"Elevation" Sounds a Lot Like Frexcitement

BoingBoing points to an awesome post today about “elevation” and the science being conducted around understanding the experience.

University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, “Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration….”

And Slate has this piece on how Barack Obama created the feeling with his acceptance speech.

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, studies the emotions of uplift… he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing “a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat.”

That, my friends, sounds like a category of frexcitement. The experts can refer to it as “elevation,” if they want to. I’m sticking with my terminology because any word with an “X” is better than a word without it.