Edited by Joseph E. LeDoux, New York University, New York, NY, and approved August 7, 2017 (received for review February 9, 2017) (pnas.org)
Claims about how reported emotional experiences are geometrically organized within a semantic space have shaped the study of emotion. 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. Reported experience is better captured by categories such as “amusement” than by ratings of widely measured affective dimensions such as valence and arousal. Although categories are found to organize dimensional appraisals in a coherent and powerful fashion, many categories are linked by smooth gradients, contrary to discrete theories. Our results comprise an approximation of a geometric structure of reported emotional experience.
Abstract
Emotions are centered in subjective experiences that people represent, in part, with hundreds, if not thousands, of semantic terms. Claims about the distribution of reported emotional states and the boundaries between emotion categories—that is, the geometric organization of the semantic space of emotion—have sparked intense debate. Here we introduce a conceptual framework to analyze reported emotional states elicited by 2,185 short videos, examining the richest array of reported emotional experiences studied to date and the extent to which reported experiences of emotion are structured by discrete and dimensional geometries. Across self-report methods, we find that the videos reliably elicit 27 distinct varieties of reported emotional experience. Further analyses revealed that categorical labels such as amusement better capture reports of subjective experience than commonly measured affective dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal). Although reported emotional experiences are represented within a semantic space best captured by categorical labels, the boundaries between categories of emotion are fuzzy rather than discrete. By analyzing the distribution of reported emotional states we uncover gradients of emotion—from anxiety to fear to horror to disgust, calmness to aesthetic appreciation to awe, and others—that correspond to smooth variation in affective dimensions such as valence and dominance. Reported emotional states occupy a complex, high-dimensional categorical space. In addition, our library of videos and an interactive map of the emotional states they elicit (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html) are made available to advance the science of emotion.
Footnotes
- 1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: alan.cowen@berkeley.edu.
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Author contributions: A.S.C. and D.K. designed research; A.S.C. and D.K. performed research; A.S.C. contributed new reagents/analytic tools; A.S.C. analyzed data; and A.S.C. and D.K. wrote the paper.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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Data deposition: An interactive map related to this study is available at https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html.
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This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1702247114/-/DCSupplemental.
(Submitted by Michael Kelly)
There is a lot of jargon being used here–we are outside the field looking in. To provide just a basic starting point for why I submitted this for the BB, this study seems to be a fundamental shift in the scientific study of emotion. It documents the richness of human experience and asserts something closer to how we experience emotion. Here are three basic aspects of this shift:
— How many emotions? I’ve heard, and probably the reader has heard, about there being 6 or 7 basic emotions. This Wikipedia article, “Emotion classification,” lists 6: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. The study says 27 categories are needed.
— Are emotional categories discrete? It is also assumed that each category is a discrete category of related emotional states; so it isn’t anger that is the emotion per se, but a category in which we find e.g., irritation, rage, etc. This part of the title, “… bridged by continuous gradients” asserts that these categories are not discrete but bridged so that one slides into the other. This fits the sense we have of our emotional experience that it is slippery and slidey and all run together.
I’d like to add a note here: All that said, it can be of immense therapeutic value to be forced, like I was, to report my emotions using one of the 6 or 7 words. This helped me to grasp my emotional experience in upsetting situations by getting it into manageable chunks.
— What is the basis for the categories? The is part of the title, “Self-report” is that they have sophisticated empirical support based on the self-reports of over 2000 people responding to short videos. Therefore, it is not based on the logical analysis of the idea of the emotions, and people in the field figuring out over time what they should be called (this is the question of the “semantic space” mentioned above).
As a bonus of sorts, you can see the videos and how they are mapped at the URL listed in the materials Mike posted from the Journal:
“An interactive map related to this study is available at https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html.”
Fair warning: you can click on the map and see the videos, but I found the surrounding material to be pretty confusing.