Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. There are many different types of emotions that have an influence on how we live and interact with others. At times, it may seem like we are ruled by these emotions. The choices we make, the actions we take, and the perceptions we have are all influenced by the emotions we are experiencing at any given moment.
Psychologists have also tried to identify the different types of emotions that people experience. A few different theories have emerged to categorize and explain the emotions that people feel. During the s, psychologist Paul Eckman identified six basic emotions that he suggested were universally experienced in all human cultures.
The emotions he identified were happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger. He later expanded his list of basic emotions to include such things as pride, shame, embarrassment, and excitement. Psychologist Robert Plutchik put forth a "wheel of emotions" that worked something like the color wheel. Emotions can be combined to form different feelings, much like colors can be mixed to create other shades. According to this theory, the more basic emotions act something like building blocks.
More complex, sometimes mixed emotions, are blendings of these more basic ones. For example, basic emotions such as joy and trust can be combined to create love. A study suggests that there are far more basic emotions than previously believed.
Rather than being entirely distinct, however, the researchers found that people experience these emotions along a gradient. Of all the different types of emotions, happiness tends to be the one that people strive for the most. Happiness is often defined as a pleasant emotional state that is characterized by feelings of contentment, joy, gratification, satisfaction, and well-being.
Research on happiness has increased significantly since the s within a number of disciplines, including the branch of psychology known as positive psychology. This type of emotion is sometimes expressed through:. While happiness is considered one of the basic human emotions, the things we think will create happiness tend to be heavily influenced by culture.
For example, pop culture influences tend to emphasize that attaining certain things such as buying a home or having a high-paying job will result in happiness.
The realities of what actually contributes to happiness are often much more complex and more highly individualized. Happiness has been linked to a variety of outcomes including increased longevity and increased marital satisfaction. Stress, anxiety, depression, and loneliness , for example, have been linked to things such as lowered immunity, increased inflammation, and decreased life expectancy.
Sadness is another type of emotion often defined as a transient emotional state characterized by feelings of disappointment, grief , hopelessness, disinterest, and dampened mood. Like other emotions, sadness is something that all people experience from time to time.
In some cases, people can experience prolonged and severe periods of sadness that can turn into depression. Sadness can be expressed in a number of ways including:. The type and severity of sadness can vary depending upon the root cause, and how people cope with such feelings can also differ. Sadness can often lead people to engage in coping mechanisms such as avoiding other people, self-medicating, and ruminating on negative thoughts. Such behaviors can actually exacerbate feelings of sadness and prolong the duration of the emotion.
Fear is a powerful emotion that can also play an important role in survival. When you face some sort of danger and experience fear, you go through what is known as the fight or flight response. 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.
To reach their conclusions, Jack et al. They found that fear and surprise shared a common signal — the eyes are wide open — suggesting they only constitute one basic emotion, not two. The authors argue that the facial expression associated with the basic emotions have an evolutionary function.
Secondly, physiological advantages for the expresser—the wrinkled nose prevents inspiration of potentially harmful particles, whereas widened eyes increases intake of visual information useful for escape—are enhanced when the face movements are made early. The theory is that there are four biologically basic emotions — anger, fear, happiness and sadness — on top of which have evolved much more complex varieties of emotion over the millennia.
After all, the full complexity of life on earth is made possible from a sequence of just four nucleobases in DNA, commonly abbreviated to the letters G, A, T and C guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine. How Many Emotions Are There? These happen to be the emotions that scientists have focused on the most [ 2 ]. However, while these five emotions are very important, recent evidence indicates that we also experience many other emotions in our everyday lives.
The concept of emotion may seem simple, but scientists often have trouble agreeing on what it really means. Most scientists believe that emotions involve things other than just feelings.
They involve bodily reactions, like when your heart races because you feel excited. And emotions involve behaviors, like yelling at someone when you are angry. Although there are many different parts of an emotion, feelings are usually considered the most important part [ 3 ]. The majority of scientists who study emotion measure it by asking people what they are feeling. Of course, we cannot know whether a person is telling the truth about what he or she is feeling.
Despite these limitations, however, self-reported experience, meaning what a person says about what he or she is feeling, is the most direct way to measure emotional feelings.
People use many different words to describe the emotions that they feel. We wanted to study how many different emotions these words actually refer to, and how these emotions relate to each other. This is the question of how emotion is structured. Different scientists believe in competing theories of the structure of emotion.
For many years, most psychologists scientists who study the mind, and why we do the things that they do believed that emotions could be boiled down to five or six types [ 2 ]. The most widely studied types of emotion—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness—are the main characters in the film Inside Out.
Scientists who support this view of emotion consider each type to be a family of emotions that contains closely related emotions, such as anger, frustration, and rage. Other scientists believe that there are just two properties that make us experience emotion in any situation and they are called valence and arousal. Valence means the degree to which a person feels good or bad, and arousal means the degree to which a person feels calm or excited. Scientists who support this view usually also believe that the differences between emotions like anger and fear, which are both negative low valence , highly excited high arousal states, come from our interpretations of the actual events that are going on, rather than from specific emotional feelings like those in Inside Out [ 4 ].
The evidence for the valence-and-arousal view of emotion came from mathematical analyses of how people report feeling [ 4 ]. These mathematical techniques told us that negative emotions like fear and sadness often happen together, as do positive emotions like amusement humor and awe. That is, emotions that are similar in valence tend to happen together. 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.
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