How many emotions at one time
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Font Size Abc Small. Abc Medium. Abc Large. LOS ANGELES: Scientists have identified 27 distinct types of emotions , challenging a long-held assumption that our feelings fall within the universal categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.
Using novel statistical models to analyse the responses of more than men and women to over 2, emotionally evocative video clips, researchers at University of California, Berkeley UC Berkeley in the US identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they are connected.
Read More News on emotions human emotions. Subscribe to ETPrime. So do emotions that are similar in arousal.
In other words, certain emotions are correlated —meaning they often rise and fall together—because people tend to report feeling them at the same time or in similar situations. But these mathematical analyses have not always been able to tell us when two emotions are different. We do not know whether fear is truly distinct from sadness, and amusement from awe, beyond their similarities and differences in valence-and-arousal levels.
In our study, we wanted to discover how many emotions people really have. When people say what they are feeling, can what they tell us be boiled down to how good or bad, excited or calm they feel? Do we need five emotions, like the ones from Inside Out? Or do we need a lot more? To determine how many emotions people have, we first gathered some of the darkest and brightest moments of life caught on video, including over 2, films of wedding proposals, animals, art, births, nature, warfare, sports, accidents and close calls, and many other deeply emotional scenes.
Then, we had people watch these videos over the Internet and gathered hundreds of thousands of reports of how the videos made people feel. Finally, we developed a new mathematical technique to find out how many different dimensions of emotion we need to explain how people said the videos made them feel.
Next, we asked people to freely respond to each video with their own words, describing how the video made them feel. We collected 19, of these responses. Finally, we asked people to rate each video along dimensions, including valence and arousal. We also included other dimensions that people think might be fundamental to emotion, in addition to valence and arousal, like how safe people feel.
Each dimension was rated on a 9-point scale with 1 being very low, for example, very unsafe, and 9 being high, for example, very safe. We collected a total of , of these responses. Collecting these three different types of responses is important because they capture different ways that people can describe their emotions.
By analyzing the relationships between the different types of responses that we collected, we found that people reliably reported feeling at least 25 different kinds of emotion when they watched the videos. We did this using a mathematical technique that calculates the number of dimensions that are required to explain the different types of responses we received. It turns out that we needed at least 25 dimensions, or patterns, to explain the data we collected.
The patterns of emotion that we found corresponded to 25 different categories of emotion: admiration, adoration, appreciation of beauty, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, craving, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, excitement, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, relief, sadness, satisfaction, and surprise.
Finally, we found that even though most of the videos were just around 5 s long, many of them caused people to feel more than one category of emotion. In fact, a lot of the categories were blended together for many videos.
This challenges the view that emotions are totally separate, like the characters in Inside Out. Instead, emotions are more like colors. Just as there are many different colors in between red and green—like yellow, orange, brown, laser lemon, electric lime, and so on—there seem to be many different emotions in between fear and disgust.