Like the small handful of characters featured in the Disney film Inside Out (2015), there is a prominent view held in psychology that most human emotions can be divided in to 5 or 6 major universal categories, such as happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, and disgust.
New research published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) using a very... entertaining method... challenges this view, having identified 27 distinct human emotions.
Instead of thinking of emotions as individual islands, completely separate from one another, the research reveals that most categories of emotion share continuous gradients. “The boundaries between emotion categories are fuzzy rather than discrete in nature,” according to Alan S. Cowen, one of the study’s coauthors. More about the study design and methods can be read here.
The UC Berkeley researchers behind the study used statistical methods to analyse responses from 853 demographically diverse men and women living in the US, who were exposed to a database of 2,185 emotionally evocative video clips.
The participants' self-report responses resulted in the finding of 27 emotion categories, which have been plotted on an interactive map (link below). The map, which is free and open to the public, will play one of the videos showing content that reflects your mouse location in proximity to various emotional zones.
WARNING: Before you start interacting with the map, a couple of cautions. First, it’s addictive. Really addictive. There are dozens of pee-your-pants funny, scary, exciting, and hypnotically bizarre videos. People get lost in the map for hours. Some of the videos had me crying with laughter; other videos will probably cause nightmares. Second, some of the videos contain graphic content (violence, nudity, sex). Viewer discretion is advised. Videos with highly graphic content are blurred. If you would like to view the uncensored version, click the second (uncensored) link below.
Note: it may take a minute or two for the map to load at first.
When you rest your mouse over parts of the map, a video (without sound) will appear (each video is about 5-10 seconds long). The short clip might include anything from cute animals or babies to spiders or car crashes to sex acts or optical illusions to famous viral videos or regular people doing incredibly abnormal things.
What you get depends on your relative position on the map. You’ll notice the percentage of each emotion associated with the specific video being displayed at the top of the screen, and these numbers will change as you move your mouse around the map.
If you want a good place to start, two of my favourite areas on the map are “Confusion” and “Interest.” Venture into the territory of “Fear,” “Anxiety,” "Disgust," “Pain” and "Terror" at your peril. The area of the map around the “Boredom” zone delivers what it promises, so save yourself the time.
Have fun, and just remember you have been warned.