In one of the latest Pixar films, Inside Out , from 2015, five characters appeared that represented the emotions that the protagonist felt inside: they were Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and the unpopular Disgust. However, the film directed by Pete Docter seems that it could have incorporated a much larger cast, because many other emotions were left behind, such as love, admiration or pride, among others .
At least that is what is deduced from a new study from the University of California at Berkeley (United States), which questions the belief that most of the emotions that human beings feel would fall within the categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust.
In fact, these researchers have come to identify a total of 27 different categories of emotion and, to show how they are connected, they have shown them on a three-dimensional interactive emotional map.
The study, which has been carried out with statistical models and whose findings have just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , focused on a demographically diverse group of 853 women and men who had to watch videos designed to evoke in them a wide range of emotions . The topics of these 2,185 videos included births and babies, weddings and solicitations, death and suffering, spiders and snakes, sexual scenes, natural disasters, spectacular images of nature or uncomfortable handshakes, among others.
“We realized that we needed to count 27 different dimensions, and not six, when specifying how hundreds of people said they felt in response to each video, ” explains on the website of this university in California one of the authors of the study, Dacher Keltner, professor of Psychology and expert in Science of Emotions.
The list
What would those 27 different dimensions be? Admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, fun, anxiety, amazement, discomfort, boredom, calm, confusion, longing, aversion, empathic pain, rapture, envy, emotion, fear, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, sympathy and triumph.
But the study goes further, because it ensures that, in contrast to the belief that each emotional state would be like a kind of island , “there are smooth gradients of emotion between, for example, fear and tranquility, horror and the sadness and the fun and the adoration, ”says Dacher Keltner.
The question, as explained by the lead author of the study, Alan Cowen, a doctoral student in Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, would be that the human being would not have finite groups on the map of our emotions, but that everything would be interconnected . “Emotional experiences are much richer and more nuanced than previously thought,” he stresses.
And being aware of all this could be helpful in different fields of research. “Our hope is that our discoveries will help other scientists and engineers to more accurately capture the emotional states that underlie moods, brain activity, and expressive signals, leading to better psychiatric treatments , an understanding of the brain base of emotions and technology sensitive to our emotional needs, ”adds Cowen.
