Understanding emotions encompasses the ability to be sensitive to slight variations in one emotion only, for instance, know the difference between feeling happy and feeling ecstatic. And to recognize and describe how emotions evolve over time, for instance, how shock can turn into grief. The ability to understand emotions is the most cognitive, or thinking-related of the four branches of emotional intelligence and it is based on four underlying principles. The four principles to understand emotions are:

• Emotions have heir own vocabulary: For example, feeling melancholy is not the same thing as feeling sad, or feeling disappointed is not the same thing as feeling angry. A basic skill in understanding emotions is our ability to accurately label how we are feeling at any given moment as the first step to understand and manage our emotional states. That is why it is so important to enhance your emotional literacy and learn an emotional vocabulary.
• Emotions have underlying causes: Salovey and Mayor, the fathers of the concept of emotional intelligence used a mathematical formula to explain that any given emotion has an underlying cause they are not random events: Event X = Emotion Y

• Emotions are complex: Plutchik built the wheel of emotions with the purpose of helping us understand that the six basic emotions when mixed can create a new myriad of emotions that can be similar, opposite emotions, or combined. We often use the term bittersweet to refer to a moment or an event that is simultaneously happy and sad.

• Emotions change according to set of rules: You can predict why you or others around you are feeling in a certain way and what will happen next. For example, if a solution architect is feeling content when his development team approved the artifact that he designed to solve a specific problem, it is easy to predict he will feel happy with the results.