The palette of our emotions

From Researchers Pinpoint 27 States of Emotion by Yasmin Anwar.

A new study from the University of California, Berkeley, challenges a long-held assumption in psychology that most human emotions fall within the universal categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.

Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than 800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re connected.

Their findings are published this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” said study senior author Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and expert on the science of emotions.

Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration,” Keltner said.

“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”

The 27 emotions are:

Admiration
Adoration
Aesthetic Appreciation
Amusement
Anger
Anxiety
Awe
Awkwardness
Boredom
Calmness
Confusion
Craving
Disgust
Pain
Entrancement
Excitement
Fear
Horror
Interest
Joy
Nostalgia
Relief
Romance
Sadness
Satisfaction
Sexual Desire
Surprise

There is a very interesting interactive that goes with this research in which you can review the videos used to identify the different emotions.

I found this statement interesting:

Here, the experimenters found that participants converged on similar responses, with more than half of the viewers reporting the same category of emotion for each video.

That necessarily implies that nearly half did not have a shared category of emotion. Presumably most were close: Joy rather than Excitement perhaps or Sexual Desire rather than Romance for example. It would be interesting to find a way of measuring the degree of standard deviation around each video and whether there are commonalities in those deviations.