How Many Different Kinds of Emotion are There? · Frontiers for Young Minds

Throughout life, our feelings influence the choices that we make. We watch TV shows that make us laugh or cry. We avoid people that scare us. We eat until we feel satisfied. Even though these emotional feelings determine how we behave, psychologists have not figured out how many different kinds of emotions we feel. One theory is that we feel five or six different kinds of emotion, like anger and amusement, and that each emotion is completely different from all of the others. Another theory is that we feel two opposite emotions, like pleasure or displeasure and excitement or calmness, that are mixed together to form all of our emotional feelings. To study the number of different kinds of emotional feelings that people experience in response to different situations, we collected over 300,000 self-reported emotional responses to 2,185 emotional videos. We then used mathematical techniques to see how many different emotions were captured in people’s responses. Our findings told us that there are at least 25 different kinds of emotion, and that many of them can be mixed together. To show what these different emotions are and how they can be blended together, we created an online interactive map. This map reveals that the emotions people report experiencing are more complex than scientists had thought. Our results may help people who study emotional disorders and the way the brain represents emotion, and may also help to design phones and computers that react appropriately to the emotions we express.