Scores of words describe the wide range of emotions we experience. And as we grasp for words to describe our feelings, scientists are similarly struggling to comprehend how our brain processes and connects these feelings.
Now, a new study from the University of California, Berkeley challenges the assumptions traditionally made in the science of emotion. It was published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Past research has generally categorized all emotions into six to 12 groups, such as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. However, the Berkeley researchers identified 27 distinct categories of emotions.
They asked a diverse group of over 850 men and women to view a random sampling of 2185 short, silent videos that depicted a wide range of emotional situations — including births, endearing animals, natural beauty, vomit, warfare and natural disasters, to name just a few. The participants reported their emotional response after each video — using a variety of techniques, including independently naming their emotions or ranking the degree they felt 34 specific emotions. The researchers analyzed these responses using statistical modeling.
The results showed that participants generally had a similar emotional response to each of the videos, and these responses could be categorized into 27 distinct groups of emotions. The team also organized and mapped the emotional responses for all the videos, using a particular color for each of the 27 categories. They created an interactive map that includes links to the video clips and lists their emotional scores.
“We sought to shed light on the full palette of emotions that color our inner world,” said lead author Alan Cowen, a graduate student in neuroscience at the UC Berkeley, in a recent news release.
In addition, the new study refuted the traditional view that emotional categories were entirely distinct islands. Instead, they found many categories to be linked by fuzzy boundaries. For example, there are smooth gradients between emotions like awe and peacefulness, they said.
Cowen explained in the release:
“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.
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.”
The team hopes to expand their research to include other types of stimuli such as music, as well as participants from a wider range of cultures using languages other than English.
This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.
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