berkeley | Using novel statistical models to analyze the responses of more than
800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips, UC
Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotion and
created a multidimensional, interactive map to show how they’re
connected.
Their findings are published this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.
“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.
Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an
island, the study found that “there are smooth gradients of emotion
between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement
and adoration,” Keltner said.
“We don’t get finite clusters of emotions in the map because
everything is interconnected,” said study lead author Alan Cowen, a
doctoral student in neuroscience at UC Berkeley. “Emotional experiences
are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.”
“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 added.
