Using sophisticated statistical models to analyze the responses of people to emotionally evocative short videos, University of California, Berkeley researchers identified 27 states of emotion and created an interactive map to show how they’re connected.
UC Berkeley psychologists Professor Dacher Keltner and Alan Cowen uncovered 27 varieties of emotional experience. Image credit: Alexandra.
For the study, a demographically diverse group of 853 men and women went online to view a random sampling of silent 5- to-10-second videos intended to evoke a broad range of emotions.
Themes from the 2,185 video clips included births and babies, weddings and proposals, death and suffering, spiders and snakes, physical pratfalls and risky stunts, sexual acts, natural disasters, wondrous nature and awkward handshakes.
Three separate groups of study participants watched sequences of videos, and, after viewing each clip, completed a reporting task.
The first group freely reported their emotional responses to each of 30 video clips.
The second group ranked each video according to how strongly it made them feel 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 authors found that participants converged on similar responses, with more than half of the viewers reporting the same category of emotion for each video.
The final cohort rated their emotional responses on a scale of 1 to 9 to each of a dozen videos based on such dichotomies as positive versus negative, excitement versus calmness, and dominance versus submissiveness.
The scientists were able to predict how participants would score the videos based on how previous participants had assessed the emotions the videos elicited.
Overall, the results showed that study participants generally shared the same or similar emotional responses to each of the videos, providing a wealth of data that allowed researchers to identify 27 distinct categories of emotion.
“We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six (happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust), were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video,” said UC Berkeley Professor Dacher Keltner, senior author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, we found that there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration.”
Through statistical modeling and visualization techniques, Professor Keltner and Alan Cowen, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley, also organized the emotional responses to each video into a semantic atlas of human emotions.
On the map, each of the 27 distinct categories of emotion corresponds to a particular color.
“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because everything is interconnected. Emotional experiences are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought,” Cowen explained.
“Our hope is that our findings will help other scientists and engineers more precisely capture the emotional states that underlie moods, brain activity and expressive signals, leading to improved psychiatric treatments, an understanding of the brain basis of emotion and technology responsive to our emotional needs,” he said.
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Alan S. Cowen & Dacher Keltner. Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients. PNAS, published online September 5, 2017; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1702247114
