How many emotional states are there

The second group ranked each video according to how strongly it made them feel admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, contempt, craving, disappointment, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, envy, excitement, fear, guilt, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, pride, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, surprise, sympathy, and triumph.

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. The final cohort rated their emotional responses on a scale of 1 to 9 to each of a dozen videos based on such dichotomies as positive versus negative, excitement versus calmness, and dominance versus submissiveness. Researchers were able to predict how participants would score the videos based on how previous participants had assessed the emotions the videos elicited.

Overall, the results showed that study participants generally shared the same or similar emotional responses to each of the videos, providing a wealth of data that allowed researchers to identify 27 distinct categories of emotion.

Through statistical modeling and visualization techniques, the researchers organized the emotional responses to each video into a semantic atlas of human emotions. Your muscles become tense, your heart rate and respiration increase, and your mind becomes more alert, priming your body to either run from the danger or stand and fight. This response helps ensure that you are prepared to effectively deal with threats in your environment.

Expressions of this type of emotion can include:. Of course, not everyone experiences fear in the same way. Some people may be more sensitive to fear and certain situations or objects may be more likely to trigger this emotion. Fear is the emotional response to an immediate threat.

We can also develop a similar reaction to anticipated threats or even our thoughts about potential dangers, and this is what we generally think of as anxiety. Social anxiety , for example, involves an anticipated fear of social situations. Some people, on the other hand, actually seek out fear-provoking situations. Extreme sports and other thrills can be fear-inducing, but some people seem to thrive and even enjoy such feelings. Repeated exposure to a fear object or situation can lead to familiarity and acclimation, which can reduce feelings of fear and anxiety.

This is the idea behind exposure therapy, in which people are gradually exposed to the things that frighten them in a controlled and safe manner. Eventually, feelings of fear begin to decrease. Disgust is another of the original six basic emotions described by Eckman. Disgust can be displayed in a number of ways including:. This sense of revulsion can originate from a number of things, including an unpleasant taste, sight, or smell.

Researchers believe that this emotion evolved as a reaction to foods that might be harmful or fatal. When people smell or taste foods that have gone bad, for example, disgust is a typical reaction.

Poor hygiene, infection, blood, rot, and death can also trigger a disgust response. This may be the body's way of avoiding things that may carry transmittable diseases. People can also experience moral disgust when they observe others engaging in behaviors that they find distasteful, immoral, or evil.

Anger can be a particularly powerful emotion characterized by feelings of hostility, agitation, frustration, and antagonism towards others. Like fear, anger can play a part in your body's fight or flight response. When a threat generates feelings of anger, you may be inclined to fend off the danger and protect yourself. Anger is often displayed through:. While anger is often thought of as a negative emotion, it can sometimes be a good thing. It can be constructive in helping clarify your needs in a relationship, and it can also motivate you to take action and find solutions to things that are bothering you.

Anger can become a problem, however, when it is excessive or expressed in ways that are unhealthy, dangerous, or harmful to others.

Uncontrolled anger can quickly turn to aggression , abuse, or violence. This type of emotion can have both mental and physical consequences. Unchecked anger can make it difficult to make rational decisions and can even have an impact on your physical health.

Anger has been linked to coronary heart diseases and diabetes. It has also been linked to behaviors that pose health risks such as aggressive driving, alcohol consumption, and smoking. Surprise is another one of the six basic types of human emotions originally described by Eckman. Surprise is usually quite brief and is characterized by a physiological startle response following something unexpected.

This type of emotion can be positive, negative, or neutral. An unpleasant surprise, for example, might involve someone jumping out from behind a tree and scaring you as you walk to your car at night.

An example of a pleasant surprise would be arriving home to find that your closest friends have gathered to celebrate your birthday. Surprise is often characterized by:. Surprise is another type of emotion that can trigger the fight or flight response.

When startled, people may experience a burst of adrenaline that helps prepare the body to either fight or flee. Surprise can have important effects on human behavior. For example, research has shown that people tend to disproportionately notice surprising events. This is why surprising and unusual events in the news tend to stand out in memory more than others. Research has also found that people tend to be more swayed by surprising arguments and learn more from surprising information.

The first group freely reported their emotional responses to each of 30 video clips. The second group ranked each video according to how strongly it made them feel admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, contempt, craving, disappointment, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, envy, excitement, fear, guilt, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, pride, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, surprise, sympathy and triumph.

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. The final cohort rated their emotional responses on a scale of 1 to 9 to each of a dozen videos based on such dichotomies as positive versus negative, excitement versus calmness, and dominance versus submissiveness.

The difference here is that there are 25 colors instead of 5, and there are also blends between colors. Hovering over each letter allows you to watch the video that it corresponds to. Figure 1 shows a non-interactive version of the map. We found that the structure of emotion is more complex than many scientists thought. Scientists who believed emotional experiences existed as just five or six basic categories, like the characters in Inside Out , were half correct.

They were right in thinking that emotions are best represented as categories, like anger and fear. But they underestimated the number of distinct categories. Also, they were wrong in thinking that these categories were completely independent, like the characters in the movie. Instead, many emotions can be blended together. Scientists who viewed emotional experiences as dimensions like valence and arousal were also half correct. They were right in doubting that there are rigid boundaries between emotions.

Instead, we see that emotions can be blended together. But they were wrong in thinking that only two dimensions, like valence and arousal, can explain the emotions people report feeling. These emotions are actually made up of at least 25 different dimensions. Beyond inspiring animated films like Inside Out , this research is important for a number of reasons.

These findings might influence how scientists study various things, such as mood disorders like anxiety or depression , the way emotions are produced in the brain, and the design of machines that react appropriately to our emotional needs.

Scientists who study mood disorders, like anxiety and depression, can use this research to understand the range of different emotions these patients feel in their everyday lives. It might turn out that two patients with the same diagnosis, like depression, actually experience different patterns of emotion, and respond to different kinds of treatment.

Scientists who study how the brain generates emotion can use this research to understand how different emotions could be represented in different brain regions. For example, one brain region that is known to be involved in emotion, especially in states of fear, is called the amygdala, a small structure lodged deep within each side of the brain, between the ears.

The amygdala helps us learn to be afraid of dangerous things and to rapidly respond to those things based on our past experiences [ 6 ]. Brain scientists could study whether different parts of the amygdala are involved in emotional responses that are related to fear, such as anxiety, horror, relief, and surprise.

Such studies could help us understand the role of brain regions like the amygdala in emotion. Finally, scientists and engineers who develop machines that interact with humans, such as social media apps, iPhones, cars, and customer-service robots, can use this research to make sure their machines respond appropriately to our emotions.

These machines could give us tools for coping with negative emotions, like anxiety and fear, and promoting positive emotions, like adoration and awe. And emotions can involve behaviors, like yelling at someone when you are angry.

A feeling is something that you experience internally, in your own mind, and that other people can understand based on your behavior.