Sometimes we ourselves do not notice how sadness is replaced by anger, and delight is a fear. A quick change of emotions seems strange. Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Alan Cowen believe that in fact all emotions are much more connected with each other than we think.
Previously, psychologists believed that most human emotions are divided into universal categories: happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust. However, the new study conducted by the professor of psychology from the University of California Dacher Keltner showed that people experience more than 27 different emotions, and all of them are closely connected with each other.
Scientists used new statistical models to analyze the reaction of more than 800 people to videos that stimulate an emotional response. This allowed them to create a multidimensional interactive
map that shows the connection of emotions. “We found out that for a reliable description of emotions caused by videos, hundreds of people required 27 different feelings, and not six, as scientists suggested earlier”.
Moreover, contrary to the idea that every emotional state, regardless of the rest, the researchers found out: emotions such as thrill and peace, horror and sadness, amazement and adoration, smoothly flow from one to another.
The leading author of the study Alan Cowen explains: “On our map there are no clearly limited clusters for every emotion, because everything is interconnected. Emotional experience is much richer and thinner than it was considered before. We hope that our findings will help other scientists and engineers more accurately to fix emotional states that affect mood, brain activity and expressive signals. This will lead to a more effective treatment of psychiatric diseases, understanding the process of emergence of emotions in the brain and the emergence of technologies that meet emotional needs ”.
The organizers of the study chose a demographically diverse group of 853 men and women for the experiment. Participants watched soundless videos from 5 to 10 seconds that were supposed to arouse emotions on the network.
For the show, they selected 2185 videos on topics such as childbirth, children, hand and heart offers, weddings, death, suffering, spiders, snakes, clumsy falls, risky tricks, sexual acts, natural disasters, miracles of nature and awkward handshakes.
The participants of the experiment were divided into three groups. Each group watched a series of videos and after that filled out a report. The first group reported the emotions caused by each video in free form. “Their answers indicated a rich and sophisticated set of emotional states, starting with nostalgia and ending with disgust,” Cowen notes.
