Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

We identified 30 years ago a pattern of clusters of concepts of personality and laid out a somewhat inadequate but useful five-dimensional picture of human personality.

There's an important dimension missing, but we won't go into that at the moment.

One of the dimensions is negative emotion, and so

Negative emotion.

You can think of your emotional systems as a tree with two trunks.

One trunk branching into two, branching into many.

One half of the trunk or one of the separate trunks is positive emotion and the other is negative emotion.

And they're independent.

neurological systems, each with their own biochemistry.

And they cross talk because it's hard to be miserable when you're happy.

Although you can laugh and cry at the same time, right?

The relationship can be quite closely juxtaposed and paradoxical.

You can weep with joy.

The negative emotions all cluster together, coming as they do from the same trunk, let's say.

Sorrow, grief, pain, frustration, disappointment, shame, anxiety, horror, disgust, contempt, etc.

And if you're more likely than most to feel any of those, you're more likely than most to feel all of them.

There's a normal distribution of sensitivity to negative emotion, with some people being relatively immune, and so very...

resistant to depression and anxiety, but also somewhat opaque to signals of distress and threat.

Others, extraordinarily sensitive to danger, but suffering because of a surfeit of negative emotion with most people in the middle.

That's the normal distribution.