I saw this on social media, 23 Emotions People Feel, But Can't Explain. I can't speak to the legitimacy of this particular list, but I myself know of some emotions (like "saudades" or "schadenfreude") that have words for them in certain languages but not others, suggesting that certain emotions are more prevalent, or at least more on the radar, in certain cultures than others.
Some of these emotions on the list I could see myself having (or have had), others not so much. It made me think of emotional (affective) empathy (as opposed to cognitive empathy). If people are not even aware that some of these emotions exist in the broader population, how could they possibly feel empathy for someone who is experiencing one of these emotions? It makes me wonder about some people's absolute faith in empathy, that just because they happened to have been born a human being they were somehow magically imbued with being able to reliably understand each other and feel each other's feelings. In a world in which researchers are constantly finding new ways in which our cognition fails us such that entirely new disciplines have sprouted up over the past decade or so (behavioral economics for one), it's odd to me that there is still such blind faith and misconceptions about what exactly empathy is, means, and can do.
