.com/stuck
Crotty, Michael. The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process. St Leonards, New South Wales, Australia, SAGE Publications, 1998.
Novak, Joseph D., and Alberto J. Cañas. “The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use Them.” Cmap, 2008, https://cmap.ihmc.us/docs/theory-of-concept- maps. Accessed 5 April 2024.
Wells, Martha. Exit Strategy: The Murderbot Diaries. Tor Publishing Group, 2018.
Special thanks
To Livia Labate for introducing me to the thrill of concept mapping, and to Tony Pitale, Millie Erb, Ron Erb, and Cee for being my unwavering support.