How Many Emotions Are There
Answer: There are 27 human emotions according to the research done by Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner.
Quoted from the research article published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS):
“Using statistical methods to analyze reports of emotional states elicited by 2,185 emotionally evocative short videos with richly varying situational content, we uncovered 27 varieties of reported emotional experience.”
What Are The 27 Human Emotions?
List of 27 emotions:
- admiration
- adoration
- aesthetic appreciation
- amusement
- anger
- anxiety
- awe
- awkwardness
- boredom
- calmness
- confusion
- craving
- disgust
- empathic pain
- entrancement
- excitement
- fear
- horror
- interest
- joy
- nostalgia
- relief
- romance
- sadness
- satisfaction
- sexual desire
- surprise
How The Study Was Conducted
This result is obtained after a demographic diverse group of 853 men and women viewed a random sampling of videos online which was meant to evoke a broad range of emotions.
The themes of the 2185 videos selected for the study include births and babies, death and suffering, risky stunts, natural disaster, spiders and snakes, and an awkward handshake.
During the study, the participants were separated into three groups.
The first group watched a sequence of videos and then freely report their emotional response to each of 30 video clips.
The second group ranked each video according to the intensity of 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.
The third group rated the video based on dichotomies (positive vs negative), such as dominance vs submissiveness, excitement vs calmness.
Conclusion Of Study:
The general conclusion is that participants shared the same or similar emotional response to each of the videos, and this allows the researchers to extract information and identify 27 different human emotions.
“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.
This has opened our eyes because previously, the theory of basic emotions which was introduced by Paul Ekman only outlines that there are only 6 basic human emotions, such as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise.
After the research above, we know what there are 27 distinct human emotions. This allows us to understand and to study human emotions more accurately in the future.
How Many Positive Emotion Are There?
According to research done by Psychologist, Barbara Fredrickson, there are 10 positive emotions.
Credit: Emotion. 2009 Jun; 9(3): 361–368.
List of positive emotions:
- Amusement
- Awe
- Compassion
- Contentment
- Gratitude
- Hope
- Interest
- Joy
- Love
- Pride
How Many Negative Emotions Are There?
Also, according to the research done by Dr. Fredrickson, there are 8 negative emotions.
Credit: Emotion. 2009 Jun; 9(3): 361–368.
List of negative emotions:
- Anger
- Contempt
- Disgust
- Embarrassment
- Fear
- Guilt
- Sadness
- Shame
Quotes On Emotion:
Ted Talk: You Aren’t At The Mercy Of Your Emotions
How Many Basic Emotions Are there?
American psychologist Dr. Robert Plutchik proposed the Wheel of Emotions and suggests that there are 8 primary emotions that serve as the foundation for all other emotions.
According to him, primary emotional color can be overlapped or combined to form the secondary emotional colors. For example, a combination of joy and anticipation can form optimism, while joy and trust can combine to be love.
List of basic emotions:
- Joy
- Sadness
- Trust
- Disgust
- Fear
- Anger
- Surprise
- Anticipation
The Wheel of Emotions:
Each primary emotion has a polar opposite.
For example:
- Joy is the opposite of sadness.
- Fear is the opposite of anger.
- Anticipation is the opposite of surprise.
- Disgust is the opposite of trust.
How Many Emotions Are There In Inside Out?
There are 5 types of emotions in Inside Out.
They are joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust.
How To Control Emotions To Live An Empowering Life:
1) Acknowledge Your Emotion
If you want to change the emotions that have negatively impacted you on a daily basis, the first thing you must do is to be true to yourself and accept the fact that the emotion is influencing your life. Identify what is the real emotion that you want to change. No one likes to admit having negative emotions, but if you want to be totally free from the negative emotion, you have got to be very honest with yourself. Put it down on a piece of paper, what are the external events that trigger the negative emotion, what is your thinking pattern, and what kind of emotion is created?
For example:
External event: My girlfriend is talking to another guy or having fun with her friends
Internal thinking pattern: She likes the other person more than me, that’s why she enjoys spending her time with the others instead of just me. Soon, she will think that I’m boring and she’ll leave me. I must stop her from mixing with other people, so she can’t compare the others with me and I will become her only source of happiness.
Emotion: I feel jealous and angry at her in the beginning, but then I know what’s really happening is, I’m angry towards myself because I think I have failed to be funny and interesting enough to make her just want to stick with me.
2) Accept The Responsibility:
If you want to stop the negative emotions from ruining your life further, you must be willing to take responsibility for your own emotions. Only then, you can own the power to make changes in life. Remember, we can’t control the external event but we do have full control over our emotions. You should master your emotions, not the other way around.
3) Make A Change
There are 3 major factors which influence our behavior, the way we act. The first one is the external event or the trigger, the second one is our thinking pattern, and the third one is our emotion.
For external events or the trigger:
You can choose to change your environment, which subsequently, changes the inputs to your brain and trigger a different set of thinking patterns, emotions and ultimately your behavior.
For example, you are feeling depressed about your body shape. Instead of joining your friends for a food trip, you can go to the gym room and start working out. When you see other people are working hard, you will be more motivated to build a healthy body shape too. When you receive positive energy from your surroundings, you will tend to have positive thoughts which help to elevate your mood and emotions. This way, you are more likely to act positively too.
For internal thinking:
Most of the time, we could not change the external events, but we can definitely control the thinking pattern when it happens. Remember, the external event does not have a meaning until we give it one, and how you will feel (emotions) is largely affected by how you think.
For example, someone hit your car by accident. If the first thing that slips into your mind is “I could not believe this. How dare he hits my car. He should be scolded for causing me trouble”, then the emotion you will have in split seconds, is anger. On the other hand, if the first thought you have is “I’m so lucky that I’m didn’t hurt in this accident. I should check if he is safe too. I wonder if he has kids in his car. I hope everything is fine”, then the emotion would be a positive one which is empathy. Having different thoughts will give you different emotions and then trigger different behavior. That’s why I think controlling your internal dialogue is the no.1 key factor to change your emotions and your behavior.
For Emotions:
This is the feeling we have when an external event (trigger) happens, and it is heavily influenced by our internal thinking pattern (inner talk). In general, emotions are the by-product of our thought process. However, emotions can also be influenced by other factors such as the food we consume and our physiology. If we consume healthy food like chicken, eggs, seaweed, bananas, we will have sufficient amino acids to build happy hormones like dopamine and serotonin, which will help to elevate our overall mood.
4) Learning New Behaviour
As discussed above, if you have a positive thinking process, most likely you will also have a positive emotion. However, having a positive emotion does not mean that you are going to behave or act positively. You will have to learn a new set of behavior to replace the old negative one, then only you can see changes in your life.
For example, a father loves his son very much. But due to the way he was taught and treated by his own parents, he does not know how to express love. He thinks that loving someone means he has to be very strict, harsh and push the person to become the very best version of himself. In this case, the emotion is love (positive) but the negative behavior will not earn him any respect from his son, especially in this millennial age. He definitely needs to learn a new set of behavior, like giving praise, hug, and convey messages in a more gentle manner, etc. This way, the way he loves will match the way how his son perceives love. This will help to improve their overall relationship.
On your route to master your emotions, sometimes it is fine to detach yourself from external events or people around you. Remember, your life journey is yours, so just be yourself and do not compare yourself with others too much.
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